Strategy

Maritime Statecraft and its Future

1 Comment

By Steve Brock and Hunter Stires

With shipping and shipbuilding receiving high-level political and diplomatic attention across two administrations after decades of neglect, the United States has the chance to realize a much-needed maritime revival. Having initiated a change in course from the past forty years of stagnation, Washington should double down on its winning bipartisan strategy to build maritime power through allied investments in U.S. shipping and shipbuilding—and keep off the rocks and shoals that could run the nascent American maritime renaissance aground.

History demonstrates that no great naval power has long endured without also being a great commercial maritime power. Yet for the past four decades, America has attempted to defy this maxim, starting in 1981 with the choice to cut off government support for American commercial shipping and shipbuilding, allowing those industries to wither at home and ultimately move abroad. Since that decision, successive administrations of both parties have lulled themselves into the false reassurance that in this latest era of globalization the United States did not need a vibrant commercial maritime industry, and that America would still be able to affordably field a dominant Navy without one. Similarly, the outcome of the Cold War seemed to have rendered a conclusive verdict that the American-style capitalist economy—one characterized by robust marketplace competition—was superior to the Soviet-style planned economy. Yet starting with the infamous “Last Supper” in 1993, the U.S. government and industry have effectively engineered competition out of the defense industrial base. Successive administrations of both parties have since assured themselves that real competition is unnecessary and even counterproductive to national defense, and that monopolies across most individual ship classes, aircraft types, and weapon systems would in fact be more efficient for the government to manage than a competitive business environment with multiple rival vendors.

It is now clear that these two calculations were wrong. The past thirty years of ballooning costs and delays in Navy shipbuilding programs, the growing gaps in the U.S. Merchant Marine’s capacity to support wartime contingencies, and the domestic industrial base’s inability to affordably recapitalize the reserve sealift fleet all point to the same conclusion. The twin experiments in attempting to field a blue water Navy without a commercial maritime industry to support it, and concurrently eliminating competition from the defense procurement landscape, have failed. As Colin Gray writes, “tactical mistakes may kill you today, while operational error may prove fatal in days or perhaps weeks…. A strategic error in statecraft or strategy may take years to reveal itself in its full horror.” Today the United States is experiencing the compounding consequences of two such strategic errors committed decades ago.

Over the same period that the sinews of American seapower have atrophied, China has systematically expanded its own seapower, creating globally dominant, state-backed commercial shipping and shipbuilding industries. China has used this industrial base to rapidly build the People’s Liberation Army Navy from humble coastal origins into a blue water force capable of credibly threatening the U.S. Navy at sea. Those concerned by China’s rapidly expanding navy should be even more alarmed by its ability to set the terms for the global movement of goods in peacetime or crisis using its levers in global maritime finance, shipbuilding, shipping, bunkering, port ownership, and shoreside logistics.

Washington’s decades-long run of political seablindness has not changed America’s immutable geographic relationship to the world’s oceans. The United States remains inherently dependent on the sea for political, economic, and military access to the world’s population and markets, the overwhelming majority of which reside outside North America. China’s emergence as a full spectrum maritime power – and not just a naval power – means that the United States can no longer indulge its longstanding strategic errors to mortgage its maritime future.

To address this critical national strategic vulnerability, the authors formulated and began implementing under the leadership of Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro an innovative new strategy to build and apply American seapower. This approach, now known as Maritime Statecraft, begins from the recognition that naval shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding, and commercial shipping are not distinct problem sets as they have been treated for many years, but are in fact inextricably linked parts of a national seapower ecosystem. Many of the solutions to the Navy’s most pressing challenges lie outside the Department’s own lifelines, demanding a creative, multi-pronged approach to solve them, leveraging the unique position of the Secretary of the Navy to drive results only possible through collaboration at the highest levels of government and industry. Maritime Statecraft has proven durable, with notable bipartisan continuity through the transition into the new administration.

From the perspective of naval shipbuilding, the primary objective of the Maritime Statecraft strategy is to disrupt the current broken paradigm by reinjecting real competition and best-in-class practices into the U.S. naval shipbuilding marketplace. The most effective way of doing this is to attract new market entrants in the form of world-class shipbuilders from overseas allies, incentivizing these firms to open modern dual-use commercial and naval shipyards in the United States. Introducing the integrated naval and commercial model which has proven so successful abroad necessitates creating demand among global shipping firms for U.S.-built commercial ships. Accordingly, the architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy worked extensively with partners across the Executive Branch and in Congress to broaden government support of U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding on the basis of economic security rather than strictly national defense, structuring this government support to make the U.S. shipbuilding industry and the U.S. Merchant Marine economically competitive on the open international market. This expanded approach will create a broader market demand and order volume that will increase overall capacity and health across the industrial base and design enterprise. Re-creating a vibrant commercial shipbuilding industry in America will accrue significant direct benefits to the Navy, driving long term improvement and lower costs across the Naval shipbuilding portfolio. This will create an opening to invigorate and reimagine key alliance relationships at a moment of strain, offering new opportunities to strengthen the common defense while rebalancing the burdens of its maintenance to a more politically sustainable equilibrium.

Standing Into Danger

In a healthy seapower ecosystem, a national navy draws on a relatively small portion of a nation’s overall physical and human maritime resources—shipyards, suppliers, industry workers, and mariners. The majority of those resources are typically devoted to building prosperity through domestic and overseas commerce, creating both the taxable wealth and competitive industrial base that also pays for and builds the Navy. From the Navy’s perspective, such a healthy system enables construction and maintenance of warships at much lower cost, since shipyards and suppliers would distribute their overhead costs to both civilian and government customers, as opposed to just the government.

At present, the American seapower ecosystem is out of balance. The U.S. Navy is the nation’s primary buyer of large ships, with a fleet of 297 battle force warships plus another 130 Military Sealift Command auxiliaries. By contrast, the U.S. Merchant Marine has just 177 commercial ships out of more than 60,000 merchant ships on the world’s oceans today. This reduces the United States to being a strictly naval power and a maritime consumer—dependent on foreign-built and foreign-controlled commercial fleets to move American trade.

A key factor in creating these conditions has been the elimination of internationally competitive U.S.-built and U.S.-flagged commercial shipping over the past forty years. While it has long been more expensive to build commercial ships in the United States and operate them under the U.S. flag, for most of the 20th century an interlocking system of imperfect but intelligent government interventions in the commercial shipping and shipbuilding sectors served to fully offset the higher cost of U.S. ships and mariners relative to foreign counterparts, either through construction and operational differentials in peacetime, or direct government construction of standardized commercial ships during the World Wars. These measures enabled U.S. shipping companies to compete for cargo on the international market at prevailing rates.

