DoD now will try to make more clear the worth of delivering a capability above “technically acceptable” or the minimum requirement when awarding contracts. “What that would allow the source selector to do is then say ‘Because the other offer came in that’s more expensive than the lowest price one, but it has this additional capability, I can put a price on that and quantify the value to the government of that additional capability,’” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in an interview with Federal News Radio. 

The NSC frequently takes top-down control to send a coherent message, said Bryan Clark a former senior aide to Adm. Jon Greenert, the recently retired chief of naval operations. While serving as Greenert’s aide, Clark said the NSC regularly vetted the former CNO’s statements on China and the South China Sea.

But Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments also thinks DoD needs to go further in its reforms. One of the biggest critiques of Carter’s agenda was the lack of acquisition reform. Carter said he wants to change the DAB, which provides a senior advisory role on acquisition decisions and he wants to reduce some paperwork requirements. Clark said that overlooks one of the main acquisition issues in defense, which is the development of requirements for new weapons.

While in open conflict, the fixed position of the islands would make the missiles easy targets but the weapons could have a coercive effect to China’s neighbors and U.S. operations in peacetime, Bryan Clark, naval analyst Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and former special assistant to past Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Wednesday. “In a conflict, the islands will be hard to defend, but their value is in curtailing U.S. peacetime operations and in the opening moves of a conflict when they can threaten U.S. forces with a surprise attack,” he said. “If the U.S. deployed similar forces to Palawan [in the Philippines], it could similarly impact [People‘s Liberation Army] operations.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington- based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that although it was surprising the Coast Guard once again did not invest substantial funds for UASs, there are other options.

So how can the Navy combat this? Through consolidation of networks and the cloud, Clark said. For example, the Navy used to have a situation where each ship basically had its own network. Now, all of those networks are being brought into one umbrella under the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services system.