Two independent bipartisan commissions have called for the fleet to be increased from its roughly 270 ships to 350, a number President Trump has said he supports. The Navy’s 2016 Force Structure Assessment calls for 355 ships. These proposals weigh budget constraints; otherwise the target would be higher.

Those U.S. ships “would be in a good position to engage medium-range ballistic missiles going into the Sea of Japan, which is where the previous North Korean test shots have gone,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who previously served as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. That presence off of Japan means that “when the Vinson gets there, it will not need to bring additional BMD capability,” Clark added, referring to ballistic missile defense.

There is enough political support for the Coast Guard to prevent massive cuts along the lines of what appeared in the predecisional budget draft, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But that doesn’t mean the service will receive the money it was aiming for in its five-year budget plan. “You may find that they do end up with some kind of reduction because the negotiated result ends up being between the two” numbers proposed by the White House and the Coast Guard, he said. “Then the question will be: can they make the cuts in such a way that they [don’t] take it all out of procurement or modernization? … They are in a very, very vulnerable position right now having three major programs in the procurement pipeline,” he added.

It would have been a quick and easy fix if the military had simply sent out a press release detailing Vinson’s plans and clarifying the initial release, said Brian Clark, retired Navy officer who was a senior aide to former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A flawed narrative might have been stopped in its tracks and prevented rattling a region on the brink of conflict, he said.  “It’s really shocking that they let this go for nearly two weeks without trying to correct the record,” he said.

Is Austal’s proposal realistic? We need to know the trade-offs, said Bryan Clark, a former top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, who’d prefer a new, heavier frigate designed from the start to handle VLS. If you have to fit everything in the small hull of an LCS, Clark told me, adding VLS could require taking out too many other systems. Particularly at risk is kit for anti-submarine warfare, an increasingly important mission as the Chinese and Russian sub fleets grow in size and sophistication. Austal says their VLS-equipped frigate can still hunt subs just fine, but they do acknowledge it can carry fewer helicopters and drones than the original LCS, which could impact ASW and many other missions.

In fact, long-range anti-ship missiles, such as the DF-21D, have engendered some measure of debate about the future of carriers; a recent think-tank, Navy study (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment) recently found that smaller, faster and more agile carriers may need to be engineered for the future in response to guided missiles able to travel as far as 900 nautical miles.