Iran War Series

The Price of Doubt: Sea Control in the Strait of Hormuz

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Iran War Topic Week

By James Jackson

Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026, with objectives unrelated to commercial shipping: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and their manufacturing plants, destroy its navy, sever its proxies, and foreclose a nuclear weapon. The strait was open when the bombs fell. On March 4, Iran closed the strait in response to the strikes. What had been a campaign against Iranian military power became, by consequence, a campaign to reopen a waterway the United States had helped shut. Three months later, the strait is still closed, though not due to any failure of skill at sea. Aegis-equipped American ships have compiled a near-perfect intercept record against Iranian coastal cruise missiles, drones, and small-boat swarms. Iranian launch sites, radars, and command nodes are being struck on schedule. Yet the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ irregular forces – mobile anti-ship missiles, drones, and fast-boat flotillas dispersed along the coast – remain largely intact. The strait is still (at the time of this writing) in dispute.

Iran now runs a permission regime, issuing IRGC transit clearances and waving favored flags through. Under Project Freedom, U.S. escorts briefly pushed individual hulls through the Omani waters along the strait’s southern side, but this effort was terminated in early May. Three months into the campaign, ordinary commercial transit has collapsed to under a tenth of its pre-conflict volume and stayed there.1 Tankers and boxships are still routing around the Cape of Good Hope, war-risk premiums for Western-linked hulls remain prohibitive, and the flow of commerce the United States went to war to restore has not returned. No amount of additional tactical excellence is bringing it back.

Whether the United States was wise to start this war is a separate question, and not the one this essay addresses. The strikes on Iran were in theory a choice to move from one state of affairs to a better one. They produced the opposite. The strait was open when the campaign began; Iran closed it in response to the strikes, and the commerce the United States sought to protect collapsed. But the war was fought, and fighting it taught what the decision (and strategy) missed. One can think the war a mistake and still find the analysis useful.

Destroying Iranian launchers was never going to reopen the strait, no matter how many the Navy hits.  Whether the strait stays closed gets decided each morning in the war-risk syndicates of London and the risk committees of the world’s shipping lines, in numbers no destroyer can reach. They hold a veto no warship can override. The Navy does not choose this fight or set its aim; it executes the policy it is handed. So the burden falls where Clausewitz put it: on the policymakers and the President who set the war’s objective. Until they accept that reopening the strait is an economic and political act rather than a targeting problem, the Navy can win every tactical engagement while the nation will remain on track to lose the war.  

What Is Actually Being Contested

Planning to win wars must begin with the aim in mind. The United States is not trying to sink the Iranian navy. Rather, it is trying to reestablish the flow of seaborne commerce. That aim defines the object of the contest, and the object is not the water. A strait is closed not when ships cannot pass but when the people who own the cargo and insure the hull decide the cost of passing exceeds the cost of going around. That decision is a financial calculation, and it forms the decisive point of a chokepoint war. Whoever controls the calculation controls the strait.

For Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett, the most prominent theorists of modern sea power, command of the sea was a physical condition: the ability to use the sea and deny its use to the enemy. In today’s global economy, where moving goods depends as much on insurance, credit, and confidence as on hulls and engines, that condition is necessary but no longer enough. A destroyer can shield a ship, but it cannot lower that ship’s insurance bill or convince an owner that next week’s voyage will be uneventful. Command of the sea has slipped from the gun line to the insurance ledger, and the Navy did not move with it. Sea control has become an actuarial condition: whether the strait can be used is decided by the price underwriters put on the risk of crossing it – the same arithmetic an actuary applies to any hazard – not by which navy wins the day’s engagement.

The number that decides a chokepoint is the war-risk premium: the surcharge a hull pays to sail through a war zone. It tracks the persistence of a threat, not the odds that any given attack is intercepted. An underwriter is indifferent to the ninety-nine missiles that were stopped. They price the hundredth, the catastrophic loss that bankrupts the voyage, and the standing chance that it recurs tomorrow. A single ship lost undoes the record of a thousand intercepts.

The Red Sea already showed this. From January 2024, U.S. and coalition warships ran the same high-intercept campaign against the Houthis that is now underway against Iran, and ran it well. Yet container traffic through the Suez Canal fell roughly seventy-five percent and stayed down from 2024 onward through the present, with no recovery even during lulls in Houthi activity.2 Carriers kept routing the long way around Africa, adding some 4,000 miles and ten to fourteen days per voyage and absorbing a roughly nine-percent cut in effective global shipping capacity, because the market was not pricing the kill ratio.3 It was pricing the chance that one drone would get through and the certainty that the threat had no announced end. The shooting was excellent. Yet the strait stayed shut.

Hormuz will reproduce this at greater intensity: a narrower, mineable waterway overlooked by mobile coastal missiles along the whole Iranian littoral, carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil.4 The premium will not fall simply because Iranian launchers are destroyed. It will fall only when the market believes the threat has durably ended, and belief in an ending is exactly what an open-ended bombing campaign cannot supply.

The Asymmetry of Doubt

The cost-per-intercept problem is by now well documented: multimillion-dollar SM-2 and SM-6 interceptors spent on twenty-thousand-dollar drones, nearly a billion dollars in such rounds burned in the Red Sea alone, and a vertical-launch magazine drawn down faster than industry can replace it, consuming the very interceptors the fleet needs for the Pacific.5 The Vice Chief of Naval Operations has said plainly that a protracted fight will demand more magazine depth than the force possesses.6

But munitions are the lesser asymmetry. The greater one is doubt. The attacker’s product is uncertainty, which is cheap, requires no successful hit, and can be sustained indefinitely from a cave with a launch rail. The defender’s product is confidence, which cannot be manufactured at all. Confidence is earned slowly and lost instantly. You cannot prove a negative to an underwriter. Premiums rise in an afternoon and fall over quarters, because the market has a long memory for danger and a short one for safety. The defender is buying a perishable good with a currency the adversary can debase at will.

None of this leaves the defender powerless. It means the defender’s familiar tools such as more intercepts and strikes are the wrong ones. The moves that actually lower the price of risk lie outside the peacetime paradigm, and a state willing to use them has them: it can shoulder the risk itself through a government guarantee or turn the same economic weapon back on Tehran by choking the oil exports that fund the war. The defender has options. Firepower aimed at launchers just isn’t one of them.