Unfortunately, flaws in the subsidy system’s structure, particularly its lack of competitive incentives and its reliance on inaccurate government estimates of foreign ship construction and operating costs, contributed to a loss of effectiveness, and eventually a collapse in political support for the program. In 1981, the Reagan Administration repealed the Operational Differential Subsidy and defunded the Construction Differential Subsidy under the belief that a free-market approach would produce better results and inspire other nations to drop their subsidies. No other country followed suit, and so this policy choice led most of the U.S. commercial shipping sector to either close or move abroad, particularly to countries which continued subsidizing their shipping and shipbuilding industries. This in turn resulted in a wholesale collapse of demand for the U.S. shipbuilding industry, apart from the naval and relatively small domestic commercial Jones Act markets.

While the Clinton Administration created the Maritime Security Program (MSP) in the 1990s to provide a stopgap source of militarily useful commercial sealift in international trade, this program has proved a poor substitute for the prior method of fostering development of a healthy U.S. Merchant Marine. MSP supports a hodgepodge of used, foreign-built ships lacking fleetwide standardization, with the fleet sized to support strictly military requirements for a 1990s-era regional contingency in a permissive maritime environment. MSP’s model of a partial operational subsidy supplemented in peacetime by government preference cargo effectively caps the size of the U.S.-flag merchant fleet at however many ships U.S. government preference and military cargo can economically support in peacetime. It does not factor in the larger requirements for assured sealift for U.S. economic security in either peace or war. MSP is not structured to incentivize U.S. shipping firms to become more competitive over time and, most damaging of all, does nothing to create demand for a competitive U.S. shipbuilding industry.

The resulting situation presents a number of troubling implications for Navy shipbuilding. To begin with, the Navy bears the brunt of virtually all the overhead costs of the shipyards that build and maintain warships, since the Navy is those companies’ primary, if not only customer. Accordingly, the remaining naval-focused shipbuilding industry has sized itself based on what the Navy’s peacetime steady-state procurement budget can economically support. As a result, even though threat-informed studies and Congress consistently signal support for a bigger Navy, the national industrial base lacks the commercial capacity that a healthier ecosystem would be able to draw upon to surge to meet an influx of new naval demand.

The loss of the commercial shipbuilding sector has been compounded by the consolidation of the defense industrial base after the Cold War. These two developments have had the combined effect of all but eliminating real competition between shipyards. The U.S. naval shipbuilding sector has become an uncompetitive series of monopoly-monopsony relationships, with only one yard building a given ship class (the sole exceptions being destroyers and attack submarines, which have duopolies) and the U.S. government as their sole customer. This lack of competition allows shipyards to drive up the prices they charge the Navy while also reducing those companies’ incentives to find efficiencies or make needed capital investments, such as facility modernization.

“We Must Bring Our Shipbuilding Allies to us”

By contrast, South Korean and Japanese yards are engaged in a commercial deathmatch with China’s state-backed juggernaut for control of the global commercial shipbuilding market. This unrelenting competitive environment forces yards to invest in state-of-the-art technology and production processes. Intense commercial competition has compelled such a high degree of effectiveness that these three countries now produce 90 percent of the world’s commercial ships. Importantly, their broad international customer bases and integrated naval and commercial facilities allow Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese shipbuilders to effectively subsidize their national naval production with the profits from their commercial work, increasing the purchasing power of their respective national navies. Using their robust dual-use yards, Korean and Japanese shipbuilders are able to construct high-end Aegis surface combatants of respected quality for a fraction of the cost of U.S. equivalents.

The competition in Asia has technological implications as well. Many U.S. shipyards are decades behind the global technological standard set by Korean and Japanese shipbuilders, which was clearly evidenced during a firsthand visit to the facilities of HD Hyundai and Hanwha Ocean by Secretary Del Toro in February 2024. The highly automated shipbuilding and sea trial technologies in use at these facilities are more advanced than anything now in operation in the United States. Unlike their American counterparts, these yards also consistently make substantial, self-funded investments in both production processes and worker quality of life, including housing and training facilities for employees and the crews of visiting ships. Both Hyundai and Hanwha reported near-perfect on-time performance—even during COVID—and can tell customers when their ships will be delivered to the day. This is a far cry from the PowerPoint slides that American shipbuilders often present in the Pentagon, explaining that a given vessel is going to be somewhere between one and three years late.

Given the cutthroat competition among shipbuilders in Asia and the lack of a competitive shipbuilding marketplace in the United States, this result should be unsurprising. At its best, capitalism demands that firms continually invest in innovation and adaptation to find a new competitive edge over their opponents in a Darwinian evolutionary arms race. In the U.S. shipbuilding sector, that process of rivalry, adaptation, and renewal has mostly ground to a halt. U.S. shipbuilders demand the government pay for new infrastructure investments and workforce salary increases—while too often investing their profits into stock buybacks and dividends rather than into improving their core businesses, which are falling behind on their contractual obligations to the Navy. Building the world’s best warships in 1960s-era shipyards is unaffordable and slow, and is unacceptable if the United States is to prevail in the increasingly tense geopolitical competition for the 21st century.

It should be emphasized that outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding overseas remains—and should remain—a non-starter. Beyond the legal requirement and political imperative to build U.S. government ships in U.S. shipyards, outsourcing new construction to yards in East Asia would be strategic malpractice, not least because the Korean and Japanese shipyards capable of producing U.S.-equivalent combatants are ranged by thousands of Chinese short and medium range missiles. In the course of the implementation of the Maritime Statecraft strategy, Asian shipbuilders and their customers around the world have increasingly come to recognize the value of “defense in depth” and geostrategic diversification of ship production and repair provided by the strategic sanctuary of the United States. One cannot discount the possibility that China could destroy the shipbuilding infrastructure of U.S. allies during a Pacific war to set the stage for even greater PRC maritime dominance in the postwar world.

Additionally, suggestions that the U.S. government might outsource shipbuilding overseas in the future—even temporarily while U.S. production ramps up—surrenders valuable negotiating leverage with major shipbuilders, reducing their incentive to open critically needed shipyards in America, which is a primary objective of the strategy. This led us to a similar approach as drove the inception of the Mulberry Harbors used in the Allied landings at Normandy in World War II. Just as the chief naval planner of D-Day recognized that “if we cannot capture a port, we must take one with us,” the Maritime Statecraft strategy is derived from the similar insight that “if we cannot build ships in the world-class shipyards of our allies, then we must bring our allies to us.” An American maritime revival requires the help of allies, but is only possible if they invest in the alliance by investing in America.

Creating a Better Paradigm

After Secretary Del Toro articulated the vision of Maritime Statecraft in a series of speeches at Columbia, Harvard, and several major naval conferences, the first step in executing this new strategy to restart competition in U.S. shipbuilding was to make contact with the leaders of the foremost Korean and Japanese shipbuilders who build both commercial and naval vessels. This began in February 2024 via meetings in Seoul led by Secretary Del Toro with the Vice Chairmen and CEOs of Hanwha and HD Hyundai, followed by tours of their respective shipyards. Our central message going into each of these engagements in Seoul and Tokyo was a simple, yet profound opportunity – invest in America.

