In 2010, the People’s Liberation Army Navy began operating at a greater pace and further afield than in any time in their recent history, which prompted the U.S. Navy to pour more assets into the Western Pacific, 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.

“The morale in 7th Fleet has gone down, based on command surveys over the last few years, and it’s gone down noticeably,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington and a former strategic planner for the Navy.

The debate over whether space should be militarized is effectively over, says Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“Force Planning For The Era Of Great Power Competition,” Mark Gunzinger, Bryan Clark, David Johnson, Jesse Sloman, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017: The authors, researchers with the center, recommend that the U.S. Department of Defense, as part of a new National Defense Strategy, adopt force planning constructs (FPC) geared toward countering the changing military strategies of Russia and China. “DOD’s planning scenarios should address long-term competitions with China and Russia that include gray zone operations and other actions in peacetime that are intended to undermine U.S. influence in their regions,” the authors write.

In anticipation of combat with more capable adversaries, U.S. amphibious forces will require greater reach and lethality. A study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments proposes, inter alia, enhancing the aviation elements in the ARG/MEU, providing both amphibious ships and landing force with long-range fires and improving air and missile defense capabilities.

The report, entitled “Force Planning for the Era of Great Power Competition,” was published earlier this month by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), which I have previously called a “think tank’s think tank.” Its main conclusion is that while the U.S. military has focused on preparing for high-end conventional conflicts like the First Gulf War, China and Russia have been crafting strategies to achieve their ends without fighting those wars.