Here the kinetic campaign becomes counterproductive.  The fighting created the war zone, and the strikes cannot clear it. Their visible open-endedness sustains the one signal the underwriter cares about.  To a risk committee, an ongoing high-intensity bombing campaign is evidence the danger is still live enough to require bombing. The campaign meant to reopen the strait reads, to the people who decide whether it is open, as a daily bulletin that it remains a war zone.

The Stand-In Force, Turned Around

The Marine Corps will recognize what Iran is doing, because Iran is running the Marine Corps’ own playbook. Low-signature, mobile, lethal, and cheap, operating from inside the contested zone to deny freedom of maneuver: this is the Stand-in Forces concept made manifest, except that the stand-in force is Iranian and the maneuver denied is American.7 Coastal launchers and drones have held multi-billion-dollar capital ships at arm’s length and pushed carrier strike groups into recessed defensive boxes, just as the Houthis forced U.S. carriers out of the Bab el-Mandeb and sent the George H.W. Bush carrier strike group the long way around Africa.8

The instinct is to treat this as a targeting problem and answer it with better sensors and more interceptors. That misreads the lesson. What a stand-in force generates is doubt, the steady pressure it keeps on an adversary’s economic lifelines. The IRGC Navy has sunk little and priced a great deal. That should change how the Marine Corps measures and resources the concept. A force designed to destroy enemy hardware fights where the United States is wealthiest and most vulnerable to cost-imposition; redesign it to manufacture uncertainty in an adversary’s commercial flows and it fights where great powers are thinnest-skinned and least able to hit back. The right yardstick is cost and uncertainty imposed per dollar spent, and by that measure Iran is winning at a rate no munitions budget can match.

The Free-Rider Tell

The clearest proof that the contested good is confidence rather than control is sitting in the strait right now, transiting unmolested. Chinese-flagged and Russian-flagged vessels move through it under bilateral understandings with Tehran, using the friction the U.S. Navy generates as a shield for their own commerce.

This would be impossible if the good in dispute were physical control of water, which is indivisible. You cannot grant one ship partial control of a strait. But you can grant selective confidence, a promise not to target a particular flag, because confidence is divisible and assignable. That safe passage can be parceled out flag by flag shows what Tehran actually commands: the risk of passage. It is in the indemnity business, not the sea-lane business. The United States, sustaining a high-risk environment from which it has exempted its two principal competitors, is paying the full premium to buy Beijing and Moscow a discount.

1987: The Flag, Not the Gun

None of this is unprecedented. The United States solved the same problem in these waters thirty-nine years ago. During the Tanker War, Iran imposed doubt on Gulf shipping with mines and IRGC small boats, the 1980s edition of today’s drones and coastal missiles, and Kuwait’s tankers became uninsurable in practice. What reopened commerce was not the destruction of Iran’s navy. The largest kinetic action, Operation Praying Mantis, lasted a day and came late.9 It was Operation Earnest Will, and at its core Earnest Will was a flag, not a gun. By reflagging eleven Kuwaiti tankers as American, the United States moved the risk of those hulls onto the U.S. government and its implicit guarantee, collapsing the war-risk burden that had priced them off the water.10 The escort made the guarantee credible. What the cargo owners paid for was the promise behind it.

Two further features of 1987 matter for 2026. The commitment was tied to a war-termination framework, UN Security Council Resolution 598, so the market could see an ending rather than an open-ended campaign. And it was bounded precisely because it was a guarantee rather than a war. Critics attacked it as an open-ended commitment, which forced it to define its limits.11 The decisive maritime weapon of the Tanker War was a credible, bounded, state-backed promise. The Navy made the promise believable. It did not make the promise, and no amount of bombing could have.

Redesigning the Campaign Around the Premium

If sea control is an actuarial condition, the campaign must drive down the price of risk directly rather than chase the launchers that are only its distant cause. Four moves follow.

First, re-create the guarantee. Let Washington itself cover the war risk that private insurers now refuse. The same thing occurred in 1987 when it put the American flag on Kuwaiti tankers, except today the tool is the U.S. Treasury’s guarantee rather than the flag. This is the single most powerful move available, and the one thing the Navy can support but cannot do on its own. Driving down the price of passage is the goal. Every strike exists only to make that guarantee believable.

Second, sell predictability, because predictability is what the market prices. A scheduled, published, escorted transit window, a convoy that reliably sails Tuesday, is worth more to an underwriter than an unannounced ninety-nine-percent intercept rate, because it converts an open-ended threat into a bounded and plannable one. What the market is buying is a schedule it can plan around.

Third, set a military goal the Navy can actually reach. Wiping out Iran’s coastal forces is not it. They are cheap, scattered, and replaced faster than the Navy can replace the missiles it spends shooting them down. But making it unlikely enough that any single attacker gets through, unlikely enough for an insurer to live with, is reachable. Pursue it with layered, cost-sustainable defenses, including the directed-energy systems the Navy is now fielding, and the fleet stops burning through magazines better preserved for a Pacific fight on an Middle Eastern attrition contest it is positioned to lose.12

Fourth, signal the ending. Because the price of risk depends on how open-ended the danger looks, a credible, stated path to ending the war is itself a force that brings that price down. Escalating does the opposite: it stretches out the very uncertainty the campaign seeks to end. A limited objective is not restraint for its own sake. Rather, it is a way to move the market. All of this means keeping a different scoreboard. In a chokepoint like this one, the numbers that matter are the price of insuring a voyage and the count of ships actually sailing . Those two figures tell you who holds the strait today, the way a fleet on station and an enemy kept away once did. They are the numbers this campaign is not moving.

Misassigned, Not Defeated

The Navy’s problem in the Strait of Hormuz is that it has been handed the wrong job. It is winning, with discipline and skill, every kinetic engagement in which it participates. But the war’s objectives cannot be achieved by destroying targets and killing the enemy. The war is over the price of doubt, and doubt cannot be killed. The strait will reopen when the underwriter’s veto is lifted, and lifting it is an economic and political act: a credible guarantee, a predictable corridor, and a visible ending. With the approach laid out above, the Navy can make that act credible. But it cannot bombard credibility it into being.

The warning runs past Iran and past the merits of this particular war. Consider what this war has shown. A regional power armed with cheap drones, mobile launchers, and the patience to keep the outcome in doubt has held a global chokepoint closed against the world’s premier fleet, and sold safe passage through it to that fleet’s competitors while doing so. Whether the U.S. Navy can still secure the sea lanes it exists to protect was answered once in the Red Sea, and is being answered again off Hormuz. That lesson holds whatever one thinks of the decision to intervene. The instrument that secures the modern chokepoint is the credible guarantee, and the metric that scores it is the premium. A nation that grasps this can choose its chokepoint fights on terms it can win or decline them, clear-eyed about what victory would cost. A force that keeps counting intercepts will do neither: it will go on winning every engagement and losing every strait.