The response has been remarkable and swift. Just over three months after engaging with the Secretary in South Korea, Hanwha announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the Philly Shipyard, a former naval facility now building commercial ships, and successfully closed this transaction in December 2024. Hanwha has since announced plans to invest $5 billion to expand the yard’s facilities, update its technology and production processes, and create more than 7,000 new jobs in order to multiply output tenfold over the next decade and compete for both commercial and naval shipbuilding contracts. Since the Philly Shipyard has not built a naval vessel since 1970, restoring this facility to the naval-facing industrial base will be a significant capacity expansion and value-add for Navy shipbuilding.

HD Hyundai has also taken steps to engage. A major accomplishment was brokering a partnership between HD Hyundai, Seoul National University, and the University of Michigan to create academic and professional exchange opportunities in the education of naval architects, a foundational element of a healthy white collar shipbuilding workforce. HD Hyundai has since signed agreements to collaborate with several U.S. shipyards serving both the naval and commercial markets, and has now publicly announced its intent to acquire of a U.S. yard of its own. Seeing the growing momentum and opportunity of Maritime Statecraft, Davie Shipbuilding of Canada and Finland reached out and met with Secretary Del Toro on multiple occasions, and in July 2024 announced intentions to purchase a U.S. shipyard (subsequently announced to be Gulf Copper and Manufacturing Corporation in Texas) to bring the firm’s world-class icebreaker capabilities to bear on U.S. government programs. Bringing the advanced technologies, production processes, and dual-use commercial and naval business model that have been so successful abroad to American shores heralds a paradigm shift that will transform the U.S. competitive marketplace and incentivize modernization investments by legacy players.

Creating a business case for dual-use shipbuilding in the United States also requires incentivizing commercial demand. The first step on this line of effort was to leverage existing government programs to create favorable options both for dual-use shipbuilders looking to finance investments in their businesses as well as prospective ship buyers looking to finance purchases of U.S.-built vessels. In the spring of 2024, after a year of collaborative engagement and negotiation, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office expanded the eligibility of its multibillion-dollar Title 17 Clean Energy Financing and Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Programs to include the maritime industry. Title 17 Clean Energy Financing allows for commercial ship buyers to secure Treasury rate loans and loan guarantees to purchase U.S.-built ships that achieve a 10 percent improvement in carbon emissions over legacy single-fuel diesel ships. The Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program enables dual-use shipbuilders and secondary suppliers to secure financing at Treasury rates for technology improvements, plant expansions, and other investments in their production facilities.

At home, another important line of effort was recruiting unions as critical partners and stakeholders to advance the strategy across multiple lines of effort. The United Steelworkers led the way in catalyzing the Section 301 investigation of anticompetitive Chinese shipbuilding practices, a key offensive step to push back directly on Chinese dominance of the global maritime industry while also stimulating demand for American steel at a moment when most U.S. steel plate facilities are producing at less than 50 percent of their designed capacity. Domestically, unions have also championed innovative solutions to fill blue collar workforce gaps in many American shipyards. An illustrative example is a partnership with the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers which recruits itinerant welders in the construction trades and provides them with the requisite training and certification to work on Navy shipbuilding programs during lulls in construction demand ashore. After launching a pilot program recruiting skilled welders across five midwestern states in 2024, this rotational expeditionary workforce program was quickly oversubscribed, and cohorts are now working in Newport News to deliver new aircraft carriers.

On the legislative front, the Maritime Statecraft strategy’s implementation took the form of significant technical assistance on the SHIPS for America Act co-sponsored by Senator Mark Kelly, Senator Todd Young, Representative John Garamendi, and Representative Trent Kelly, with Representative Mike Waltz and a large cross-functional working group from government, industry, and academia providing invaluable input to the drafting process. This legislation revitalizes the Title 46 authority for the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Transportation to grant shipbuilding construction differentials on a competitive basis. The bill also creates a new Strategic Commercial Fleet of 250 U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-crewed ships in international trade that would compete for a stipend that would fully offset the higher cost of U.S. construction and operation, to be resourced through a dedicated new Maritime Trust Fund. These and other measures will help prime the pump to incentivize shipping firms to begin buying U.S. ships built by world-class shipbuilders in U.S. yards.

The next phase of the strategy was to directly engage the leaders of the world’s foremost shipowners, beginning with Secretary Del Toro’s visit to the CEO of A.P. Moller-Maersk in Copenhagen. Going into this meeting, we were aware that Maersk and a number of its European peers were discounting the strategic risk of dependence on Chinese shipbuilding and were directing disproportionate shares of their newbuild orderbooks to Chinese shipyards, which continually seek to undercut their Korean and Japanese rivals on price. At the same time, we were aware that European shipping giants were beginning to find themselves under increasing direct pressure from Chinese competitors in the shipping market, with Chinese lines the fastest growing players in the global container trade.

A key objective of our engagements with the European shipping firms was to help them better understand the connection between these two phenomena: whatever discount Chinese yards offer a European ship buyer relative to Korean and Japanese builders, Chinese yards almost certainly offer Chinese shipping firms a far steeper discount. With every new order the European firms place with Chinese shipyards, they directly subsidize the growth of their new biggest competitor in the global shipping market while placing their own companies at geopolitical risk without a fallback shipbuilding alternative outside Northeast Asia. This message is resonating. Indeed, within days of the Secretary’s meeting with Maersk, the CEO of France’s CMA CGM, the world’s third largest shipping firm, reached out to discuss expanding their U.S. footprint, beginning months of productive discussion and collaboration. In March, CMA CGM announced that they would be investing $20 billion into the United States, tripling the size of their U.S.-flag commercial fleet, and creating 10,000 new jobs.

What Must Happen Next

Maritime Statecraft has demonstrated remarkable intellectual staying power through the political transition, with its central pillars publicly embraced by President Trump, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, and the new White House Office of Shipbuilding in engagements with South Korea and in the April 2025 executive order on Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance. The new administration’s focus on expanding on the blueprint created by its predecessor presages a lasting commitment to a long-overdue national maritime revival that will endure across future administrations of either party.

Going forward, Washington should focus its efforts on supporting and expanding the U.S. investments and commitments already made by players like Hanwha and CMA CGM, and encouraging additional dual-use shipbuilders from Korea, Japan, and Europe to follow through on contemplated U.S. investments. Congressional approval of the SHIPS for America Act and appropriations for the Strategic Commercial Fleet and the Maritime Trust Fund will provide a concrete demand signal for the long-term development of internationally competitive U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding. This Fall, the United States Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce must ensure effective and timely enforcement of Section 301 remedies levied on Chinese vessels calling on U.S. ports and must work to ensure that these proceeds directly accrue to U.S. shipbuilding investment needs. Once passed into law, the Maritime Trust Fund should serve as the primary vehicle for transferring the Chinese 301 duties to the build-out of U.S maritime power.

