SWO Specialization Week

By Chris Rielage

SWO specialization was a good idea for the last generation of officers, but time is now too short. Implementing it in 2026, with the possibility of great power war looming, would be self-destructive.

It was more than five years ago – August 2020 to October 2020 – when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted its well-known survey about SWO specialization. This was a moment when, in the wake of the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, there was deep frustration with the existing personnel and training system across the surface fleet. There was also enough time to make major change a reality. The Chinese were a near-peer threat with alarming growth trends, not a regionally dominant superpower. The previous year, the PLA had just displayed the first versions of many of the weapons that it now produces en masse. The PLAN only boasted two aircraft carriers – Shandong had commissioned the year before – and only one Renhai (Type 055) cruiser was in service. Admiral Davidson had not yet made discussion of a near-term China threat mainstream. The surface navy had a stable window when it could afford to make changes, even dramatic ones, to its officer career path. 

The world is not the same place it was in 2020 – and SWO specialization is no longer a good idea. 2027 – less than a year away – is the benchmark the fleet has set for readiness for a war with China. We are being told to prepare for high-end combat operations – soon. We have no room to work through the major disruption that dividing the SWO community into specialties would bring. Instead, the surface Navy should drive the existing officer career path to be more tactical anywhere it can.

Bureaucratic Change in Theory and Practice

Calls to divide the SWO community into subspecialties have been common since 2017, in the aftermath of the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain collisions in Seventh Fleet. They came up short due to bureaucratic inertia – and the recognition that there was an easier path to the same end. Often framed as a negative, bureaucratic inertia is a fact of life. Simply put, it is a succinct way of capturing how it takes a dramatic investment of time, energy, and resources for any bureaucracy to establish its current system and to enculturate every member with the same goals and expectations. For a bureaucracy to change in the face of this sunk cost, political economist Anthony Down describes three forces that must, in some combination, motivate individuals.

Self-aggrandizement is the natural desire for ambitious leaders to act in ways that distinguish them from the crowd. While not every naval officer is perfectly selfless, there is no indication that today’s officers are any more or less self-aggrandizing than previous generations, making this a constant. Instead, Downs suggests two other forces that are more relevant for driving particular change in the Navy.

Mission success is the altruistic desire to see the bureaucracy succeed at its core goal – which drives change when there is a performance gap between the stated goal and what the bureaucracy actually does. 

Finally, self-defense is the tendency of bureaucrats – even less ambitious ones – to defend their role and resources when their relevance is questioned.

The 2017 surface ship collisions boosted the power of both of these latter forces. By starkly revealing a gap between the surface fleet’s goal – operating professionally at sea – and the surface fleet’s actual performance, those tragedies provided a powerful shock to officers motivated by mission success. Clearly, if the surface navy was going to serve the nation properly, something needed to change. Even less altruistic officers were spurred into action by a sense of self-defense, the third force that Downs describes. As embarrassing articles and reports appeared in the press, the surface navy’s reputation sank. Senior leaders had to defend the fleet in front of congress. For the surface navy to maintain access to resources and avoid outside interference, it had to improve. 

Advocates, including the authors of the GAO report cited in the introduction, suggested that dividing the surface community into three subspecialties – engineering officers, deck and navigation officers, and combat-focused officers – would prevent more collisions by giving each specialty deeper focus in one area. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear there was a window for these reforms: the surface fleet’s most pressing “fight tonight” mission was power projection ashore in the Middle East, with only rare opposition. 

Instead, the surface community reworked its educational model, creating two large shiphandling schools for all new SWOs and smaller simulator facilities scattered across each fleet concentration area. Officers began logging watchstanding hours more fastidiously, and were forced to go through more shiphandling tests throughout their career. With less overall impact to the community than specialization would have had, the surface navy was able to course correct and avoid further collisions. 

Costs of Specialization

If the surface navy had chosen to instead pursue the specialization route, it would have reckoned with serious disruptions. Most discussions around specialization do not dive into the vital details of implementation. Before the SWO community specializes, it would have to work through the following questions:

• How would specialist communities market themselves to potential officers at OCS, NROTC units, and the Naval Academy? How would midshipman cruises change?
• What requirements would each specialist community have for entry? Would they have tests, like the aviation community, required college degrees, or interviews?
• At what point would career tracks diverge? Would SWOs start with a generalist tour and specialize later, for example, or would they be locked into a specialization immediately?
• Would lateral transfer between specialties be a viable option?
• What initial schools would newly-selected specialist officers attend? What schools would they attend between each tour? Do those schools already exist, or would they need to be created?
• What criteria would each specialist community use to sort and select talent? What promotion milestones would each require?
• Would current officers become specialists midway through their career? If so, how would they be sorted into each specialty?
• Would the members of each specialist community still be able to take command of a warship? If not, what would their equivalent senior jobs be?
• Would different specialist communities still report to the same overall TYCOM? Would they have the same resource sponsor in OPNAV?