LtCol James Jackson is a career logistician in the U.S. Marines, and an operational and strategic planner currently assigned to US Cyber Command. He is a graduate of the Maritime Advanced Warfighting School at the U.S. Naval War College.

Endnotes

1. As of late May 2026, roughly day 89 of the campaign, commercial transit through the strait had collapsed to under ten percent of the pre-conflict baseline and had not normalized. Iran shifted in April from continuous closure to a permission-based regime, issuing IRGC transit clearances while continuing to fire on shipping; the tanker SANMAR HERALD was attacked on April 18 despite holding a valid clearance. See Windward, “Three Months Into Operation Epic Fury: How Iran Restructured Hormuz Instead of Closing It” (May 27, 2026); USNI News, “Strait of Hormuz Commercial Transits at Lowest Level Since Operation Epic Fury Start” (May 1, 2026), citing Lloyd’s List; and GlobalSecurity.org, “Project Freedom: Strait of Hormuz, May 2026.” A roughly 70 percent drop reported by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Congressional Research Service reflects the opening weeks of the campaign rather than the sustained collapse measured three months in.

2. Container-vessel transits through the Suez Canal fell roughly 75 percent in 2024 against 2023 and had not recovered through mid-2025, persisting even through pauses in Houthi activity. See project44, “The Red Sea Crisis: Ceasefire Collapse Leaves Red Sea in Tumultuous State” (Aug. 21, 2025); and Coface, “Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea: Why Maritime Trade Is Still Not Smooth Sailing” (Dec. 29, 2025), which records container flows through Suez down by roughly 90 percent at the trough.

3. The Cape of Good Hope diversion adds approximately 4,000 nautical miles and 10–14 days to an Asia–Europe voyage. J.P. Morgan estimated the rerouting amounted to roughly a 30 percent increase in transit times and an approximately 9 percent reduction in effective global container shipping capacity. See J.P. Morgan Research, “The Impacts of the Red Sea Shipping Crisis”; and World Atlas, “How the Red Sea Shipping Crisis Affects Global Trade” (Apr. 2026).

4. On the share of seaborne oil transiting Hormuz and the waterway’s chokepoint geometry, see U.S. Energy Information Administration data as summarized in the CIMSEC call and contemporary reporting on Operation Epic Fury; for the operational character of the 2026 conflict, see Defense.info, “From Red Sea Defense to Epic Fury: How the U.S. Flipped the Drone Cost Equation” (Mar. 13, 2026).

5. On interceptor unit costs and the cost-exchange asymmetry, see Khyati Singh, “Navies Can’t Afford Expensive Solutions to Cheap Problems,” The Strategist / ASPI (Oct. 21, 2025); CSIS, “Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts” (Oct. 11, 2024); and “The Hidden Cost of a Missile: Why the Headlines Get Cost Wrong,” War on the Rocks (Nov. 18, 2025), which estimates roughly $1 billion in munitions expended defending Red Sea shipping since late 2023.

6. Adm. James Kilby, then acting Chief of Naval Operations, on the need for greater magazine depth in a protracted conflict, as reported in Fox News, “Navy’s Kilby on Houthi Missiles and Red Sea Costs” (2025).

7. Headquarters Marine Corps, A Concept for Stand-in Forces, (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2021), 4.

8. On the deterrence of U.S. carrier strike groups from the Bab el-Mandeb and the resulting circuitous routing, see the CIMSEC call for articles, “War with Iran” (2026); and reporting on carrier strike group dispositions during the Red Sea campaign.

9. Operation Praying Mantis (Apr. 18, 1988) was a single-day action launched after USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine. See “Operation Praying Mantis,” and David B. Crist, “Joint Special Operations in Support of Earnest Will,” Joint Force Quarterly (Autumn/Winter 2001–02).

10. On the reflagging of eleven Kuwaiti tankers as U.S.-flagged vessels and the transfer of risk to the U.S. government, see “Operation Earnest Will”; Richard A. Mobley, “Intelligence Support During Operation Earnest Will, 1987–88,” Central Intelligence Agency; and Veterans Breakfast Club, “Before Today’s War with Iran, There Was the Tanker War” (Mar. 16, 2026).

11. On UNSCR 598 as a termination framework and the domestic controversy over the open-ended nature of the commitment, see “Renewed Tensions in the Persian Gulf: Further War Powers Lessons from the Tanker War,” Just Security (2023).

12. On the Navy’s pivot toward directed-energy defenses (e.g., HELIOS aboard USS Preble) as a response to the cost-exchange and magazine-depth problems, see “How to Save the U.S. Navy from Becoming a Bunch of Old ‘Battleships,'” 19FortyFive (Feb. 14, 2026).

Works Cited

Coface. “Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea: Why Maritime Trade Is Still Not Smooth Sailing.” December 29, 2025. https://www.coface.com/news-economy-and-insights/houthi-attacks-in-the-red-sea-why-maritime-trade-is-still-not-smooth-sailing

Crist, David B. “Joint Special Operations in Support of Earnest Will.” Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 2001–02. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA403506.pdf

Center for International Maritime Security. “Call for Articles: War with Iran.” 2026. https://cimsec.org/call-for-articles-war-with-iran/

Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Cost and Value in Air and Missile Defense Intercepts.” October 11, 2024. https://www.csis.org/analysis/cost-and-value-air-and-missile-defense-intercepts

Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities.” March 11, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45281

Council on Foreign Relations. “The Strait of Hormuz: A U.S.-Iran Maritime Flash Point.” 2026. https://www.cfr.org/articles/strait-hormuz-us-iran-maritime-flash-point

Defense.info. “From Red Sea Defense to Epic Fury: How the U.S. Flipped the Drone Cost Equation.” March 13, 2026. https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/03/from-red-sea-defense-to-epic-fury-how-the-u-s-flipped-the-drone-cost-equation/

GlobalSecurity.org. “Project Freedom: Strait of Hormuz, May 2026.” https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/project-freedom.htm

J.P. Morgan Research. “The Impacts of the Red Sea Shipping Crisis.” https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/supply-chain/red-sea-shipping