Maritime Statecraft presents an opening for the United States and its maritime partners to strengthen the foundations of coalition seapower and rebalance defense burden sharing at the same time. Investments by allies in shipbuilding in the United States is one now-proven avenue. The South Korean government in particular leveraged our engagement with its shipbuilders and trade ministry to develop its Make American Shipbuilding Great Again proposal, which proved instrumental to Seoul’s success in recent tariff negotiations. The Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC) summit in Korea this year presents further opportunity to build on the accomplishments to date through deeper investment in shipyards and secondary shipbuilding suppliers in the United States, translating the Korea Development Bank’s promised $150 billion in shipbuilding loans and loan guarantees from paper promises into steel and concrete on American waterfronts. A presidential visit to a shipyard in Korea on the sidelines of APEC, like President Lee’s visit to the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in July, would offer a firsthand view of what Korean investment can do to revitalize the U.S. shipbuilding industry and workforce. It would also showcase the tremendous talent that the United States should incentivize to come to American shipyards with their skills and best practices. There are several steps the administration can take on devising more effective and collaborative visa and immigration programs to facilitate the entry of the managers and technical experts needed to train the U.S. shipbuilding workforce.

Beware the Rocks and Shoals

There are nevertheless challenges ahead. The biggest immediate risk is the continuing allure of foreign outsourcing that some in the national security establishment see as a quick fix to the nation’s naval shipbuilding woes. An attempt by the administration to go around Congress’s clear wishes, either now or in the future, would derail a shipbuilding strategy embraced by both political parties and instead put a restoration of American seapower out of reach. Outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding abroad, even temporarily, as the administration has indicated it plans to do with U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers, would surrender the United States’s most powerful source of leverage for a negligible short term gain while undermining the business incentive for world-class shipyards to follow through on investing in America.

A related outsourcing challenge that can be quickly corrected with executive action are the loopholes that allow U.S.-flagged vessels receiving MSP stipends and carrying government preference cargo to be maintained and repaired in China, instead of at underutilized U.S. repair yards. This corrosive practice aids the Chinese maritime industry and introduces a security risk to vessels that the Department of Defense depends on while denying U.S. based shipyards critically needed contracts.

Over the medium to long term, a new and growing risk to the administration’s ability to carry forward the shipbuilding priorities it shares with its predecessor is its increasingly coercive approach to trade and foreign investment, as well as its aggressive immigration enforcement actions. The recent immigration raid on Hyundai Motor’s electric vehicle plant in Georgia could frighten off firms from making new investments in U.S. shipbuilding or completing previously-pledged commitments. Its brusque treatment of South Korean engineers, who had entered the country legally to support domestic American electric car manufacturing, damaged South Korean popular perceptions of the United States as a safe place to work. Indeed, the Hyundai Motor action was starkly incongruous with successful Administration efforts just weeks prior to obtain major South Korean commitments to help revive the American maritime industry. Perceptions matter, as those much needed and welcome commitments will ultimately require the recruitment of large numbers of skilled South Korean managers and engineers to move to the United States.

During our engagements with global shipbuilding executives on investing in America, the Koreans in particular asked whether they would be treated fairly on a level playing field as their prospective U.S. competitors, or if instead they would be regarded as foreigners and treated as second-class citizens. We assured them, as we did others, that by investing in the United States and setting up fully compliant U.S. subsidiaries, they would indeed be treated as any other U.S. company according to the rule of law, with access to the same certifications, security clearances, and opportunities to compete fully and fairly for Navy contracts. This was a key catalyst for their decision to enter the U.S. market as forcefully as they have.

The American tradition of a welcoming business climate under the rule of law that values direct foreign investment and participation must continue. Strategic industries such as the maritime sector must be supported by Administration policies that do not dissuade but rather incentivize world-class corporations, experts, and workers to come to America—particularly from long-standing allies that share our democratic values such as South Korea, Japan, Canada, Italy, Australia and Finland. If the administration can keep off these clearly marked rocks and shoals, it has the opportunity to follow through on achieving the rewards for the U.S. Navy and maritime industry that Maritime Statecraft can make possible.

For too long, policymakers of all political stripes have neglected the cornerstone of American power, which is its seapower. Through diligent effort, Maritime Statecraft has become a bipartisan movement, and has created the largest market opportunity in the U.S. maritime sector in half a century. America’s maritime renaissance is just getting started. Its success depends on a sustained, long-term recognition that for the United States, maritime strategy is grand strategy.

Steven V. Brock was appointed by the White House as the Senior Advisor to the 78th Secretary of the Navy, where from 2022 to 2025 he served as a chief strategist and key implementor of the Secretary’s highest priorities, including as a principal architect of Maritime Statecraft. A former member of the Senior Executive Service and retired U.S. Navy Captain, he currently is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Del Toro Global Associates.

Hunter Stires served as the Maritime Strategist to the 78th Secretary of the Navy, where he was recognized for his work as one of the principal architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy. He serves as the Project Director of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Maritime Counterinsurgency Project, a Non-Resident Fellow with the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy, and the Founder and CEO of The Maritime Strategy Group.

Featured Image: Port of Jakarta, Indonesia. (Photo by Tom Fisk via Pexels)

Call for Articles

Call for Articles: Should the U.S. Surface Warfare Community Specialize?

Leave a comment

Articles Due: December 8, 2025
Week Dates: January 5-9, 2026
Story Length: 1,5000-3,000 Words
Submit to: Content@cimsec.org

By Dmitry Filipoff

The U.S. Surface Warfare Officer community has operated on a generalist career path since 1899. SWOs are responsible for matters of both operational and material readiness, while the surface fleets of other navies, as well as some other U.S. naval warfare communities, have specialized career tracks. While SWO Warfare Tactics Instructors specialize in specific warfare areas, the vast majority of Surface Warfare Officers have no distinct specialization.

U.S. SWO career paths compared to other naval warfare communities and surface fleets. (Source: GAO study, “Actions Needed to Evaluate and Improve Surface Warfare Officer Career Path,” June 2021.)

The career path of a community holds major implications for that community’s ability to raise its warfighting standards, and sets the limits of what knowledge and skill can be reasonably expected of its officers. A 2021 GAO study surveyed SWOs on the topic, and found that 65 percent believe specialized career paths would best prepare them for their duties, while 16 percent believed the current generalist model is best. That same year, the Surface Warfare Officer Leadership Enhancement Act was proposed by members of Congress and included specialized career tracks.

Arguments in favor of the generalist career path often claim it facilitates cross-functional expertise that better prepares SWOs for higher levels of responsibility. Arguments for specialization often claim that technical and tactical matters have reached a level of complexity that outstrips the ability of generalists to effectively keep pace with, resulting in officers who are too stretched thin to achieve higher readiness across multiple areas.

Should the U.S. Surface Warfare Officer community specialize? Is the generalist career track effectively pacing the threat environment and the growing complexity of surface platforms? How does the generalist track compare against the specialized tracks of other warfare communities and surface navies? Authors are invited to consider these questions and more as they weigh in on the SWO specialization debate.

