The Navy faces huge hurdles in trying to get to 355 ships – but a new shipbuilding plan due in coming weeks could change the whole calculus.

The sale to Montenegro might be small, but the US push into the Balkans will not make Moscow happy.

“The threat that we face has developed faster,” than countermeasures, giving adversaries like Russia, and Iran, some asymmetric advantages.

“We’ve got to wrestle with ship mix and their capacity; there’s a balancing act.” 

Concerns over a new Okinawa airfield, and how to get Marines across vast swaths of ocean, are complicating American plans to spread forces across the Pacific.

The Marine Corps and Navy are moving past the insurgent wars of the past two decades and readying themselves to play a central role in countering China and Russia.

The Navy and Marine Corps are trying to buy new autonomous and unmanned systems more quickly for expeditionary ops, but as one general warned, “if I can’t sustain it, I’m hosed.”

“It would be illogical to continue to concentrate our forces on a few large ships,” the new USMC Commandant writes in his new guidance, setting decades of planning on its head. So what’s next?

The Army is also testing the last, which can smack into drones from hundreds of meters away.

The Trump defense budget takes significant steps to move from a focus on regional conflicts and counter-insurgency to a focus on great power conflicts. But the Army, Navy Air Force and Marines clearly are struggling with this balance.