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It would have been a quick and easy fix if the military had simply sent out a press release detailing Vinson’s plans and clarifying the initial release, said Brian Clark, retired Navy officer who was a senior aide to former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A flawed narrative might have been stopped in its tracks and prevented rattling a region on the brink of conflict, he said.  “It’s really shocking that they let this go for nearly two weeks without trying to correct the record,” he said.

The five months DoD has to spend its newly appropriated funds really won’t be that hard, Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Federal News Radio. “They’ve been anticipating this [money] for literally over a year at this point. They submitted the fiscal 2017 request way back in February of 2016, we are not almost seven months through the fiscal year. They’ve had a lot of time to think and to plan and to prepare,” Blakeley said. “They have a really good sense of where all this funding is going to go.”

“It was aimed at both our allies and adversaries, and it appears to have worked, to some degree,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush’s administration who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. But Mr. Edelman drew some critical distinctions between the two presidents. Nixon’s “madman” act generally masked a calculated strategy, which is not yet evident in Mr. Trump’s approach. Nixon’s national-security team was better coordinated than Mr. Trump’s, at least so far. And even in Nixon’s case, the madman strategy worked better later in his presidency, when he and his aides were more seasoned.

“The Trump team certainly has opened the aperture,” former Pentagon adviser Hal Brands, now at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in the District, told The Washington Times in March

"Even fifth generation would be challenged to penetrate in certain ranges against these very capable air-missile-defense systems," said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired Air Force colonel, noting China has developed its own "very advanced" HQ-9 air-defense system. But he said the S-400 wouldn't create "no-go zones" for the U.S. and allies.

Is Austal’s proposal realistic? We need to know the trade-offs, said Bryan Clark, a former top aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, who’d prefer a new, heavier frigate designed from the start to handle VLS. If you have to fit everything in the small hull of an LCS, Clark told me, adding VLS could require taking out too many other systems. Particularly at risk is kit for anti-submarine warfare, an increasingly important mission as the Chinese and Russian sub fleets grow in size and sophistication. Austal says their VLS-equipped frigate can still hunt subs just fine, but they do acknowledge it can carry fewer helicopters and drones than the original LCS, which could impact ASW and many other missions.