SWO Specialization Week

By Gerry Roncolato

Introduction

“Despite the remarkable developments in military technology, despite the weapons and machines which have vastly expanded our striking power, it is still a basic truth that the only absolute weapon is man. Upon his determination, his stamina, and his skill, rests the issue of victory or defeat in war.”¹ –General Matthew B. Ridgway, U.S. Army

Long periods of peace between great powers generate certain characteristics in their militaries. Most notably, highly technical and mechanistic models of war come to the fore, and as Andrew Gordon brilliantly argues, system specialists take over.² That is the import of the above quote from World War II’s General Mathew Ridgway. Militaries must always be on guard to preserve focus on the human element of war during times of peace, and to avoid slavish devotion to rules and a mechanistic approach to war.³

The U.S. Navy has largely been at peace since 1945. Certainly, elements within the Navy have seen combat, but even then, the Navy writ large fought from the sanctuary of an American-controlled ocean. Over the decades since 1945, the argument for ever-deeper specialization has been a consistent drumbeat. As early as 1946 some naval officers found it necessary to argue against the trend, and repeated efforts to stem the tide can be found up to the present.⁴

Specialization is attractive to bureaucratic organizations. It promises to solve the problems of building individual system knowledge in the face of extraordinary technological advancement. It works well in commercial applications, but its efficacy in military organizations that fight wars, suffer casualties, and adapt to unforeseen and highly dangerous events is at best unproven.⁵ The U.S. Navy is already heavily specialized, and today’s calls are for even more.

Specialization feeds more specialization. Each step seems to solve the immediate problem, but eventually each is insufficient. Specialization sets a navy down the path where the true purpose of that navy can be lost. That purpose is to fight the nation’s wars. A commanding officer who has devoted his or her attention disproportionately to mastering a specialty will find little remaining time and bandwidth to focus on the broader and less technical demands of the position. Consideration of war—particularly its human element—falls prey to deeper study of the specialty’s technical demands. This is how a Navy can lose sight of its purpose and the realities of war

Historical Debates and Evolution

The topic of specialization within the Navy, and specifically in the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) community, reemerges from time to time. This tendency is usually occasioned by a series of mishaps, dramatic changes to the strategic environment, or as Captain Mark Hagerott argues, bureaucratic changes like the emergence of the nuclear power navy in the 1950s.⁶ Now, based on a 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on SWO career paths—incident to several 2017 collisions at sea—further specialization is under consideration.⁷

This debate within the Navy reaches back to the original amalgamation of deck and engineer officer corps in 1899. Then-Lieutenant Commander L. H. Chandler, USN, felt compelled to counter specialist arguments already surfacing in 1906.⁸ He laments the frequent refrain about ever-increasing complexity in naval weapon systems and therefore the assumed inability of an individual to master those systems. Specialization, he warns, will not solve the problem and worse, once embarked upon, will bring ever more specialization. The implication is that once you accept that technology overwhelms a generalist commander, there will be no end to the amount of specialization you will need.

He has been proven right. In the late 19^th century, specialization of line officers existed between the old deck officers and newly forming engineer corps as the development of steam propulsion, steel hulls, and rifled ordnance continued to accelerate. The Navy Personnel Law of 1899 decided against this specialization, and “amalgamated” deck officers and engineers into a single line officer corps.⁹ Ever since its enactment, pressures to specialize line officers have been a consistent backstory to the Navy’s evolution.

First came the aviators and later the submariners. The SWO community itself was a relatively late comer to the game. Originally line officers assigned to surface ships were those who remained generalist, and often they broadened their experience by earning aviator wings or doing time in submarines. This practice largely ended after World War II, and by the mid-1970s specialization into these three main line communities solidified. In the intervening decades, specialization continued to expand, with the SWO community for example being sub-specialized into the AEGIS, non-AEGIS, amphibious, and mine warfare sub-communities. Juxtaposed to these groupings are functional specialties such as combat systems, operations, and engineering (nuclear and non-nuclear). Perhaps these categories are not official, but as many SWO will tell you, they are real just the same.