Send all submissions to Content@cimsec.org.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Nov. 12, 2017) The guided-missile destroyer USS Chafee (DDG 90), right, leads USS Stethem (DDG 63), the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG 59) and USS Sampson (DDG 102) while transiting in formation. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Cole Schroeder)

Ocean Governance

Strategic Minerals and the False Promise of Seabed Mining

Leave a comment

By Drake Long

On April 29, a small seabed mining enterprise known as The Metals Company (TMC) formally submitted an application to NOAA to commence commercial-scale mining in an area of the ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

This followed an executive order issued by the White House explicitly ordering the expedition of seabed mining permits in international waters under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act – a little-known law passed in 1980. The Metals Company cited this law in its press release, stating it was submitting its commercial-recovery permit precisely under the terms of that act. On first glance, this would seem a strange, but necessary measure for the U.S. to procure critical minerals it sorely lacks.

There is no firm classification for what counts as a critical mineral. The Energy Act of 2020 defined critical minerals as “minerals, elements, substances, or materials” that were necessary for national or economic security of the United States, and if supply of said material were disrupted in some way, it would have dire implications for the U.S. manufacturing of defense goods or a negative effect on the overall U.S. economy. Nebulous as this category is, critical minerals have taken on new significance as of late due to the overwhelming dominance of China in the extraction and processing of them. As of 2025, China has the outsized ability to cut off, or severely constrain, the supply of 46 out of 84 different materials on the critical mineral list to the United States. Not coincidentally, China has also shown the willingness to use this dominant position in the commodity market, such as by restricting the sale of seven critical minerals to the U.S. back in April.

The seabed mining industry has stepped in and offered themselves as one of several proposed solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, these firms are mostly pitching false promises.

Seabed mining, for research purposes and experimentation, has occurred since 1970. What is unexpected about the current moment in the seabed mining industry is that companies are aggressively pursuing permits for commercial-recovery. That entails mining the seabed for profit – and elevating the practice to an industrial activity at the bottom of the sea.

For the past two years, I have been researching and writing a book on states’ interests in the seabed, and emerging issues affecting those parts of the seabed under international waters that were first dubbed “a common heritage of mankind” at the United Nations in 1967. Commercial activity on the seabed is a touchy subject due to concerns about its effects on deep-sea habitats. During most of my time researching this book project, the wind has been at the back of the environmentalist movement.

There are three types of deep sea environments considered viable for seabed mining: Hydrothermal vents that naturally grow polymetallic sulphides, metalliferous muds in shallower parts of the seabed, and abyssal plains with volcanic crusts or large, scattered deposits of polymetallic nodules. The most notable example of the latter is the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a vast area in the South Pacific under the jurisdiction of the International Seabed Authority, where TMC has applied for a plot to commercially mine in.

Figure 1. Click to expand. Map of the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, broken down by plots reserved for explorative polymetallic nodule mining. China Minmetals, one of the largest mining conglomerates in the world, has its reserved plots highlighted. (Source: ISA)

All three of these environments are some of the most fragile on the planet, with organisms and ecology completely untouched by human activity until recently. Research over the past five years has shown that everything from dustclouds to the mere noise generated by seabed mining activity can destroy seabed habitats and take an extremely long time to recover from.

The vast, vast majority of undersea life that would be affected by this activity is completely unknown – all scientists I spoke to in the course of research noted that there is insufficient information on undersea life to accurately characterize the environmental impact of seabed mining in the South Pacific, and research continues to reveal the fragility and uniqueness of life deep beneath the sea. Because of this, energy has been building behind a moratorium on seabed mining entirely and as of 2025, 37 countries have joined that movement, with others requesting a likeminded ‘precautionary pause’ instead.

A U.S. permit for commercial mining in the Clarion Clipperton Zone would seem to signal a turn against this anti-mining tide. However, the reality is more nuanced – governments looking to seabed mining for new sources of critical minerals are likely setting themselves up for disappointment and should review the series of events that brought the seabed-watching community here for signs of failure in the future. More than anything else, this latest push by private seabed mining companies is a desperation move to revive a rapidly failing speculative business model.

To start, one should think of the seabed in one of two categories: the international seabed, dubbed ‘the Area’ by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the seabed that a country enjoys economic rights to under UNCLOS, as part of its continental shelf. The International Seabed Authority is a unique international legal body tasked with overseeing the former.

The International Seabed: Tough Crust to Crack

Momentum for seabed mining in international waters died in August 2024 with the election of a new Secretary-General of the ISA. That election capped off a years-long push to expedite commercial-scale seabed mining since June of 2021, when the tiny Pacific Island nation of Nauru said it would grant a license to a subsidiary of The Metals Company to begin seabed mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

When Nauru threatened to grant TMC its license, it triggered a ‘two-year rule’ within the UN document establishing ISA procedures that stated the ISA had to finalize its regulations, or Mining Code, by the two-year mark after a commercial license was granted. If it failed to do so, it was ambiguous as to what authority the ISA would have to halt operations if The Metals Company went ahead and mined anyway.

Despite the sudden urgency, the Mining Code was not finished by the July 2023 deadline. To stave off the possibility of Nauru and the private sector pushing forward with unregulated, commercial-scale mining, most members of the ISA unified and used that year’s ISA Council meeting to kick the can down the road and issue a revised timeline for the formal adoption of the Mining Code instead. That timeline called for the Mining Code to be finished by the end of July 2025 – and the ISA ultimately did not succeed in doing so, to little surprise to those I have spoken to who regularly observe ISA proceedings.

This was not the best outcome for the private seabed mining industry, especially as the initial pause on deregulated mining occurred nearly concurrent with the finalization of another UN treaty titled the Boundaries Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, which will come into effect in January 2026.

The BBNJ, much like the ISA itself, was created to settle unfinished business from the original conference that established UNCLOS. Namely, how to safeguard and treat all areas of the ocean outside of a country’s allotted maritime territory. This included international waters and the seabed within the ISA’s jurisdiction. While the draft Mining Code contains regulations intended to minimize the environmental impact of extractive activity on the seafloor, the BBNJ Agreement is far more stringent in terms of deterring seabed mining on the basis of protecting deep-sea ecological diversity. With its passage, mining companies already facing one set of regulations now need to contend with an eventual second.

The 2024 ISA Secretary-General election was the final factor signaling the nadir of the international seabed mining enterprise. The previous ISA Secretary-General, frustrations aside, was generally regarded among members as more of a seabed mining enthusiast than not, and for this reason he was nominated for an unprecedented third term by the pro-mining Kiribati even though he was a British citizen. He lost to Leticia Carvalho, who has made it clear she will not rush a Mining Code and has continually stressed the need for proper regulation of seabed mining above all else.

This brings us to the present. Seabed mining under the ISA process in international waters remains an aspiration for now.

