It will not be easy to cover for the loss of the two destroyers, explains Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Top priority missions, such as ballistic missile defense due to tensions with North Korea, will likely continue despite the pause, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Navy veteran and former senior civilian official at the Pentagon.

Between 1998 and 2015, the Navy shrank by 20 percent to 271 ships, while the number of vessels deployed overseas remained at about 100 ships, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, wrote in a 2015 article for The National Interest. Clark concluded that each ship has to work 20 percent more to meet demand.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the US Navy’s future frigate “needs to be a multi-mission capable ship” and gives Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian a status update on the program, including its recent request for information soliciting “industry’s ideas on what the frigate should be able to do,” during an August 2017 interview at CSBA headquarters in Washington.

Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the RFI “opens up the aperture too much” in terms of what that future frigate might look like.

“It makes it seem like it could be anything from … a relatively low-end ship or less capable ship, all the way up to a frigate that can do air defense for another ship and do anti-submarine warfare,” he said.

In an effort to save money, the Navy might buy a vessel with insufficient capabilities, he said.

The RFI “establishes a capability hierarchy that could support development of a less expensive and less capable ship that does not meet the Navy’s needs,” he said.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, believes the approach the service established for the RFI points to cost being the main consideration.