Would an 80-mile missile be useful? Absolutely, said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “The 80 (nautical mile) minimum range could be relevant in scenarios in the Persian Gulf, Mediterranean, and possibly the South China Sea,” all relatively narrow waterways, he said. “That would be enough to threaten ships beyond realistic ranges for enemy helicopters and assault craft to attack the EAB (in retaliation).”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, disagrees with the CSIS findings about flat funding for training. The current budget request for Fiscal Year 2018, Clark said, increases training funding to $977 million, or roughly $3.5 million per ship.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and Jerry Hendrix, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, discuss a Navy report detailing a series of procedural failures in the Pacific Ocean.

The committee's mark of the fiscal year 2018 defense policy bill directs the Navy to begin designing a smaller carrier. The three organizations that conducted force structure assessments, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Mitre Corp., and the Navy's assessment division in the office of the chief of naval operations (N81), all recommended the service add smaller aircraft carriers to its future fleet.

One way forward would be to begin rewarding officers for prudent decisions in putting the brakes on deployments of ill-prepared surface ships, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., and a former strategic planner for the Navy.

“Right now what happens is decisions on whether to say no to a particular deployment generally rise all the way to the level of the chief of naval operations,” Clark said.

“Because people don’t want to go and tell CNO, hey, I can’t do this, below that level the can-do attitude sort of persists,” he said.

Such decisions should perhaps be pushed down to the fleet-forces command level where an officer has enough seniority to be able to stand up and say no but is still close enough to a readiness problem to directly understand it, he said…

“In theory it’s a great idea, but in practice it’s probably infeasible,” said Jan van Tol, who retired as a captain from the Navy in 2007 after a career that included command of three warships

Mark “Gonzo” Gunzinger, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, discusses “Force Planning for the Era of Great Power Competition,” a new CSBA report he co-authored with Bryan Clark, David Johnson and Jesse Sloman, during an October 2017 interview with the Defense & Aerospace Report. The interview was conducted at the think tank’s Washington headquarters.