The Continental Shelf: Sovereign, Not Soft

Given their status as glorified start-ups in a speculative industry with a shallow pool of capital to draw from, seabed mining companies making headlines today cannot wait for a Mining Code to be finalized, nor can they deal with all the provisions and legal issues the BBNJ Agreement will saddle them with. For a time, they instead turned to the lower-hanging fruit – mining the continental shelf that is strictly within a country’s jurisdiction.

The ISA, Mining Code, and UNCLOS are complicating factors for seabed mining only in international waters. Within the 200-nautical mile zone of a country’s continental shelf, national governments instead determine whether companies can mine their seafloor.

The logical next step for any company looking to mine the seabed then is to pursue mining licenses on a country’s continental shelf, outside any regulations the ISA or BBNJ could create. To clarify, a country’s continental shelf under UNCLOS is a legal, and not a geophysical, limit. Any country can claim a continental shelf out to 200 nautical miles from their coastline, and this can extend an additional 150 nautical miles outward if certain criteria are met. In the scientific sense, this means a country has economic rights to an area of the deep sea that is inclusive of a continental shelf, continental slope, continental rise – and even the deep seabed. All of these physical features are rolled into one legal definition of a “continental shelf” under UNCLOS.

While somewhat confusing, what this means in practice is that some countries have economic rights to areas of the deep seabed that are ripe for seabed mining. The ideal countries for the entrepreneurial seabed wildcatter to pursue would have massive maritime entitlements under UNCLOS close to known seabed reserves, lax regulation, and a small economy eager for foreign investment.

Traditionally, some Pacific Island countries (PICs) seemed to be auditioning for this role. Countries like Kiribati and the Cook Islands have overtly signaled their openness to the industry. The Cook Islands alone has a massive continental shelf, nearly 2 million square kilometers in size, spread between 15 tiny islands. Its continental shelf abuts the Clarion Clipperton Zone, where most known reserves lie. It held the first ever Underwater Minerals Conference in September to bring industry and governments together solely to discuss the prospects for seabed mining. Kiribati took the extraordinary step of abolishing a 115,000-square mile marine protected area around the Phoenix Islands, partially to allow for the possibility of seabed mining and other extractive activities there. And other Pacific Island countries such as Nauru, as previously mentioned, pushed the ISA to allow for commercial mining as soon as possible.

Probably the most important thing to examine during this period is the failure of private companies to actualize a seabed mining industry in Cook Islands. Despite having considerable history in the country, a very friendly government, and more-than-a-little ability to shape regulations there in their favor, the Cook Islands ultimately chose a different partner for its deep sea mining ambitions – the People’s Republic of China. The two countries signed an MOU in February that prominently featured exploration, extraction, and development of minerals on the Cook Islands’ vast continental shelf.

The reason private companies are now cut out of the Cook Islands market in favor of China is the same reason relaxing regulations on seabed mining ultimately benefits China in the long-run. China offers a suite of sweeteners alongside any mining deals that the private sector cannot compete with. This is as true with its terrestrial mining and oil-gas giants as it is with the speculative seabed mining industry. China simply has more money and capacity.

Wildcatters Versus Titans

Seabed mining is often touted as a means to alleviate the U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals. The Metals Company CEO said as much during his congressional testimony in April. This is heavily misleading. There are substantial reserves of these metals on the seafloor and close to shore in some spots, including on an area of the Gorda Ridge identified by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s. But China’s dominance in the rare earths market does not come from its reserves. It comes from its processing capability. Over 80 percent of all rare earths on the world market are processed by Chinese companies. China processes over 90 percent of all graphite, and about 67 percent of the world’s cobalt and lithium, all of which are critical minerals for emerging commercial and military technologies.

The numbers do not differ much, no matter what mineral one looks at. China has cornered the market on simple processing of many different ores, and while other countries such as the DRC, Myanmar, and Australia all have significant reserves of these metals on their own, they overwhelmingly are still shipped to China for processing.

There is little reason to see how opening a new reserve of critical minerals changes this dynamic at all – especially because processing seabed minerals costs quite a bit more. The initial step in processing ore is to simply separate the actual usable mineral from anything else. Water depth, salinity, and a variety of other environmental factors can make deep-sea minerals, even when extracted, difficult to separate out in this way, and processing facilities normally used for terrestrial ore cannot put them on the same production line. This means that any commercial-scale processor for these critical minerals would probably operate at a loss without massive, well-financed state-backing.

This is the sort of thing China, with its vertically-integrated supply chains for all aspects of metal extraction and processing, as well as its patient capital approach to bankrolling initially unprofitable commercial enterprises, would be able to do. It is not something the private sector is prepared to do. Other strong contenders for building a seabed mineral processing industry are Norway, India, and Japan – both countries with well-trod, well-funded industrial policies that fit the scale of the profitability problem with seabed mining. These countries are also non-coincidentally pioneering their seabed mining models with the help of aggressive state-backing and public institutions, crowding out the previous private sector players.

Even if one came into a large processing industry quickly, there are already reserves of critical minerals out there that are not owned by China – and they are terrestrial, not undersea, which points to another aspect of seabed mining that should give pause to advocates. Seabed mining is sometimes described as more environmentally-friendly than the mining that goes on inland. Truthfully, terrestrial mining on land is horrifically destructive, and in areas with large cobalt reserves like the DRC, child exploitation and unsafe working conditions are rampant. If there was a way to limit these activities, that would be a benefit to humankind. Seabed mining advocates state that if their industry were deregulated, terrestrial mining could end, and these minerals could instead be mined off the seafloor.

However, there is no evidence that terrestrial mining would stop even if seabed mining were permitted. In the course of writing a book on the topic, I have not encountered a single person in or familiar with the critical mineral mining industry that believes any mines on land would close if new reserves from the seabed started circulating. There is no incentive for any mining company working in cobalt or REE reserves to do so.

On the contrary, some speculated that it would lead to more, not less, terrestrial mining. If seabed mining introduced new reserves into world markets, mining companies could just cut corners or mine more on-land to ensure they still made a profit – and in many cases may not need to do so, as seabed reserves are slower to introduce to the market and more expensive to extract. Many of the companies backing seabed mining are more traditional mining companies in any case, and nobody I am aware of believes they are investing in the seabed mining industry with the intent to shutter their most profitable enterprises elsewhere. For countries that have large on-land reserves of critical minerals but lack the technology or know-how to engage in seabed mining, the market logic behind halting mining is nonexistent.

Conclusion: The Wild, Wild South Pacific

Most observers of the seabed mining industry I have interviewed are keenly aware of companies like TMC, their business history, and their profit margins. They tend to view their business models as unworkable, and vulnerable to a host of legal and political pressures. Private seabed mining companies do not own their own equipment and ships, instead requiring other companies like Allseas to provide it for their use instead. They are understood to be constantly running out of cash, given how the commercial seabed mining industry is nonexistent, and are thus starving without constant injections of private capital. There is more than a little desperation in the way these companies are working now to secure mineral rights and commercialize seabed mining.

