One solution to close the small surface combatant gap is to use Expeditionary Fast Transports or Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ships for lower-end missions like humanitarian aid and security cooperation, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told ITN June 13. 

However, the CBO assumed that all of the additional ships in the larger Navy would come from new construction, noted Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “That combination of [service life extensions] and then new construction could mean that you could get to a larger fleet sooner and then with a little less cost,” he said. “But you’re still going to have probably … an approximately 20 percent larger shipbuilding budget being needed” to reach 355 ships.

Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News that the missions for the frigates would be limited and the cost would be high in reintroducing them to the fleet. “The Perry class are going to be an expensive proposition to bring out of mothballs and maintain just for the purpose of going out and doing some presence missions,” Clark said. “You’re talking about having to come up with a 150 billets for each of those ships out of an already stressed manpower pool. They’re also not going to offer that much in terms of combat capability. So if you bring them back, they’re essentially going to be like how they were when they left the fleet, which was as a theater security cooperation, maritime security asset.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told ITN June 8 the Navy could send Congress a letter describing the budget offset but, because Congress has its own appropriation and authorization processes, it does not need an amended budget. "Congress gets to decide what to buy and how," he continued. "In effect, the budget is just a recommendation to Congress, so they could add a LCS using [Overseas Contingency Operations] funds or another offset."

“This was a very focused excursion into how we could do better with what we already have with modest adjustments in the next few years,” said Bryan McGrath, one of the co-authors of a recent fleet architecture study conducted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “I was grateful to see that group of smart people had looked very hard at the near-term horizon. There are a world of things we can do in the next few years that are interesting and can have impact.”  But McGrath noted that “there’s a considerable amount of diplomacy to be done to make those things happen,” referring to the multiple forward-basing proposals. He also brought up another issue.  “There has to be a reason why, a sense of urgency, compelling reasons to force the Navy and Congress to make these adjustments,” McGrath observed. “But that compelling narrative has not been created, and no one is out preaching it. I know in my heart there is one.  “I think Admiral MIller’s team makes a very useful contribution that when a compelling narrative arrives that makes these things important, they will be useful first steps, and relatively straightforward to implement. But without that narrative it’s going to be difficult to pull off.”

The government has taken some new steps to combat the problem of leaking since Snowden. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the think tank’s security officer, noted that the Defense Department had implemented a new “Insider Threat” program over the last year, “partly because most of the major releases of classified material in the past few years were from insiders who were careless or who sought political or monetary gains." Organizations such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which receive security clearances from the government, have their own program run by an Insider Threat Program Senior Official that provides training for all personnel who are given clearances on indicators to watch for and how to report concerns, Clark said. “The rationale behind this new approach is just doing clearance investigations every five to ten years may not be enough to identify changes that make someone vulnerable to espionage, or make them more likely to illegally or accidentally release classified information,” Clark said in an email. “We now train everyone in the organization [since 2016] to be on the lookout for things like significant indebtedness, major life changes, recent financial windfalls, foreign contacts, etc. that could indicate someone is at risk.” “We also train folks to watch out for actions like excessive printing of classified documents, accessing secured containers and vaults outside of normal working hours, etc. that could suggest someone is accessing or creating materials for unauthorized purposes,” he added. “If someone may be a security risk, the security manager or officer could restrict their access until their situation is reviewed.