From Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments: “ ... a “more of the same” planning approach will not create a future force that is capable of projecting power effectively into threat environments where “every operating domain— outer space, air, sea, undersea, land and cyberspace—is contested.””

“The mismatch of supply vs. demand in the Seventh Fleet and the fleet at large” is one issue the Navy should be looking at, Bryan Clark, a retired naval officer and now senior fellow at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in an e-mail to Seapower. “Keeping 100 ships deployed overseas for the last 20 years as the fleet shrank by more than 20 percent is stressing ships and crews. Seventh Fleet may be the ‘canary in the coalmine’ because of its location and higher [operations tempo].”

A new report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments urges the Pentagon to shift its force planning to account for new war-fighting strategies adopted by China and Russia.

Long before these pronouncements for a larger Navy were made, Congress asked what kind of fleet the country would need in the new century. Congress placed a requirement for studies of the Future Fleet Architectures (FFA) in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA required three different views: one from the Department of the Navy, one from a Federal Funded Research and Development Center, and one from a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research center. The Navy staff, led by its Assessment Division (OPNAV N81), completed the first, MITRE Corporation completed the second, and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) completed the third. When on active duty, I participated in the Navy staff study, representing the Office of Net Assessment.

Naval analyst Bryan Clark, of Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, states, “As the total number of ships operating over the last decade has gone down, the operational tempo has remained the same or increased. Fleet training has been reduced 20 to 25 percent over the last decade. There is a systemic problem overall that the surface Navy is getting worked a lot harder than its been designed to do.”

In the past two decades, the number of Navy ships has decreased about 20 percent, though the time they are deployed has remained the same, according to a 2015 report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington research group funded by the Defense Department. The increased burden has fallen disproportionately on the Seventh Fleet.