CSBA in the News

A draft of the so-called 30-year shipbuilding plan, finalized by the Navy on Friday and obtained by USNI News on Monday, holds firm to the Navy’s goal of reaching a 308-ship navy over the next five years. But that battle force total is likely to increase, Bryan Clark, naval analyst Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and former special assistant to past Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, told USNI News on Monday.

The findings of the Alternative Carrier Study will be passed on to the three groups conducting the Fleet Architecture studies — an OPNAV group under N81, the Mitre Group and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). The Fleet Architecture work, said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst leading the CSBA team, “is supposed to look at alternative views of what the Navy will need in the future. Mix and match carriers, frigates, destroyers in different ways. We’ll come up with a different view of the demand signal, the steady state and wartime surge requirements. It’ll be based on a different approach to war-fighting requirements.”

As Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis wrote in a long report last year, the Chinese “precision-strike regime” is potentially very lethal.

In November 2014, the then-heads of the Army and Navy wrote a memo titled “Adjusting the Ballistic Missile Defense Strategy,” in which they argued that the “current acquisition-based strategy is unsustainable in the current fiscal environment and favors forward deployment of assets in lieu of deterrence-based options to meet contingency demands.”

The Navy sails right on the edge of being able to meet its global presence, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. If one little thing goes wrong, such as the need for increased presence or maintenance delays, there will be a necessity for gaps or extended deployments.

Both shipbuilders are effectively set in stone. General Dynamics' NASSCO shipyards in San Diego have always built oiler and other auxiliary ships while Huntington Ingalls’ shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, have always had a lock on amphibious platforms.