The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, has released its new Fleet Architecture Study, which includes recommendations for what kinds of ships should make up the future U.S. Navy fleet, and how it should be organized. CSBA’s report is one of three separate Fleet Architecture studies that were ordered to inform decisions, design, and procurement for the future fleet. Part I looked at the new fleet organization and operating concepts CSBA proposed. Here, I examine their recommended fleet composition, the numbers and types of ships that should make up the future fleet.

What madman would propose adding diesel submarines to the U.S. Navy’s all-nuclear silent service? There are a few. The topic came up at an early March hearing before the U.S. House Seapower and Force Projection Subcommittee. Representatives from three teams that have compiled competing “Future Fleet Architecture” studies convened to debate their visions with the committee. Published by the Navy Staff itself, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and the MITRE Corporation, the studies explore everything from overall ship numbers to the types of hulls comprising the future fleet to the mix between manned and unmanned platforms.

Because companies won't hire excess workers in advance, they will have a huge challenge in expanding their workforces rapidly if a shipbuilding boom materializes, said Bryan Clark, who led strategic planning for the Navy as special assistant to the chief of Naval Operations until 2013.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at CSBA, said during the hearing that the Navy ought to move to a larger and more survivable frigate design, ideally building the LCS and LCS-based frigate for a few more years until a new design is ready for production. Clark said CSBA’s studies highlighted the need “to do air defense for another ship so it can do an escort mission, which we saw in our analysis as being increasingly important for a situation in which our logistics force and civilian convoys and noncombatant ships are going to be at risk of being attacked by an enemy that’s willing to go all out and attack civilians as well as attacking just strictly military ships. So we saw that need to have the ability to do air defense of another ship as being essential. The other thing it has to be able to do is anti-submarine warfare, and in particular using new anti-submarine warfare concepts that leverage things such as the variable depth sonar, which the LCS mission package has, and the multi-function towed array, which the LCS mission package has as well. What those capabilities do is allow us to transition from having a strictly man-on-man or single-ship-on-submarine kind of ASW to now a multi-static ASW where multiple ships can look for multiple submarines, and then you need standoff weapons to be able to engage those submarines rapidly.”

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said at the hearing held by House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower and projection forces, that there would have to be some investments in shipyards to enable them to further increase production, particularly in Connecticut. “They’re largely going to be maxed out in terms of their near-term industrial capacity with the Columbia class [submarines] and if we try to do two attack submarines,” he said at the March 8 hearing. “But they have workforce limitations that are going to keep them from growing further. There are some facilities constraints that just over time that have grown and need to be addressed. So putting some money into facilities and a training infrastructures of the shipyards are going to be able to bring on the workforce they need to grow in order to start doing the construction at the rate that we would need to get to a 350-ship or so Navy,” he added.

The Navy kicked off a tabletop wargaming exercise last week at the Center for Naval Analyses that will identify key enablers the force will need to fight in various scenarios, according to an official. Rear Adm. Jesse Wilson, assessment division director in the office of the chief of naval operations (N81), said March 8 during a House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee hearing the exercise began March 7 and includes representatives from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary..