"The South China Sea is still going to be a flash point," said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer who is now an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "He's clearly got that on his radar now and has spoken about it a couple of times."

The Navy underwent a massive build up in the 1980s during the Reagan era, an effort that suggests that expanding the size of the surface fleet is not always good for sailors and Navy readiness, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer who is now an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

"The Pentagon feels like the US is well-positioned to do undersea warfare and anti-submarine warfare better than any other country," said Mr Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He is the author of a report titled "The emerging era in undersea warfare".

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced the results of a much-awaited internal review of fleet size known as a “Force Structure Assessment. It appears that the Navy is setting its sails to the winds of renewed great power competition. The assessment states a requirement of 355 ships that Mabus declares must “continue to protect America and defend our strategic interests around the world, all while continuing the counter terrorism fight and appropriately competing with a growing China and resurgent Russia….”

Enunciated in 2014, the navy’s officially stated goal [5] is 308 hulls. Three independent “fleet architecture [6]” studies are revisiting that number, however. The Navy Staff [7], the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments [8], and the Mitre Corporation [9] are surveying the strategic environment—the rise of China’s navy, an increasingly troublesome Russia, and on and on—and gauging how large a fleet it takes to handle such challenges.

Many analysts outside of government have also converged on about 350 ships. “Independent analyses have been calling for a fleet of roughly that size for some time, to include the 2010 QDR Independent Panel, as well as CSBA’s recent alternative fleet architecture study,” said Tom Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses, which Congress commissioned to do an (as yet unpublished) force structure assessment.