All of this is ending up on the shoulders of the crew. If the PSA had gone off without a hitch, Minnesota would be nearing its first deployment, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer. To top it off, a big chunk of the plankowners are likely never to deploy with their boat. “For the crew it sucks because most of them came on not long before commissioning with the understanding that they would be doing a post-shakedown period in the yards, then work-ups then a deployment,” said Clark, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said CANES is “designed to consolidate a lot of the little networks that we have out in the fleet today into a smaller number of networks.

Bryan Clark is former Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations and Director of the CNO’s Commander’s Action Group. He’s now Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He and his colleague Mark Gunzinger are writing in Breaking Defense about how to make BBP better; Bryan talked about those ideas on National Defense Week.

Patrols such as the one made by the Stennis Carrier Strike Group are intended to assure allies and regional partners that the U.S. is committed to their interests in the region, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Nobody in Beijing thinks that the United States doesn't care about what's happening in the South China Sea, but they might tell our allies that," he said. "They might say, 'Hey, you say the U.S. has your back but we don't ever see them around here.'"

The original design of the ship would have had a much smaller RCS, but cost considerations prompted the Navy over the last several years to make the trades in increasing RCS to save money, 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.

Reforming the U.S. military’s acquisition system has been a hot issue since Congress replaced the Continental Army’s first Quartermaster General in 1777. Despite near-continuous efforts to reduce waste, accelerate schedules and control costs, these efforts have rarely achieved their intended results.