Just Security. “Renewed Tensions in the Persian Gulf: Further War Powers Lessons from the Tanker War.” 2023. https://www.justsecurity.org/87650/renewed-tensions-in-the-persian-gulf-further-war-powers-lessons-from-the-tanker-war/

Mobley, Richard A. “Intelligence Support During Operation Earnest Will, 1987–88.” Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Fighting-Iran.pdf

19FortyFive. “How to Save the U.S. Navy from Becoming a Bunch of Old ‘Battleships.'” February 14, 2026. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/02/how-to-save-the-u-s-navy-from-becoming-a-bunch-of-old-battleships/

project44. “The Red Sea Crisis: Ceasefire Collapse Leaves Red Sea in Tumultuous State.” August 21, 2025. https://www.project44.com/supply-chain-insights/the-red-sea-crisis-ceasefire-collapse-leaves-red-sea-in-tumultuous-state/

Singh, Khyati. “Navies Can’t Afford Expensive Solutions to Cheap Problems.” The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), October 21, 2025. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/navies-cant-afford-expensive-solutions-to-cheap-problems/

Featured Image: The Thailand-flagged cargo ship Mayuree Naree engulfed in black smoke in the Strait of Hormuz. (Royal Thai Navy photo)

Iran War Series

Iran War Series Kicks Off on CIMSEC

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By Dmitry Filipoff

For the next two weeks, CIMSEC will be featuring writing submitted to our Call for Articles on maritime conflict with Iran. 

The maritime domain has featured prominently in the Iran War and heavily shaped negotiations over the post-war future. The world economy has been strongly affected, with the military contest over the Strait of Hormuz reverberating across markets. 

Below are the articles and authors being featured, and will be updated with further submissions as the series unfolds.

“The Price of Doubt: Sea Control in the Strait of Hormuz,” by James Jackson
“Hormuz and the Era of Asymmetry: Sea Mines, Unmanned Systems, and the Redefinition of Naval Power,” by Admiral Massimo Vianello (Ret.) and Master Chief Petty Officer Giovanni Giorguli (Ret.)
“The Insurance Chokepoint: War-Risk Pricing as an Instrument of Maritime Coercion,” by Bruce Randolph Tizes
“The Hormuz Closure and the Limits of Sanctions: How Russia Benefited from Iran’s Chokepoint Weapon,” by Rustam Taghizade
“Asymmetric Alliance Strategy: An Israeli Maritime Perspective on the Iran War,” by Ehud Eiran
“Chokepoint Hormuz: Epic Fury and Italy’s Mediterranean Strategy,” by Rear Adm. Roberto Domini (Ret.)
“The Iran War Highlights New Realities and Changing Paradigms,” by Paul Viscovich
“The Hormuz Strait Crisis Confirms Nodal Control Will Dominate Maritime Geopolitics,” by Ludvico Domini
“Convert Merchants into Unmanned Ships to Manage Risk in the Strait of Hormuz,” by Alexander Lott, Kristjan Tabri, and Angela Sooba
“American Naval Mines Can Be Decisive Against Iran,” by Ronald Stewart and Scott Truver

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

Featured Image: Aircraft is staged for flight operations on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in support of Operation Epic Fury, Mar. 3, 2026. (U.S. Navy photo)

Tactics and Warfighting

China Is Rehearsing More Than Amphibious Landings

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By Jason Wang, Marvin Bernardo, Pei-Jhen Wu, and Andrew S. Erickson

For years, the public debate over a possible Chinese Communist invasion of Taiwan has focused on a single question: Does the People’s Liberation Army have sufficient amphibious lift to move an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait? That question remains important. However, recent Chinese exercises suggest that the People’s Liberation Army is not simply trying to solve the problem of getting forces onto a Taiwanese beach. It is rehearsing how to move, sustain, and conceal a large amphibious campaign across multiple locations.

In August 2025, the People’s Liberation Army conducted a large-scale amphibious capstone exercise along China’s southeastern coastline. Commercial satellite imagery and Automatic Identification System data indicates the exercise consolidated several previously separate training exercises into a more coherent campaign simulation. The operation included synchronized amphibious activity across multiple geographic locations, direct-to-shore landing by civilian landing craft tank vessels, use of a floating causeway, offshore deployment of amphibious fighting vehicles from roll-on/roll-off ferries, port offloading, and operations around aquaculture structures and beach obstacles.

The most important lesson is not that China has solved the Taiwan invasion problem. It has not… yet. Amphibious operations remain among the most difficult military operations to conduct, and the 2025 exercise still occurred under favorable sea and weather conditions. The People’s Liberation Army is making visible progress in rehearsing the operational mechanics of a Taiwan-relevant amphibious campaign. Observers should therefore pay less attention to whether any single exercise proves invasion readiness and more attention to what each exercise reveals about evolving Chinese assumptions, logistics concepts, geographic options, and campaign design.

From Lift Gap to Civil-Military Logistics

Much of the debate over China’s amphibious capability centers on the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s shortage of dedicated gray-hull amphibious ships. But the People’s Liberation Army is actively experimenting with and integrating civilian maritime assets into military logistics to solve this limitation for a range of geographic locations. China’s large commercial fleet can at-scale augment the People’s Liberation Army military lift with roll-on/roll-off ferries, deck cargo ships, landing craft tanks, and other vessels.

The 2025 exercise shows that these civilian vessels are no longer peripheral. They are part of the operational concept. During the August capstone exercise, the People’s Liberation Army used multiple categories of dual-use vessels. Civilian roll-on/roll-off ferries supported offshore deployment and recovery of amphibious fighting vehicles. Landing craft tank vessels conducted direct-to-beach offloading. Other civilian vessels worked in concert with military hovercraft to support floating causeway operations. This mix gives the People’s Liberation Army more than additional capacity. It gives Chinese leadership with low-observable options.

Dedicated military amphibious ships are scarce and highly visible. Civilian vessels tasked with military equipment are a different story. In a crisis, their mobilization could complicate indications and warnings. A buildup distributed across multiple smaller commercial ports would be harder to distinguish from routine maritime activity. Invariably, this increases the monitoring cost burden on Taiwan, the United States, and regional partners. The People’s Liberation Army appears to be experimenting with various solutions to this problem: how to generate large-scale lift while minimizing unmistakable military signatures.

A More Complex Campaign Simulation

The 2025 capstone exercise unfolded in two broad phases. The first phase took place around Honghai Bay near Shanwei. There, the People’s Liberation Army practiced several methods of moving vehicles and equipment ashore: direct-to-port unloading, the use of a floating causeway, direct beach landings by shallow-draft landing craft tanks, and probable offshore deployment of amphibious fighting vehicles from a roll-on/roll-off ferry.