The key here is the reality that, despite the 1899 amalgamation of the Navy’s line officer corps, the balance between specialization and generalism has been steadily shifting in favor of the former. The 2021 GAO report focuses on SWO career paths, but it also argues for a more specialized approach to officer training and assignment. It includes the results of a survey across all SWO paygrades—from O-1 to O-6—which indicate that 69 percent of those surveyed felt that the current generalist approach is insufficient.

Implied within the report is the increasing complexity of naval warfare—especially surface naval warfare—and the difficulty individuals have in mastering that complexity. Such an environment, the report argues, is prejudicial to SWO retention, which appears to be the lens through which the analysis was conducted. The GAO report includes an extensive appendix that contains the Navy’s response—a response which largely concurs with the report.¹⁰

The GAO report is rigorous and well-written. Its conclusions are based on solid managerial principals. And in one sense, it addresses real concerns within the SWO community. However, the report fails to consider broader issues related to SWO training, career paths, and warfighting excellence.

The Requirements of Command

The core issue is what the Navy expects of its commanding officers. Are they managers and leaders focusing on the efficiency of their organization and the well-being of their crews? Yes, of course. But what gets far less attention is that the commanding officer is above all responsible for fighting the ship. Today, the assumption within the SWO community may be that to do so effectively, the commanding officer must be a master of all the systems on that ship.

If one reads the redacted command investigation into the USS Gettysburg’s friendly fire incident in the Red Sea in December 2024, it is clear that commanding officers face a bewildering amount of information they must master—not only the ship’s systems, but also how the ship fits within the broader and even more complex system of the strike group, and ultimately the Joint Force. What bit of knowledge should the commanding officer not know? Underlying the investigation report is the assumption that he should have known more than he apparently did.¹¹

Yes, a commanding officer must know the ship’s systems, but not only the combat systems. They must also know how the engineering plant works—to be able to visualize the inner workings so that capabilities and limitations become second nature—or the various elements of the ship’s extensive communications capabilities, and even lesser systems such as the various elements of the shipboard supply organization. The commanding officer’s knowledge must also extend beyond the ship’s lifelines to how other elements in the strike group and Joint Force work, what they bring to the table and what are their limitations. And, not least, the commanding officer must know the enemy’s capabilities and limitations—and most important, how the enemy commander thinks and what their role is in their system of war.

This is a lot to demand, and it is one reason the Navy chooses its commanding officers very carefully. But that is not to say the commanding officer need be expert in all of those aspects. Indeed, it is impossible for one person to be expert in all things. The commanding officer needs to know the ship, but also how to fight the ship. This extends into the human realm beyond the world of systems.

The drive toward increased specialization has other causes as well. For example, today’s SWOs spend less time at sea than their predecessors. The majority of an officer’s career was spent at sea in the pre-WWII Navy. At the same time, there was much more command opportunity at junior levels than possible today. Famously, as commanding officer, a young Ensign Chester A. Nimitz, USN, ran USS Decatur (DD 5) aground in the Philippines in 1908.¹² Not only did his career not suffer too much, but the example illustrates how junior a commanding officer could be. The biographies of surface officers serving in the 1950s and 1960s show a plethora of command opportunities as well.

We have come a long way since the pre-WWII days when duty in Washington was limited if not openly discouraged. Modern day SWOs not only have to master their primary role as seagoing line officers, but they are also expected to serve significant time on shore staffs, especially in Washington. They are also required to serve in Joint billets and earn a master’s degree. These requirements were not present before WWII and important though they may be, they cut into sea time.

