Bringing back inactive ships is an incredibly expensive process and wouldn't give the Navy a lot of utility in return, said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  "You could do that but what you'd get is essentially a frigate, capable of low-end missions. What you're not getting is a lot of capability — it's not going to be a ballistic missile defense shooter on patrol in the eastern Mediterranean."

As the service focuses more on the Asia-Pacific, an area dominated by rivers and shallow areas — compared with the Persian Gulf and other areas in which the Navy has operated in the last few decades — there is a very clear push to make brown and green water assets a bigger part of the fleet, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “I think you’re going to see a lot of e ort to bring green and brown water forces into being able to operate more in the green and the blue water,” Clark said. “You can put a small number of weapons on each platform, and have each platform be a sensor, and kind of knit them together.”

Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the Navy could potentially reach 355 ships at less cost than the CBO projected. The CBO assumed that all of the additional ships in the larger Navy would come from new construction. But the service could help increase force levels by not retiring ships as quickly as current plans call for, Clark said. “You could get to a larger fleet sooner and … with a little less cost,” he said. But it would still require about a 20 percent increase in the shipbuilding budget, he added. From a fiscal and political perspective, ramping up to 355 ships is “feasible,” Clark said. “The key will be if there’s continued perception that you need a larger Navy to deal with security challenges that the country is facing.”

A Congressionally-commissioned study of a future fleet and operational concepts for the Navy by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments released this year described how similar anti-ship capabilities could be used not just to defend against, but to contain an adversary. In the study’s example, expeditionary ground units (this case used U.S. Marines, but could just as plausibly be ASCM-equipped U.S. Army units) equipped with coastal defense ASCMs and air defenses positioned on Japan’s Southwest islands (which include the Ryukyus and Senkakus) could “contain an adversary’s power projection capabilities.” The relatively close proximity of the Southwestern islands to each other means that batteries of land-based ASCMs, especially in concert with naval and aviation support, could effectively keep China’s North Sea and East Sea fleets bottled up inside the first island chain, unable to break out into the wider Western Pacific.

And Bryan Clark, a naval team analyst at the defense policy think tank CSBA, told TWS via email that "It is reasonable to assume he was referring to the submarines already reported to be operating in the area: USS Michigan and USS Cheyenne." Clark added that the revelation was "not particularly troubling" because so little was actually conveyed in Trump's comments: "It would not be unusual for two submarines to be operating in the East China Sea at any given time, and POTUS was not specific enough to help another country gain intelligence by trying to find or track the submarines," he said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, attributed the problem to a disconnect between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and OMB. "The Navy knew there were industrial base concerns with only buying one LCS in FY-18, but was told by OSD not to address modernization in this budget and to focus on readiness," Clark, a former Navy official, told Inside Defense in an email. "Therefore, the Navy stayed with the shipbuilding plan that was published in the FY-17 budget, which had one LCS in FY-18." But the decision created problems for the Trump administration, which does not want shipyards laying off workers during a promised naval buildup, Clark wrote. "OMB therefore told OSD and the Navy to tell Congress that DOD would reevaluate the LCS number for FY-18 to ensure the LCS shipyards remain viable for the planned FY-20 frigate competition," he wrote. "This was something the Navy intended to do anyway, and OSD and OMB should have simply addressed it upfront in the budget documents and briefs."