Jerry Hendrix, CNAS. Jackie Newmyer Deal, Long Term Strategy Group. Bryan Clark, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“With communications advances and long-range surveillance and precision weapons, ground units today have a lot more firepower and can be a lot more effective than their predecessors 50 years ago,” said Clark, now an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. 

The directive in Carter’s memo to downselect from two vendors to one in fiscal year 2019 is “perhaps the most disruptive aspect of the decision,” [Bryan] Clark said.

Bryan Clark, a maritime analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), said that while a high frequency radar on the island could have some law enforcement value – like similar radars the U.S. uses to detect drug runners in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean — it’s likely an HF radar on Cuarteron has a secondary military use to detect stealth aircraft.

The Navy is teeing up a number of high-tech projects aimed at boosting the firepower of its platforms, but challenges lie ahead as the service prepares to fight advanced adversaries.

Even without a Boeing win, the Puget Sound area still may land some work on the bomber, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington, D.C., in an October interview with Puget Sound Business Journal.