Today’s SWO faces ever increasing system complexity while simultaneously having less time at sea to master that complexity. One gap filler could be the training system. Current computer technology—digital twins, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and immersive simulations—offers the possibility of training at a much faster rate and with much greater knowledge retention. Yet, the Navy (and the military as a whole) continues the century-old practice of instructor-led instruction. Immersive trainers are making their way into the Navy’s training system, but the transition is too slow and much more could be done. One of the key problems more specialization is trying to solve could be addressed by increased training efficiency and effectiveness. This could be done without compromising the more generalist needs of command at all levels.¹³

In facing the potential for future great power war, we must better balance between bureaucratic efficiency and warfighting effectiveness. The former is necessary to maximize the benefits of funds expended, but the latter is essential in war. Trent Hone brilliantly explores this dynamic. At the strategic and high operational level of war in the Pacific in World War II, efficiency was critical to generating the material needed to project power over thousands of miles, but warfighting effectiveness at the point of contact (low operational and tactical levels of war) brought with it a highly inefficient consumption of material.¹⁴ Admiral Paparo, current commander of USINDOPACOM, recently argued for just such a rebalancing.¹⁵ Service (especially SWO) culture in part will determine how effectively we shift focus toward effectiveness. A highly specialized officer corps may not easily recognize the need or the right steps essential for such a shift.

Adjusting the Generalist/Specialist Divide Between Officers and Enlisted

Over the decades since World War II, the surface community expected its officers to delve increasingly into the technical details of its systems. This has had the unintended consequence of reducing the role of senior enlisted technical experts. As SWOs have descended deeper and deeper into minutiae, they have tended to focus less and less on the warfighting aspects of their profession. This trend has continued unchecked because, in part, we have not faced credible enemies at sea for decades, and arguably since 1945.

When this author asked a World War II Navy enlisted veteran about the differing roles of officers and enlisted on his ships during the war, he answered simply: officers fought the ship, the enlisted made it work.¹⁶ Then-Captain William P. Mack, USN, argued in the same vein in 1957. He reasoned that “…there is only one real specialty—command.”¹⁷ Mack went on to argue that the focus of the line officer is to command, and that doing so required a generalist with wide understanding of the various platforms and systems that make up the fleet. What both men were saying is that officers have roles and responsibilities beyond the technical, while enlisted experts are the true specialists in the Navy.

The reemergence of great power competition and possible conflict should once again drive the officer corps to focus more on warfighting than it has in recent decades. As officers spend more time studying and thinking about war and their role in it, senior enlisted technical experts—highly trained as they are today—will grow into the shoes formerly filled by officers. They will exercise their competence as the true system masters. Such a division of labor should never be absolute or rigid, but it does suggest a rebalancing. Moreover, it more fully engages a wider range of a ship’s crew. Both officers and enlisted together will take greater ownership in the ship and its missions.¹⁸

Preparing for the Future Fight

We now face an unknown warfighting future. No one has experienced the kind of high-end fight against a capable maritime enemy that lies on the horizon and about which we should be giving serious thought. In such a situation, the experiences of today’s naval leaders over the course of their careers hold only a limited relevance. How can we prepare for such an unknown? This is what Clausewitz struggled with in his classic On War.¹⁹ His answer – deep and empathetic study of military history. Any military history would suffice because the focus of such study would be on the human element, specifically, the commander. What caused commanders to make the decisions they did or did not make? A similar approach today would help arm future leaders with the tools they will need to deal with the unexpected.²⁰

No one individual can master all of the technologies and systems in use on our ships. A specialized commanding officer is ill-equipped to comprehend the myriad complexities and uncertainties of a future joint fight against a capable maritime opponent. We cannot be masters of every technology or mission area.

The answer is contained in the history of the debate over specialization. The commanding officer must be the conductor of their ship and its systems, not the putative expert in a narrow technical or specialty field. As the Navy looks to high-end conflict at sea in the future, officer responsibility will shift to fighting the ship, accomplishing the mission, and to the degree possible, bringing ship and crew back home. That is a heavy burden, one we have not had to bear for a very long time. It demands a more generalist officer corps, increased ownership by enlisted technicians, greater warfighting focus, and in a world of rapidly changing technology, a training system that can pace those changes.

