Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, disagrees with the CSIS findings about flat funding for training. The current budget request for Fiscal Year 2018, Clark said, increases training funding to $977 million, or roughly $3.5 million per ship.
“This account could be raised, but has been increasing significantly over the last several years,” Clark said. “The main contributor to the Navy’s overall readiness shortfalls is the mismatch between fleet supply and demand, as we documented in our 2015 study “Deploying Beyond their Means” and the GAO has described in several reports since 2015.”