Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former aide to retired former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News that the missions for the frigates would be limited and the cost would be high in reintroducing them to the fleet. “The Perry class are going to be an expensive proposition to bring out of mothballs and maintain just for the purpose of going out and doing some presence missions,” Clark said. “You’re talking about having to come up with a 150 billets for each of those ships out of an already stressed manpower pool. They’re also not going to offer that much in terms of combat capability. So if you bring them back, they’re essentially going to be like how they were when they left the fleet, which was as a theater security cooperation, maritime security asset.”

“This was a very focused excursion into how we could do better with what we already have with modest adjustments in the next few years,” said Bryan McGrath, one of the co-authors of a recent fleet architecture study conducted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “I was grateful to see that group of smart people had looked very hard at the near-term horizon. There are a world of things we can do in the next few years that are interesting and can have impact.”  But McGrath noted that “there’s a considerable amount of diplomacy to be done to make those things happen,” referring to the multiple forward-basing proposals. He also brought up another issue.  “There has to be a reason why, a sense of urgency, compelling reasons to force the Navy and Congress to make these adjustments,” McGrath observed. “But that compelling narrative has not been created, and no one is out preaching it. I know in my heart there is one.  “I think Admiral MIller’s team makes a very useful contribution that when a compelling narrative arrives that makes these things important, they will be useful first steps, and relatively straightforward to implement. But without that narrative it’s going to be difficult to pull off.”

A Congressionally-commissioned study of a future fleet and operational concepts for the Navy by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments released this year described how similar anti-ship capabilities could be used not just to defend against, but to contain an adversary. In the study’s example, expeditionary ground units (this case used U.S. Marines, but could just as plausibly be ASCM-equipped U.S. Army units) equipped with coastal defense ASCMs and air defenses positioned on Japan’s Southwest islands (which include the Ryukyus and Senkakus) could “contain an adversary’s power projection capabilities.” The relatively close proximity of the Southwestern islands to each other means that batteries of land-based ASCMs, especially in concert with naval and aviation support, could effectively keep China’s North Sea and East Sea fleets bottled up inside the first island chain, unable to break out into the wider Western Pacific.

According to a report from Scout Warrior's Michael Fabey, the CSBA report recommends a high/low mix of traditional carriers along with new, more agile smaller carriers.

Sean Stackley, the current acting secretary, is widely respected in and around the Pentagon, but his non-permanent status will make him hesitant to make any big decisions that could hem in a permanent Trump selection, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. As the Navy looks to grow it's going to need to make trade-offs about what the service is not going to buy anymore, and once a program is canceled or significantly altered, those decisions can be tough, if not impossible to reverse.  "A holdover is just not going to be comfortable making big decisions on behalf of the new administration," Clark said.  That's going to quickly be important, since the Navy is getting ready to roll out its 2018 budget and is already well into compiling its 2019 budget, Clark said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, advocates for adding the local air defense requirement. He led one of three congressionally mandated alternative fleet architecture studies recently completed by the Navy, and Clark's report advocates for building guided missile frigates. He said the proliferation of anti-ship cruise missiles and the advances in cruise missile technology necessitate the frigate defending other friendly ships from such threats. "Those things drive you to having to maybe make the air defense mission a more explicit consideration in the design of the ship," Clark told ITN April 26. If the frigates are able to protect convoys and other ships from air threats, according to Clark, the Navy's guided missile destroyers could be freed up to focus on ballistic missile defense and other missions.