Today as in the past, specialization promises more than it can deliver. It is attractive to those who do not know the past, because they are free to zero in on technical challenges—as if warfighting capability rests solely on that foundation. Increasing specialization does nothing to answer the challenges of future war at the tactical, vice procedural level, nor does it answer the challenges of combat leadership in command—at any level. Andrew Gordon warned us about this in his book The Rules of the Game.²¹ Trent Hone offered an alternative approach in his excellent work Learning War.²² And numerous article authors over the past century and a half have argued that specialization is an alluring but dangerous path.

The U.S. Navy has not fought against a peer adversary since 1945. No one on active duty today, and almost no one alive today, knows about the kind of war we fought in the Pacific in the 1940s. A future great power war will more closely resemble World War II than any of the conflicts since its end in 1945. Since that time, the Navy and its SWO community have increasingly come to see the role of the officer as being the technical expert. It was not always so. What has been lost is the concept of the generalist who is well versed in all aspects of naval and joint warfighting. In 1946, Lieutenant Commander Preston Lincoln, USNR, wrote about specialization in the Navy. He wrote from the perspective of a just-finished war where the Navy had grown to an immense size, where technology had leapfrogged far beyond where it was at the start of the war, and, consequently, where no combat officer had the time to become a true expert in any one area. A lawyer since World War I and a veteran of World War II, Lincoln succinctly stated the role of the naval officer: “The primary function of a U.S. Naval officer is to be a director and coordinator of specialists and technicians rather than one himself.”²³

Today’s Navy would do well to consider this wisdom and ask itself if the current path of increasing specialization will serve the Navy and nation into a future of great power conflict. Specialization is not the solution, but even if we slow its long creep in our military, we will still face significant challenges as we prepare for an unknowable kind of maritime war in the future. Meeting that challenge requires honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses against the backdrop of a deeper understanding of war and swift action to change course. This is where the focus must be.

Captain Gerard D. Roncolato, USN (Ret.), is a retired surface warfare officer with extensive experience in policy and strategy work. He commanded the guided-missile destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) and Destroyer Squadron 26 at sea.

References

[1] Attributed to General Matthew B. Ridgway, USA. Quoted in Captain William P. Mack, USN, “The Exercise of Broad Command: Still the Navy’s Top Specialty,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1957. VADM Mack went on to be Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and a naval fiction author.

[2] Andrew Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000). In particular, the twenty-eight “Syndromes of Peacetime Navies,” pp. 579-601.

[3] David Kohnen, “Charting a New Course: The Knox-Pye-King Board and Naval Professional Education, 1919-1923,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 71: No. 3, Article 8, Summer 2018.

[4] See, for example, Lieutenant Commander Preston S. Lincoln, USNR, “Specialization and the Post War Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1946.

[5] This too was an argument in the earliest days of the “generalist” Navy after the 1899 Line-Engineer amalgamation. See Lieutenant Commander L. H. Chandler, USN, “An Answer to Criticism of ‘Is Amalgamation a Failure’”, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1906.

[6] Mark Hagerott, CAPT, USN (Ret.), “Commanding Minds: Naval Leadership in the Age of AI,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 2025

[7] General Accounting Office (GAO), “Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Evaluate and Improve Surface Warfare Career Officer Career Path,” June 2021. Report #GAO-21-168.

[8] Chandler, “An Answer to Criticism of ‘Is Amalgamation a Failure’”.

[9] See Lieutenant Edward L. Beach, USN, “The Results of the Navy Personnel Law of March 3, 1899,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1902. He discusses the details of the law (including and beyond the deck-engineer corps amalgamation provisions) and assesses its impact three years after the fact.

[10] GAO, “Navy Readiness,” Appendix VI, pp. 151 ff.

[11] U.S. Central Command, Memorandum for Commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), “Second Endorsement of Command Investigation into the Facts and Circumstances Surrounding the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG) Friendly Fire Incident and Class A Aviation Flight Mishap on 22 December, 2024,” dtd 23 April 2025. Redacted.

