“I don’t think it does move us in the right direction”, Clark said. “It opens up the aperture too much in terms of what that future frigate could be. 

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that when he was working on the Navy staff in the early 2010s, there was talk of reactivating the John F. Kennedy (CV-67). The estimates of getting the aircraft carrier back into service were about $1 billion.

“Our adversaries look at our budgets process and exploit it,” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 

“Is there savings you could harvest if you built a smaller version of that ship, but you had essentially the same technologies in it?” said Bryan Clark, a retired submariner who co-authored a report on future fleet architecture this year for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told ITN the Navy is setting a low bar for the FFG(X)'s mission and the mission systems it will carry.

Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said one of the reasons for the boat’s delay is because of the new electric propulsion system.