The second phase was more revealing. After the first phase, vessels dispersed northward to separate locations along the Fujian coast, including Hougang Bay, Qianhu Bay, and Houcai Bay. At these sites, roll-on/roll-off ferries deployed and recovered amphibious vehicles across geographically separated areas. The exercise thus simulated not only landing at a single beach but coordinating activity across multiple axes. This is a significant evolution. In previous years, People’s Liberation Army amphibious exercises often demonstrated discrete pieces of the sustainment problem: ferry integration, floating causeways, or offshore vehicle deployment. The 2025 exercise brought these pieces together, suggesting a shift from technical experimentation toward operational integration.

The People’s Liberation Army also appears to have rehearsed different solutions for different landing environments. At Honghai Bay, landing craft tanks conducted direct-to-shore landings. At the northern sites, roll-on/roll-off ferries supported amphibious vehicle activity in waters with heavier aquaculture obstacles. This variation suggests the People’s Liberation Army is developing a menu of approaches tailored to different beaches, ports, offshore distances, and obstacle environments.

The Geography Matters

The exercise’s geography is as important as the range of platforms used. Stretching roughly 360 kilometers from the southernmost to northernmost locations, the distance is comparable to Taiwan’s western coastline from Taipei to Kaohsiung. While the exercise locations were not perfect analogues for specific invasion locations on Taiwan, the spacing, orientation, and concentration of activity opposite Taiwan suggest more than generic amphibious training. This matters because militaries train not only tasks, but also campaign geometry. Distance, sequencing, timing, and logistics routes are operational variables. If the People’s Liberation Army practices across distances that approximate Taiwan’s western coastline, it may be testing how to coordinate a distributed amphibious campaign across a Taiwan-relevant battlespace. However, we must caution against direct geographic comparison or expectation of replication of Taiwan’s coastal defense at this stage of development. The insight derived from these exercises is a growing sophistication in the logistical integration of civilian vessels in amphibious lift capacity that is now being rehearsed in a similar geographical scope as its possible target.

Navigating Obstacles Are Becoming Part of the Training

Another important development includes environmental and tactical obstacles. In previous exercises, personnel often removed nearshore aquaculture rafts before amphibious vehicle exercises. In 2025, People’s Liberation Army vehicles appeared to maneuver through or around aquaculture structures at multiple locations. Taiwan’s western coastline features dense aquaculture zones, mudflats, and other features that could complicate amphibious operations. Civilian maritime structures may not be military defenses, but they can still obstruct movement, create navigational hazards disabling vessels even before they reach the beachhead. The People’s Liberation Army also trained near shoreline anti-landing barriers and apparent beach obstacles. All of these features increase realism by forcing amphibious units to deal with cluttered, constrained, and defended littoral environments. Their inclusion suggests the People’s Liberation Army is moving beyond idealized landings toward more realistic invasion conditions.

Even so, there are limits. The exercise took place under relatively calm sea conditions, with ferries remaining offshore while deploying amphibious vehicles in a controlled environment. To date, the People’s Liberation Army has not demonstrated the ability to conduct comparable operations under contested air and maritime conditions. Nevertheless, the exercise still reflects moving from basic training towards integration of elements into a single simulated logistics operation. A logical next step would be more complex scenarios conducted under contested conditions. However, in peacetime training, there are practical limits to how far such exercises are likely to go: commanders would be unlikely to risk personnel and equipment in severe weather or rough sea states merely to replicate the most challenging conditions for a Taiwan Strait crossing. As a result, any near-term exercises are likely to show greater operational complexity, but only within relatively controlled environmental conditions.

What Analysts Should Watch For in 2026

Analysts should understand the 2025 capstone exercise as part of a broader People’s Liberation Army effort to improve realistic combat training, joint command, and civil-military logistics. It does not prove that China can successfully invade Taiwan. But it does show that the People’s Liberation Army’s systematic experimentation working through the practical challenges such a future operation poses.

Observers should scrutinize the next capstone exercise for five indicators.  First, does the People’s Liberation Army deploy a wider range of vessels, locations, and dispersion techniques across a wider range of locations? Does the spacing continue to resemble the geography of Taiwan, Japan, or the Philippines? Second, analysts should track civilian roll-on/roll-off ferries, landing barges (a.k.a. Shuiqiaos), and landing craft tanks appear in more complex sealift combinations. Third, they should examine the integrated use of multiple equipment deployment methods by both sea and air. In particular, whether they incorporate heavy airlift or air cavalry insertions at or nearby locations. Fourth, monitor whether future exercises occur under more difficult sea or weather conditions. Finally, they should watch for more deliberate efforts to operate around sophisticated anti-landing techniques beyond aquaculture fields, beach obstacles, and port-denial conditions that include simulated precision-strike capabilities of the Taiwanese.

The point is not to predict an invasion date from an exercise. It is to identify what the People’s Liberation Army is prioritizing, practicing and most importantly, what operational assumptions possibly underlie its campaign design. China’s August 2025 exercise suggests that the People’s Liberation Army is no longer merely demonstrating amphibious capacity in isolated drills. It is rehearsing how civilian lift, military landing forces, offshore deployment, port access, floating infrastructure, and dispersed command and control might fit together in a First Island Chain-relevant campaign. Taiwan is merely one objective in China’s intention to assert control over the Indo-Pacific. That should sharpen the focus of allied intelligence, planning, and denial strategies.

The debate over China’s amphibious lift gap is not obsolete. But it should be reframed. The key question is no longer simply whether China has enough ships. It is whether the People’s Liberation Army can coordinate and sustain its warfighters using a unique combination of military and civilian assets, quickly enough, with minimum signature across enough locations before Taiwan and its partners can disrupt it. 

Taiwan and the countries within the First Island Chain must continue investing in traditional and asymmetric capabilities that deter the People’s Liberation Army.  Traditional capabilities of course include coastal defense missiles, mines, mobile artillery and drone swarms.  However, Taiwan and First Island Chain countries must look beyond traditional kinetic solutions, such as the development of intelligence capabilities that can scale to identify troops and materiel mass at civilian ports. Special attention should be given to capabilities that can identify and disrupt temporary logistic nodes, i.e. smaller civilian ports that can be easily accessed using dual use vessels. Defense planning to address China’s irregular warfare must treat China’s civilian maritime sector as part of the wider strategic problem. This does not mean that every Chinese civilian vessel is a military asset, but certain classes of vessels, companies, ports, and movement patterns should be integrated into surveillance and defense planning. Exposing China’s irregular warfare tactics, techniques, procedures, can create the radical transparency that will asymmetrically complicate PLA war planning and counter CCP narratives.