These questions hint at just how drastic of a change SWO specialization would be. The last bullet point hints at an unintended – and concerning – bureaucratic consequence: each specialist community could become an advocate for a certain way of war. If the surface navy creates engineering and deck specialist communities, for example, will those communities come to advocate against unmanned adoption? A surface combat systems specialist is unthreatened by an increased proportion of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the fleet – but officers who define their professional selves by running engineering plants or navigating a ship will find little to do on an unmanned vessel. The Navy is already hampered by three large communities – surface ships, aviation, and submarines – who have different incentives, assumptions, and bureaucratic motives. The fleet cannot afford to add even more advocacy blocs.

Make Smaller Changes – Now

In 2026, the motivation to change is even more serious than it was six years ago. The PLA threat is growing in size and lethality, threatening U.S. allies and partners across the Pacific. Using Anthony Downs’ framework again, the rise of China touches on the same two motivations for change that the surface Navy faced in 2017 – a desire for mission success, and a sense of bureaucratic self-defense. Not only do surface leaders want to deter China and be able win a war in the Pacific from a sense of patriotism, they want to avoid another institution – naval aviation, for example, or the special operations community – from arguing that they can better meet the PLA threat by taking resources and prestige from the SWO community. Between these two incentives, the surface navy is on track for reforms.

The timeline is, however, far too short for specialization to be the answer. The surface fleet cannot, with less than a year left until 2027, afford to work through all of the disruption and unanswered questions that SWO specialization would entail. Changes to the personnel system are measured in years or decades. The timeline before 2027 does not even allow time for a full eighteen-month Command at Sea tour to pass. Even if the Navy switches to a specialist model today, the Commanding Officers taking command now will still be the ones in the seat in 2027. Much time and energy will have been invested in a process that will not yet have borne any fruit, and will have distracted from the more urgent work of reforming the fleet within the 2027 timeline.

Instead of specializing the SWO community, the surface navy should emulate the successful reforms of 2017 – with an eye towards tactics instead of shiphandling. There is an urgent need for better tactical proficiency: the Houthis – a small non-state actor – sorely pressed the surface fleet over the last two years, and China will be able to field much worse. The surface navy’s most senior leaders, though, should not be the only ones driving reforms. Commanders at all levels should creatively insert more emphasis on tactics throughout the SWO community – anywhere their authority allows them. The leaders at Surface Warfare Officer Schools Command (SWOS), particularly the curriculum designers behind OOD Phase I and OOD Phase II, could bring tactics into shiphandling simulators. The Naval War College or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) could make sure every ship is stocked with tactical training aides: flashcards, wargames, books, and other creative tools for conveying tactical lessons to the fleet. PERS 41 could remove the detailing point incentive for the EOOW qualification, replacing it with point bonuses for tactical qualifications that matter to the challenge we face next year, not in a decade. These ideas do not rely on the intervention of the surface navy’s most senior leaders, who have limited time and bandwidth. Most can be approved by O-6s or O-7s, and could become reality in months, not years.

SWO specialization was a compelling idea for a peacetime navy – and if we can stabilize the short-term threat to Taiwan, we should return to sharpen the fleet’s long-term competitiveness. Time is just too short for it to be the right answer today. In 2026, the only path forward is to roll up our sleeves – at every level of seniority – and drive the existing framework of the SWO community to be more ready for war. 

LT Chris Rielage is a SWO and ASW/SUW WTI on USS CARL M LEVIN (DDG 120) in the Pacific. His publications have previously appeared in USNI’s Proceedings and CIMSEC. These opinions are expressed in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. government.

Featured Image: SAN PEDRO, California (May 19, 2025) – Sailors man the rails aboard guided missile destroyer USS Carl M. Levin (DDG 120), as the ship pulls into San Pedro, California, May 20, 2025, in preparation for Los Angeles Fleet Week 2025. (U.S. Navy photo by Personnel Specialist First Class R. Eugene Haggard)