“The Navy and Marine Corps are pursuing capabilities to implement their Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment concept, which reflects the shift the Marine Corps is making away from large-scale amphibious assaults with amphibs and the Maritime Prepositioning Force and toward more distributed, smaller-scale amphibious operations,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 

How to insert autonomous systems into the fleet is indeed one of the subjects of debate, says naval analyst Bryan Clark, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Clark and other outside experts have participated in a series of “fleet architecture studies” led by the office of the chief of naval operations. Their findings will shape decisions on how to size and organize the future fleet.

“This year’s Sea Breeze exercise is definitely a signal to Russia,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who previously served as special assistant to the chief of naval operations and director of his Commander’s Action Group. “It is in part to demonstrate to Russia that U.S. and NATO forces will still operate adjacent to Russian territory and forces despite Russia's protests. 

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments with close ties to the Navy, said that without the F-35C, the service knows it is lacking the ability to fight inside heavily defended airspace. “They just have a challenge in countering IADS, particularly since the Navy doesn't yet have a 5th generation aircraft and their aircraft will still lack the ability to operate from the range where the carrier can be survivable in the early phases of a conflict,” Clark said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the Naval Integrated Fire Control Counter-Air (NIFC-CA) will be the key for the Navy’s carrier-based air operations in the post-2030 environment. One option is “using F-35Cs or Bs as stealthy ISR platforms that passively find targets, which are communicated using secure datalinks to F/A-18 E/F ‘missile trucks’ located at standoff range from threat air defenses or aircraft,” Clark said.

Bryan Clark, formerly a top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, was more optimistic. “While SOSUS did suffer from lack of attention in the 1990s, it has been reinvigorated and is now part of an Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS) that includes other arrays and the SURTASS surveillance ships,” he told me.