Disclaimer

This article distills key insights from a detailed study: Jason Wang, Marvin Hamor Bernardo, Pei-Jhen Wu, and Andrew S. Erickson, Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Growing Complexity of PLA Amphibious Exercises, China Maritime Report #52 (Newport, RI: Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute, 22 April 2026), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-maritime-reports/52/. The views expressed here, based solely on open-source research, are those of the authors alone and do not represent those of any organization with which they are affiliated.

Jason Wang is a national security researcher and COO of ingeniSPACE, a Silicon Valley geo-intelligence analytics house.

Marvin Hamor Bernardo is a PhD candidate at the National Chengchi University, Taiwan, and serves as a maritime domain analyst at ingeniSPACE.

Pei-Jhen Wu is a national security researcher and imagery analyst at ingeniSPACE.

Andrew S. Erickson, Ph.D. is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Asia Center.

Featured Image: Composite of Honghai Bay on 23 August 2025 at 1004 CST. (ingeniSPACE composite)

Human Capital

SWOs Assume Amphibious Command: Why it Matters

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By Captain Kevin Eyer, USN (Ret.)

Amphibious Command Reform

In an April 24, 2026 directive, Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle ordered that, beginning in Fiscal Year 2028, command of all amphibious warships will be assigned exclusively to Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs). This includes Landing Helicopter Assault (LHA), Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD), Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD), and Dock Landing Ship (LSD) classes.

The decision represents a significant institutional realignment in naval command structure, ending a long-standing dual-community model in which both aviators and Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) were eligible for amphibious command. The CNO’s rationale is grounded in sustained concerns over amphibious readiness, maintenance execution, engineering discipline, and material condition—areas that have remained below Navy standards for an extended period.

As articulated in the directive, effective amphibious command requires “exquisite knowledge of readiness, maintenance procedures, component design and failure modes, damage control, and operational procedures,” as well as the ability to remain in command long enough to impose sustained correction. The conclusion is clear: Surface Warfare Officers are purpose-built for that responsibility. 

Resistance from the Aviation community was immediate and significant, including among senior aviators within U.S. Pacific Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces Command. While concerns centered publicly on career progression and institutional balance, the debate also reflected disagreement with the premise that aviator command contributed materially to amphibious readiness shortfalls.

Still, beneath the institutional friction lies a broader reality. This is, at least in significant part, a fight over major command billets—assignments understood as essential for any officer hoping to achieve flag rank. The change will unquestionably reduce command and major command opportunities available to aviators. At the same time, the Navy’s inventory of traditional SWO major command ships continues to shrink. As these opportunities contract across the fleet, in both communities, institutional pressure over how remaining billets are allocated was inevitable. Something ultimately had to give.

Yet beyond these parochial issues, the Navy appears to have reached a larger operational conclusion which renders that argument moot: the amphibious force is too important to the Marine Corps’ warfighting capability to continue treating these ships as shared command territory.

The Amphibious Force and Its Operational Role

The U.S. Navy operates approximately 31 amphibious warfare ships, including nine large-deck amphibious assault ships that form the backbone of the Expeditionary Strike Group construct.

These platforms are essential to the Marine Corps’ core mission: the ability to project combat power from the sea. Amphibious ships transport embarked Marines, vehicles, landing craft, and aviation assets into contested environments where shore-based infrastructure is unavailable, degraded, or denied. Additionally, amphibious ships serve as floating expeditionary bases capable of command and control, medical support, logistics sustainment, and crisis-response missions.

Depending upon the class, modern U.S. amphibious warfare ships routinely employ the Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC), Ship-to-Shore Connector (SSC), Landing Craft Utility (LCU), Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM-8), and Combat Rubber Raiding Craft (CRRC) to transport Marines, vehicles, equipment, and supplies from ship to shore during amphibious operations. In addition, and especially relevant to this discussion, they also embark MV-22B Ospreys, CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters, AH-1Z/UH-1Y rotary-wing aircraft, and F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing fighters to support expeditionary operations ashore. Together, these systems enable distributed maneuver, vertical assault, close air support, and sustained operations in contested environments.

There are, however, substantial operational differences among amphibious ship classes, particularly with respect to aviation operations. The large-deck LHA and LHD classes conduct highly complex fixed-wing and tiltrotor aviation operations involving F-35Bs and MV-22s, including high-tempo launch and recovery cycles, advanced aviation fueling and weapons handling, and the integration of tactical air operations with expeditionary objectives. As for the LPD, while the class does not currently support F-35Bs, it does carry MV-22s. Amongst the “amphibs,” the single class that embarks only traditional helicopters, whose operation is significantly less complex than sustained fixed-wing and tiltrotor aviation operations, is the LSD class.

This distinction explains why LHA, LHD, and LPD classes are categorized as “major command” ships commanded by Captains on their second at-sea command tour, while LSDs are “Commander command” ships led by Commanders during their first command tour at sea.

These ships are the Navy’s most important fleet assets supporting Marine Corps operations. Consequently, the material readiness of amphibious ships directly affects Marine Corps operational effectiveness. Degraded ship availability constrains embarkation, delays deployment cycles, and reduces the Marine Corps’ ability to execute its expeditionary mission set. Amphibious readiness is therefore not solely a naval concern—it is foundational to the Marine Corps’ warfighting capability.

The Marines’ Perspective

At the 2026 Sea-Air-Space Conference, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric Smith, indicated that the Navy and Marine Corps were determined to work together with a “unified sense of purpose” to increase the size and availability of the U.S. amphibious fleet:

“We’re in complete agreement that our current inventory of 31 amphibious ships is not sufficient to meet our new presence that our combatant commanders are requesting and requiring.”

In 2025, amphibious ships’ readiness rate dropped to 41 percent, according to Navy Times. This metric is derived from a lack of ships deployable that caused a five-month delay in Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) deployments —critically impacting the Marine Corps’ ability to execute its mission. 

To address this, General Smith spoke to optimizing maintenance schedules, as well as investing in service life extensions for a number of ships. Moreover, he stated that the Navy-Marine Corps team is moving forward with the procurement of new and more capable ships. While the form that these new ships takes, beyond perhaps the now-planned Landing Ship Medium (LSM), remains to be seen, what is plain is that the Marines are keenly interested in the sustainability of the amphibious fleet, and specifically, availability of these ships when called upon. 