Private seabed mining companies have tried two approaches so far. Step one was to work the international institutions to get a favorable regulatory environment, which has failed so far. Step two was to work with sovereign nations to mine their continental shelf, which is endangered by the entry of bigger players.

The third step appears to be finding legal loopholes. To clarify, commercial mining in international waters under the ISA process is not possible right now. But the United States did not ratify UNCLOS, and is not a member of the ISA. This is why TMC submitted a permit under a domestic U.S. law, and not through the ISA. Any permit it grants a private company to mine in the Clarion Clipperton Zone, which is under the ISA’s jurisdiction, would be legally dubious and represents the private sector taking advantage of that grey area to get around the normal approval process – an approval process that was actually crafted by the United States during UNCLOS negotiations in the first place.

Using domestic U.S. law to mine international waters is dubious. Legal analysts are looking at the viability of this for the time being, and the emerging consensus is that TMC may be opening itself up to a raft of punitive measures by UNCLOS signatories that it, its business partners, its supply chain partners, and any other affiliated bodies, operate in. Any minerals it extracts could be of dubious value at best.

Yet the strongest national security argument against commercial seabed mining remains an understanding of who actually benefits from it. The leaders of a seabed mining industry will not be the first-movers like TMC, or any other small private actor.

The largest, most well-funded seabed mining company would be China Minmetals, a highly-prominent Chinese state-owned enterprise pumping an incredible amount of money into seabed mining technology and with its own exploration licenses issued by the ISA. If the purpose of permitting seabed mining is to reduce dependence on China, what does it mean when China also enters the seabed mining industry, and to great success? Companies like Minmetals also have the benefit of a processing and final product assembly supply chain tied to its terrestrial mining component.

While smaller companies like TMC have already conducted exploratory mining, there is no profitable path toward commercial-scale seabed mining for them. They are start-ups still in a speculative industry. They have tested and proven the technology, but for the reasons stated above, they would make less of a profit and at a steep cost than any terrestrial mining company. While intermittently backed by mining and large maritime shipping companies, there is not a consistent flow of capital to maintain operations forever, nor is it reliable enough to scale into a profitable industry from. Maersk notably abandoned TMC in 2023 after environmental concerns over seabed mining heated up and the broader seabed mining enterprise started to come into question.

The current step toward permitting under U.S. law should not be considered wind in the sails of the private seabed mining sector. It is instead a desperation move, and not one guaranteed to work out. Absent state backing, these companies cannot survive, and it is for this reason they continually sell to unaware countries the promise that with a little reciprocal support, they can turn into leaders of a new, emerging industry.

But this is not likely to happen. The smaller companies testing the technology now instead seem to be paving the way for a much larger company, such as Minmetals or its Japanese, Indian, or perhaps Norwegian counterparts, to move in the future and successfully scale upward to the commercial level.

Drake Long is currently writing a book on international seabed issues, the deep-sea domain, and security. He is also a non-resident Senior Associate with the China Warfighting Initiative, Marine Corps War College. The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent official views of Marine Corps University or any government department.

Featured Photo: Manganese nodules embedded in the seabed (mage courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration)

Human Capital

Building Tactical Excellence: How SWCTC Supports LT Breen’s Call for Higher SWO Proficiency

4 Comments

By LCDR Jeffrey Bolstad (ASW/SUW WTI) and LT Matthew Bain (ASW/SUW WTI)

In his recent CIMSEC article, “Reprioritize SWO Tactical Qualifications for the High-End Fight,” LT Seth Breen underscores a pressing challenge for the Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) community – achieving tactical proficiency commensurate with the demands of great power conflict. While his argument addresses officer qualification prioritization, his call to action aligns directly with the Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum (SWCTC), which provides a structured framework to elevate tactical readiness across the fleet. Designed to address this very need, SWCTC delivers a standardized and measurable, career-long training curriculum that develops tactical surface warfare watchstanders at every stage of their service.

The need to invest in tactical proficiency at both the individual and watchteam levels is central to driving the surface force to the next level of lethality and tactical mastery. From the inception of the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) in 2015, SWCTC was identified as a critical initiative to address this requirement. Since then, it has grown into a comprehensive, career-spanning tactical training program. Today, SMWDC’s Commander, RDML T. J. Zerr, is advancing this vision by leveraging SWCTC to shape the structure and delivery of tactical training across all surface communities, from schoolhouses to operational commands—ensuring the fleet remains tactically ready and combat effective.

Two key relationships are central to understanding the power and importance of SWCTC. First is the link between individual readiness and overall watchteam performance. The higher the individual proficiency is raised and maintained, the more capable and consistent the team becomes, reducing variability from watch to watch and ship to ship. In combat, preventable errors carry unacceptable consequences, and consistent proficiency across watchteams minimizes seams adversaries can exploit. Second, SWCTC formally distinguishes between qualification and proficiency. Before the recent rollout for CRUDES Tactical Action Officers (TAOs), there was no standardized force-wide method to ensure qualified watchstanders had completed enough repetitions to remain proficient. SWCTC addresses this gap by establishing clear standards and tracking individual performance rigorously.

SWCTC’s approach is much like training for a marathon, where most do not wake up on the day of the run without any preparation. It takes months and even years to properly prepare before meeting the desired standard, especially when that standard is winning great power conflict. As we approach the projected timelines for potential great power conflict, we must adopt a similar approach of increasing our tactical edge in a standardized, long-term, and measured method. Tactical excellence is not achieved in a single event, but developed steadily over a SWO’s career. The watchstander, as the key to employing a ship’s weapons systems, must build and maintain cadence, confidence, and familiarity with those systems and their tactics to be truly prepared for combat. From foundational courses such as the Basic and Advanced Division Officer Courses, Department Head School, and Combat Systems baseline training in Dahlgren, VA, to onboard Personnel Qualification Standards, the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, and deployment certifications, SWCTC integrates seamlessly with existing curricula and operational milestones to ensure sustained proficiency.

Surface Tactical Training Syllabus (STTS)

The April 2024 issuance of COMNAVSURFPAC/COMNAVSURFLANTINST 3502.9 formalized this approach by creating the Surface Tactical Training Syllabus (STTS) for Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The instruction institutionalizes the five pillars of Maritime Warfare Proficiency (MWP) — Knowledge, Skill, Experience, Aptitude, and Currency—as the foundation for measuring readiness. Watchstanders are assessed not simply on whether they have checked a box for qualification, but on whether they have retained the knowledge, demonstrated the skills, accumulated the necessary experience, shown aptitude for progression, and sustained their currency through consistent practice. The culmination of these factors represents a level of individual tactical readiness, referred to as MWP, that we must continuously make efforts to optimize.

