While the Pentagon will not confirm details of Mason’s engagement, the use of both missiles by the U.S. is, “very significant,” Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired former-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Monday.

Denying an enemy access to a particular piece of air, land or sea is a strategy as old as warfare but the term entered the popular military consciousness in the late 1990s and the early 2000s 

According to analyst Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, having NUWC be the “prime contractor” for LDUUV speeds up the acquisition process.

…“The unified-build strategy is a very aggressive plan to continue building two SSNs per year and eventually an SSBN each year as well,” Bryan Clark, a naval analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, said in an e-mail response to Seapower. 

"It’s getting to where other players can now build undersea warfare systems, and they can be effective enough. They’re not as good as U.S. systems, but they’re capable,” said Bryan Clark.

2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and elsewhere. Specifically, The Rand Corporation has submitted a study on the future of aircraft carriers, and three separate organizations (The Mitre Corporation, the Navy Staff (N81), and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)) have submitted views of appropriate future fleet architectures.