What is an Air Boss?

Aviation-capable amphibious ships have an Air Department Head or “Air Boss” assigned to them. This officer serves as the Commanding Officer’s principal aviation authority and senior manager of all flight operations.

Operating through Primary Flight Control (“PriFly”), the Air Boss oversees launch and recovery operations, flight deck sequencing, aircraft movement, fueling and arming cycles, sortie generation, airspace coordination, and aviation safety enforcement.

The Air Boss integrates continuously with the bridge, Combat Information Center, Marine aviation elements, and embarked air traffic control personnel to ensure safe and efficient aviation operations. He or she translates the Commanding Officer’s intent into executable aviation activity while maintaining strict control of flight deck risk and safety. This structure ensures that aviation expertise remains continuously embedded within the ship’s command organization at the Department Head level.

This is central to the Navy’s revised command logic: aviation execution aboard amphibious ships is already fully professionalized and continuously managed. The Air Boss construct therefore provides the operational depth and specialization required without necessitating an aviator in command.

In practical terms, aviation is not removed from command—it is delegated to a dedicated expert authority within a now SWO-led command structure. For this reason, it is imperative to the success of this new construct that the Aviation community assign only its best and brightest post-command aviators to this billet going forward. To do other is to court failure of the Marine mission.

In short, the Air Boss position effectively obviates the need for a uniquely assigned Aviator as commanding officer of the ship. This is analogous to the Reactor Department Head aboard an aircraft carrier being a nuclear-trained SWO. In that case, the SWO responsible for overseeing the carrier’s immensely complex nuclear propulsion plant eliminates the need for a SWO Commanding Officer solely to provide engineering and reactor expertise. Extending the analogy further, while every CVN Commanding Officer is nuclear-qualified, every SWO Commanding Officer has likewise spent an entire career intimately involved with the operations of helicopters from the decks of surface combatants across the fleet.

How Aviators Got to Amphibs

Over time, aviators were increasingly assigned to amphibious ship command primarily as part of the Aviation community’s officer development pipeline.

As the Navy’s largest unrestricted line community among SWOs, submariners, and aviators, the Aviation community has long relied upon amphibious ship command opportunities—both at the Commander and Captain level—to provide upward career progression for its most promising officers.

Squadron command is the standard Commander-level milestone for Naval Aviators. Officers selected for further operational command may proceed into major aviation leadership billets or into deep-draft command pipelines. aviators — particularly rotary-wing and tiltrotor officers associated with amphibious operations — have commonly served as Executive Officer/Commanding Officer (XO/CO) of LHAs and LHDs via the fleet-up process, while tactical jet aviators have more often followed the aircraft carrier and carrier strike group command track. However, there is considerable overlap and flexibility depending on community, timing, and Navy needs.

At the same time, LHA and LHD ships increasingly evolved toward aviation-centric operations, particularly with the introduction of the F-35B and expanded MV-22 integration. This has, with time, strengthened the Aviation community’s argument for continued command of large-deck amphibious ships.

The bottom line is that amphibious ships became an important career-development mechanism within the Aviation community, while the increasing sophistication of the aircraft embarked on some amphibs justified these assignments.

Still, it is important to distinguish between the aviation complexity of LHA and LHD operations and that of the remainder of the amphibious fleet. Commanding Officers aboard LHAs and LHDs oversee high-tempo fixed-wing and tilt-rotor flight operations in densely congested deck environments, including the integration of F-35B and MV-22 operations into expeditionary combat missions. By contrast, LPDs and LSDs, while fully aviation capable, conduct comparatively limited helicopter operations and do not execute sustained tactical fixed-wing aviation missions.

The Navy now appears to have concluded that while aviation expertise remains indispensable aboard amphibious ships, the commanding officer’s foremost responsibility is the sustained readiness and fighting condition of the ship itself. That responsibility aligns more naturally with the professional orientation and career-long preparation of the Surface Warfare community. As for the increasing complexity of air operations in major command amphibs, high-grade Air Bosses will ensure the safety and effectivity of those.

Carrier Command: A Structural Distinction

This naturally raises the question of why SWOs are not permitted to command aircraft carriers.

Unlike amphibious ships, command of nuclear aircraft carriers is restricted exclusively to Naval Aviators who are also nuclear-qualified. This is not simply a matter of tradition. It reflects the carrier’s unique identity as both a nuclear-powered warship and a floating aviation combat platform. More than that, it is the law.

Since the Act of June 24, 1926, federal law has required that officers commanding U.S. Navy aircraft carriers be qualified naval aviators. The original provision, enacted as part of early naval aviation legislation and formerly codified at 34 U.S.C. § 735, was intended in part to ensure that naval aviators had a viable path to senior operational command within the fleet. Through later recodifications of federal military law, the requirement became 10 U.S.C. § 5942 and is now codified at 10 U.S.C. § 8162. The current statute provides that, to be eligible to command an aircraft carrier, an officer must be “an officer in the line of the Navy who is designated as a naval aviator or naval flight officer and who is otherwise qualified.” As a result, non-aviator Surface Warfare Officers are legally barred from commanding active U.S. aircraft carriers. In the case of nuclear-powered carriers (CVNs), Commanding Officers must additionally meet nuclear propulsion qualification requirements established under Executive Order 12344 and subsequent statutory authorities governing the Naval Reactors program. 

In order to command a carrier, an officer must understand nuclear propulsion operations, ship-wide engineering integration, reactor safety oversight, navigation, combat systems, and full-spectrum warship command responsibilities. Aviators selected for carrier command therefore undergo nuclear power training, complete demanding XO tours aboard carriers, and typically command another ship at sea before assuming CVN command.

Yet the technical explanation alone does not fully answer the question. A Surface Warfare Officer can be trained to understand aviation operations to the level necessary for safe ship command. What a SWO can never fully possess, however, is the lived cockpit perspective that defines naval aviation.

That distinction matters because, unlike the amphibious ship, the entire purpose of the aircraft carrier is the launch and recovery of aircraft and the projection of aviation combat power. Every major operational function aboard the carrier ultimately serves the air wing. The commanding officer must therefore possess not only technical competence as a warship commander and nuclear operator, but also an instinctive appreciation for what is occurring in the cockpit during launch, recovery, tanker operations, bolters, emergency procedures, and combat tasking.

