An influential Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), released a new report, Restoring American Seapower – A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy, outlining what it thinks the U.S. Navy’s future fleet should look like to defeat Great Powers – China and Russia – in a potential war. In the past, U.S. analysts and Defense officials often referred to China as a “pacing threat,” and towards the end of the Obama Administration even more diplomatically as a “pacing competitor.” This phrasing allowed the United States to talk abstractly about planning and procuring new weapons systems to defeat Chinese strategies and weapons systems without having to say whether it was planning how to actually fight a war with China—or even thought one would be likely. CSBA’s report dispenses with that diplomatic pretense and designed a recommended future fleet for the United States explicitly to deter China, and failing that, to be able to defeat it decisively.

Three recent studies of the future of the U.S. Navy arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. The three, commissioned by Congress, were issued by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA), MITRE Corporation, and the Navy itself. 

“You’re really concentrating your fires in the fleet the Navy wants to have, and we’re arguing for a much more distributed surface fleet by taking advantage of some of the technologies you can get on some of these smaller combatants,” Bryan Clark, lead author of a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA), fleet architecture study told USNI News in February. The CSBA study called for a guided-missile frigate that would include a MK-41 vertical launch system, anti-surface missiles and a significant air search radar. In its study, MITRE called for scrapping the LCS concept and starting with a clean sheet design for a next-generation frigate.

Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the move on the heels of the Syrian strike should send a message to the allies and the North Koreans that, after years of perceived U.S. unwillingness to overly entangle itself in foreign conflicts, the U.S. is moving back to a more assertive roll. "It's a well-timed move," Clark said. "We obviously don't have the ability to strike their nuclear facilities, they are buried deep underground, but we can go after the missiles themselves while they are fueling. It's a signal to the North Koreans that we will, for the time being, have the ability to attack those facilities."  

“For the Independence-class LCS, the trimaran design is probably better able to accommodate adding weight in the form of missile launchers higher in the ship,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer, who’s argued for VLS-equipped LCS in the past. 

A fleet architecture plan from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which McGrath worked on, decreases the number of large surface combatants from 88 to 71 and increases the number of small surface combatants, allowing the Navy to be in more places at once.