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In his remarks before the House Armed Services Seapower and Power Projection Forces Subcommittee, Bryan Clark argues that American undersea dominance will increasingly be contested by competitors who are pursuing new detection technologies while growing and quieting their own submarine fleets.
How can the silent service stay in tune with the times? First and foremost, by acknowledging the danger posed by foreign navies toting gee-whiz gadgetry. Clark hints at how hard adapting to more transparent seas could prove: “unless U.S. forces adapt to and lead the new competition, the era of unrivaled U.S. undersea dominance could draw to a surprisingly abrupt close.” That’s a grim prognosis in itself. Abrupt change begets major traumas in big institutions like navies. It’s hard to get ahead of the process.
It also helps fund continual improvements to keep up with the threat, said retired Navy submariner and strategist Cdr. Bryan Clark. “Spreading out the R&D spending over the entire program also implies the Navy believes it will continue doing R&D throughout [Ohio Replacement Program] construction,” Clark said. “Since the program will take about 15 years to build, it is likely new threats and capabilities will emerge, [and] sustaining robust R&D investment throughout the program will enable the Navy to incorporate new technologies into the ship, which could then be backfitted into completed SSBNs.”
It’s too early to tell how the Trump administration might view the plans. But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said advancements in undersea warfare should continue to be a priority for the Navy.
As 2016 draws to a close, Navy Leadership is in possession of a great deal of Blue-ribbon thinking about fleet architecture and force structure, the result of Congressional direction contained in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and elsewhere. Specifically, the Rand Corporation has submitted a study of the future of Aircraft carriers, and three separate organizations (The Mitre Corporation, the Navy Staff (N81), and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) have submitted views of appropriate future fleet architectures.
According to analyst Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, having NUWC be the “prime contractor” for LDUUV speeds up the acquisition process.
…“The unified-build strategy is a very aggressive plan to continue building two SSNs per year and eventually an SSBN each year as well,” Bryan Clark, a naval analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, said in an e-mail response to Seapower.