Carrier aviation involves judgment about risk, weather, fatigue, deck cycles, aircraft performance margins, and human decision-making under extreme operational pressure. Those realities cannot be fully learned from outside the Aviation community.

Accordingly, the Navy’s judgment has long been that while a SWO can learn enough about aviation to safely command a carrier, only an aviator can fully understand the operational and human dimensions of carrier aviation combat operations. For that reason, aircraft carrier command remains restricted to aviators who are also nuclear-qualified through specialized training and career preparation.

The amphibious force is different. Aviation aboard these ships is critically important, but the ship itself exists primarily to deliver and sustain Marine combat power ashore. Aviation supports that mission; it does not wholly define it in the way aviation defines the aircraft carrier.

The Flight III DDG Issue 

Today, with the retirement of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, there is a sudden shortage of major command opportunities available for SWOs.

While the assignment of major command is being experimented with using Flight III destroyers, significant questions remain regarding whether those ships possess the capability and capacity to meaningfully fill the role once occupied by Aegis cruisers. The cruiser was not only larger and possessed greater magazine depth, but was also specifically designed to support the commanding officer’s duties as Air Warfare Commander (AWC) for a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) or Area Air Defense Commander (AADC) for a joint force. In an era of rapidly evolving air and missile threats, AWC/AADC remains the most critical warfare commander function within the CSG for the Surface Warfare community.

To fulfill those responsibilities, the Ticonderoga-class cruiser was built with an especially large combat information center and extensive command-and-control systems. Flight III DDGs remain highly capable warships, but they do not fully replicate the cruiser’s command-and-control capacity. Compounding the issue, destroyer production rates remain too slow to offset the loss of cruiser major command billets.

Amphibious command under SWO leadership therefore also serves to preserve leadership depth and major command opportunities within the Surface Warfare community. Critics will reasonably argue that this institutional reality influenced the decision. They are likely correct.

Yet this does not invalidate the operational logic behind the reform. If anything, it reinforces a broader truth: these are surface warships, and the Navy increasingly believes they should be commanded by officers whose professional expertise centers on sustaining and fighting surface ships.

Implications for the Aviation Community

For naval aviation, the policy reduces at-sea major command opportunities outside the carrier force.

Rotary-wing, and to a lesser extent Patrol Squadron (MPA) Aviators are most directly affected, as amphibious ships historically represented a key pathway for MPA, helicopter and tiltrotor officers to achieve major command.

The situation for aviators was already worsening prior to the loss of amphibious ship command opportunities for aviators. A major blow came earlier with the Navy’s transfer of its auxiliary fleet—including oilers and replenishment ships—to Military Sealift Command control, a transition completed in 2010. Since then, nearly the entire Combat Logistics Force has been operated by MSC rather than by commissioned Navy crews, eliminating a significant number of traditional command billets for aviators. Today, the only auxiliary-type vessels still under direct Navy Sailor command are a small number of highly specialized ships, such as submarine tenders and command ships.

To offset this, aviators will continue to be assigned to command selected platforms such as Amphibious Command Ships (LCCs), Expeditionary Sea Bases (ESBs), which were shifted from MSC control to Navy commands in 2019, and selected auxiliary ships. These assignments preserve meaningful at-sea command experience, particularly for aviators selected for future carrier command.

The objective is to ensure that aviators selected for carrier command possess not only aviation expertise, but also a comprehensive understanding of ship operations prior to assuming command of a nuclear-powered warship. Having said that, in any decision of this sort, there are winners and losers, and the plain losers in this, in terms of major command billets, are helicopter aviators. 

Conclusion

It is worthy of note that the Navy has tried this before. In the post–Cold War period, particularly during the 1990s and early 2000s, the Navy effectively attempted to phase aviators out of amphibious ship command by increasingly favoring Surface Warfare Officers as amphibious platforms became more maintenance-intensive and aligned with surface warfare competencies. The intent was to concentrate command responsibility with SWOs who were viewed as better suited to long-term material readiness and ship stewardship. However, the effort did not fully take hold because amphibious ships simultaneously evolved into increasingly aviation-centric platforms, especially with the growth of MV-22 and F-35B operations. As a result, the dual-path command structure persisted, and aviators remained integral to amphibious leadership rather than being fully displaced. 

This of course begs the question as to whether this effort will be fully and persistently implemented. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Navy’s interest in aligning command authority with the primary determinants of amphibious ship readiness and operational availability, it appears to be the right decision for the health of the ships and ability of the Marines to accomplish their mission.

Amphibious ships are to be increasingly treated as surface warfare commands in which long-term material condition, engineering discipline, maintenance execution, and readiness management are the Commanding Officer’s central responsibilities. Aviation remains fully integrated, but is professionally executed through the Air Boss structure, ensuring operational effectiveness without requiring aviator command authority.

The change carries real and acknowledged costs for the Aviation community, particularly among rotary-wing aviators whose command opportunities are reduced. It also reshapes long-standing cross-community pathways at sea.

At the same time, the policy does not diminish the importance of aviation expertise. Rather, it concentrates that expertise where it is operationally most valuable. On aircraft carriers, the Commanding Officer must possess a deep appreciation of what occurs in the cockpit because the carrier exists fundamentally to enable aviation combat power. That is why only aviators command aircraft carriers.

Within the amphibious force, meanwhile, the Air Boss becomes even more important under this new command structure. Particularly aboard LHA and LHD platforms conducting complex MV-22 and F-35B operations, the Air Boss is not a secondary billet but a central warfighting function. The Aviation community must therefore ensure that only top-tier, post-command aviators are assigned to these positions. They must be fully capable of advising—and when necessary, forcefully challenging—a commanding officer who will not inherently possess cockpit-level understanding of aviation timing, risk, and execution.

The Surface Fleet must help maximize the Marine Corps’ ability to execute its mission from the sea. That mission remains the foundation of the amphibious force, and every institutional decision surrounding amphibious command must be judged—without stint or reference to parochialism—against that standard.

Captain Kevin Eyer is a retired Surface Warfare Officer who served on active duty for 27 years. He deployed in seven cruisers and commanded three Aegis cruisers—the USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-51), Shiloh (CG-67), and Chancellorsville (CG-62). He completed tours on both the Navy Staff and Joint Staff and attained a Master of Arts from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He was the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings Author of the Year in 2017, and three-time winner of the Surface Navy Association’s Literary Award.

Featured image: USS Ashland Returns to Naval Base San Diego,” 01 June 2026. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Aja Campbell)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.