The STTS codifies a deliberate progression of training events, structured across six levels of increasing complexity. 100-level tasks establish theory and fundamentals, 200-level events build systems knowledge, 300-level tasks emphasize watchstation actions, 400-level events integrate the unit team, 500-level evolutions advance to multi-ship coordination, and 600-level exercises test command-level operations. This crawl-walk-run progression allows SWOs to develop steadily and measurably across their careers.

Proficiency is further captured in mastery levels ranging from Level 1 (Introductory) to Level 4 (Advanced). A Tactical Action Officer (TAO) at Mastery Level 2 can effectively execute single-ship operations, while a Level 4 TAO demonstrates advanced competence leading multi-unit engagements. Importantly, this system accounts for atrophy. Watchstanders who fail to meet periodic training requirements risk losing proficiency levels, underscoring how tactical readiness must be sustained through practice, not assumed. This emphasizes a key aspect of SWCTC – understanding that there is a difference between being qualified and being proficient.

One of the most significant aspects of the instruction is its explicit requirement for currency and recurring requalification. Under the STTS, TAOs and other tactical watchstanders must complete biennial written exams and oral boards to maintain certification. This ensures tactical decision-makers remain accountable and up-to-date, rather than relying on a one-time qualification that can fade with atrophy. The model reflects lessons long institutionalized in aviation, nuclear, and submarine communities, where loss of currency immediately removes an officer from critical duties. By adopting this standard, the surface force now demands the same level of accountability for its tactical leaders.

Training and Readiness (T&R) Matrix

At the core of this development cycle is the Training and Readiness (T&R) matrix, which tracks individual performance against clearly defined tactical tasks across warfare areas – Surface (SUW), Anti-Submarine (ASW), and Air (AW). Tasks are executed on recurring cycles and structured by proficiency levels ranging from Basic to Advanced, including multi-ship operations. Each level includes multiple tasks designed to sustain proficiency through repetition, highlight weaknesses for improvement, and provide unit commanders with an accurate baseline of watchstander readiness. This periodicity ensures both individual and unit-level tactical proficiency remains current.

The T&R matrix also creates a continuous, data-driven feedback loop that identifies knowledge gaps and informs adjustments to training syllabi, as well as Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). Tools like the Jupiter and Surface Training and Readiness Management System (STRMS) dashboards enhance this process by enabling commands to monitor individual and team performance, tailoring training to address fleet-wide trends and unit-specific needs. SWCTC combines data analytics with standardized training milestones to ensure performance shortfalls are not only identified and corrected, but also tracked over time across large datasets and then fed back to training stakeholders to address gaps in training and knowledge retention.

Focusing on the Individual Watchstander

The individual watchstander plays a critical role in employing a ship’s complex combat system. However, under the current Surface Force Training and Readiness Manual (SFTRM), Certification Exercises (CEs) and Repetitive Exercises (REs) are tracked only at the watchteam level, with no visibility into who makes up that team. For instance, the Training and Operational Readiness Information Service (TORIS) might show that two watchteams completed an AW RE (Conduct Coordinated Air Warfare)—but it does not capture whether those teams were staffed by the same TAOs repeatedly. As a result, some qualified TAOs may miss opportunities to gain repetitions, causing their proficiency to decline and reducing the ship’s overall tactical readiness.

With SWCTC, ship Commanding Officers can identify an individual’s areas of deficiency and prioritize training accordingly, while ISICs and fleet commanders gain an in-situ snapshot of each watchstander’s level of mastery—allowing them to better understand risk when assigning a specific ship or individual to a specific mission.

Fleet Feedback

SWCTC will provide commanders with objective measurements of watchstander proficiency, ensuring the fleet sustains its tactical edge in today’s complex operational environment. Fleet feedback is key and has been overwhelmingly positive, citing best practices such as use of tactical simulators and integration with real-world exercises and operations as proof of SWCTC’s adaptability and increasing relevance.

The success of SWCTC will continue to depend on feedback from the fleet. SMWDC needs to hear about any barriers to execution so we can identify where senior leadership advocacy is required. Whether it is limitations with synthetic trainers, recommendations for requirements during the Maintenance Phase, challenges executing SWCTC while deployed, or gaps in the scenario library—we can help. Your input ensures the program evolves to meet real operational demands and delivers the readiness our fleet requires.

Conclusion

The Navy regularly tracks routine maintenance, program updates, casualty control, casualty reports, and tech support for combat systems. But previous to SWCTC, the surface fleet did not systematically track the tactical proficiency of the people making critical decisions in combat. Now with SWCTC, the surface fleet has a system to track, measure, and sustain watchstander readiness at the individual level, ensuring they are prepared to defend their ship and execute combat operations when it matters most.

LT Breen’s article rightfully highlights the urgent need to elevate tactical training and qualifications, a need SWCTC is designed to meet. By combining structured career-long training, rigorous assessment, and continuous feedback, SWCTC drives lethality, accountability, and mission readiness. The program ensures our Sailors are fully prepared and proficient for the high-end fight, ultimately securing a decisive tactical advantage in complex operational environments. As the fleet continues to confront evolving threats, SWCTC remains an essential foundation, cultivating the tactical excellence that underpins surface warfare success. In short, SWCTC is how we transform individual watchstander proficiency into fleet-wide warfighting advantage.

LCDR Jeff Bolstad is a native of Bellevue, WA and joined the Navy in 2002 as a Damage Controlman. He served ship tours onboard USS REUBEN JAMES (FFG-57) as Leading Petty Officer of Repair Division, USS INGRAHAM (FFG-61) as Combat Information Center Officer and later as ship’s Navigator under a single-longer tour, USS PREBLE (DDG-88) as Weapons Officer, and USS McCAMPBELL (DDG-85) as Plans and Tactics Officer. Jeff has served tours ashore at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) as a student, Naval Ocean Processing Facility Whidbey Island, (now TUSWC) as Training Officer, and is currently at Surface Mine Warfighting Development Center as the Lead Warfare Tactics Instructor in Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum. Jeff attended the University of Washington with a BA in Global Studies focusing on China, and later at NPS wrote a thesis titled “Enhancing the NFL’s Counter-Terrorism Efforts: Is the League’s Security Scheme Able to Effectively Thwart Terrorist Attacks?”

LT Matthew Bain is a native of Belmont, NC and joined the Navy in 2016 as an Ensign. He served ship tours onboard USS PINCKNEY (DDG-91) as the Repair Officer of Repair Division and USS MONSOON (PC-4) as the ship’s Navigator, Operations Officer and Executive Officer. Matt has served tours ashore at the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) as a SWATT Planner in Fleet Training Pacific and member of the Surface Warfare Integration Office. He is currently at SMWDC as a Warfare Tactics Instructor in the Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum. Matt attended the Hampton University with a BS in Aviation focusing on Flight Education.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (April 9, 2024) Fire Controlman 2nd Class Nathan Ritchie, from Murrieta, California, stands watch in the combat information center aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) while conducting operations in the north Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Samantha Oblander)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.