Last month, Houthi rebels in Yemen twice fired anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) at the guided-missile destroyer USS Mason, forcing the ship to take defensive measures. In September, the same rebel group attacked a former U.S. high-speed vessel, burning it to the waterline.
The fleet could be grown to the size advocated by Trump, or at least close to it, by the 2030s, said Bryan Clark, a former senior aide to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Last month, I participated with my colleagues Jerry Hendrix and Elbridge Colby in a strategic choices exercise hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments where we built an alternative 10-year budget for the Department of Defense. We assumed up front that a new Administration was able to achieve a budget deal with Congress that resulted in stable funding, a prerequisite for getting the Department of Defense back on its feet, but assumed only modest budget growth.
When all this is taken into consideration with the Pentagon’s longer range plans to modernize the nuclear triad — including the purchase of 12 submarines — the F-35 and some of the nuclear programs are “bound to face scrutiny because of their sheer size,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in an email. “The budget cutters will look for where the most money is. A lot of it is in these programs.”
Directed-energy proponent Mark Gunzinger, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says the government needs to do a better job transitioning successful experiments into operational weapons systems.
National security and defense issues did not play prominently in the campaign, and when they did the discussion was largely thematic: strong or weak on defense, leading or following against Islamic terrorism, etc.
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