McCain was speaking at the roll-out of a new report, "Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy," by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The report was one of three commissioned by Congress to study new capabilities and organizational plans for the Navy's future fleet. The CSBA report specifically advocates for truncating the LCS program as soon as possible and building a larger guided missile frigate, similar to what McCain supports. The study also calls for building 71 frigates; the frigate, like the LCS, falls into the small surface combatant family of ships. The Navy currently has a requirement for just 52 small surface combatants, according to the service's 2016 Force Structure Assessment.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the United States's overuse of its shrinking Navy has caused serious backlogs in needed maintenance. For the past two decades, the United States has deployed 100 ships continuously at sea, despite a smaller fleet. As a result, the Navy has been forced to deploy ships more frequently and for longer periods of time. In 1998, only 4 percent of ship deployments lasted longer than six months. Today, every single deployment is longer than six months. Clark said this has caused many of the Navy's ships to skip maintenance, compounding problems the service faces today. "The reason we've been unable to do the maintenance is because everybody's out there getting deployed," Clark said at the Hudson Institute. "We need to keep ships in port, we need to get the F-18s back into the depots." The administration has not yet detailed what types of ships would be added to the fleet in the proposed expansion. Clark said the Navy has requested additional submarines, surface ships, and amphibious ships.

Undersea threats to the homeland have concerned U.S. leaders since long-range submarines joined enemy navies about a century ago.

Speaking on Capitol Hill at the rollout of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments' report on the structure of the future fleet, Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he wants to open up a new contract competition on the frigate's design, entertaining both U.S. and foreign proposals. "We've got to look at the challenges we're facing that the littoral combat ship does not address," he said. Speaking to reporters following the briefing, McCain said he plans to hold hearings in the subcommittee on seapower to discuss the frigate's evolving requirements and how to proceed on the program.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to hold hearings on the Navy’s frigate program amidst calls to open the competition to more domestic and foreign designs. McCain – a constant critic of the Littoral Combat Ship, which serves as the basis for the Navy’s frigate plans – told reporters on Tuesday that hearings before the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee would seek to reexamine the entire frigate program. “The frigate acquisition strategy should be revised to increase requirements to include convoy air defense, greater missile capability and longer endurance,” he said at an event outlining the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ recent U.S. Navy fleet architecture study, reported Inside the Navy. “When you look at some of the renewed capabilities, naval capabilities, that both the Russians and the Chinese have, it requires more capable weapon systems.”

An influential think-tank has unveiled a vision of a future US Navy strike group composed of two aircraft carriers and supporting ships with 110 aircraft, including new requirements for a stealthy attack unmanned air system (UAS) and a manned fighter optimized for the air-to-air mission. The report released on 28 February by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments received the endorsement of Senator John McCain, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as the Trump administration and Republican leaders in Congress plot the shape of a new military build-up.