[12] Christopher P. Michael, “Making the Most of Failure,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 2006.

[13] See Captain Gerard D. Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “Effective and Affordable Trainers Are Possible,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2017. See also the same author’s article on building a warfighting culture: “A Warfighting Imperative: Back to Basics for the Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2022.

[14] Trent Hone, “From Mobile Fleet to Mobile Force: The Evolution of U.S. Navy

Logistics in the Central Pacific During World War II,” Journal of Military

History, 87:2 (April 2023), pp. 367-403.

[15] Sam LaGrone, “PACFLEET CO Paparo Talks Combat Logistics,

Chinese Coercion,” U.S. Naval Institute News, 14 February 2023. See also Gerard Roncolato, CAPT USN (Ret.), “The Navy Needs a Lot More Logistics, or a Different Strategy, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2024.

[16] A 2013 discussion with my father, a signalman first class, 1943-1946.

[17] Captain Mack, “The Exercise of Broad Command.”

[18] This is not to ignore programs like the Propulsion Examining Board or the Planned Maintenance System (PMS). Both were necessary at the time they were implemented. However, while they improved ship material readiness, they had the side effect of diminishing the role of the Chief and enlisted technicians. The challenge is to stimulate enlisted ownership of their systems, especially adherence to engineering standards, while freeing officers to focus on that which only they can execute: fighting the ship. Hagerott suggests that the nuclear power community under Admiral Rickover’s leadership pushed the Navy down this road. The SWO community copied much of the nuclear power community’s philosophy and techno-centric culture. One could argue that the Surface PEB and PMS programs flow logically from this post-W.W.II trend. See Hagerott, op. cit.

[19] Jon Tetsuro Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2008), p. 3 and pp. 99-101. See also Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. & trans. by Michael Howard and

Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976),

[20] This is a core piece of Hagerott’s argument in preparing for the emergence of AI in war. “Commanding Minds”, op. cit.

[21] Andrew Gordon, Rules of the Game, op. cit.

[22] Trent Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945, (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2018).

[23] Lincoln, “Specialization and the Post War Navy.”

Featured Image: PANAMA CITY, Fla. (November 13, 2025) — The Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Pierre (LCS 38) is moored at the Port of Panama City ahead of its commissioning ceremony. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kassandra Alanis)

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)

SWO Specialization Week

By Scott Mobley

Specialization debates are hardly new to the U.S. Navy or the Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) community. Rapid technological change over the past two centuries repeatedly propelled demands for specialization, drawing naval officers toward narrow fields of technical mastery and mechanistic views of warfare. At the same time, the growing complexity and scope of warfare required naval leaders to master the Art of War—harnessing technology, doctrine, and decision-making with an emphasis on the human elements of warfare. Two threads of professional culture arose, one centered narrowly on technology and specialized expertise, and the other focused upon understanding warfare broadly as a fundamentally human endeavor. Often these cultures—techno-centric and human-centric—competed against one another, producing uneven outcomes.¹ However, the Navy also achieved notable success by blending and balancing the two cultures in the form of “generalist” commanders at the unit, force, and fleet level.

As they weigh future career paths, today’s surface warfare officers should inform their preferences and policy decisions with a critical understanding of past specialization debates, guided by several key questions:

• What is a “generalist” commander? How has this concept evolved over time and what do these changes reveal about shifts in professional culture?
• What is the art of war and why should today’s SWO leaders embrace it?
• Why did the Navy adopt technical specialization in the past? How did specialization shape the service, and what are its implications for the SWO community today?
• How have cultural tensions between technical specialization and the demands for generalist commanders affected the naval profession?

It is useful to explore these questions from a historical perspective, connect the Navy’s past experience to the present-day SWO debate, and ultimately propose a blended career path, incorporating the best aspects of technical specialization and generalist command.

What is a “Generalist”?

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed members of the SWO community as part of a study on ways to improve the surface warfare officer career path. The survey results suggest that SWOs favor specialized career tracks over a generalist model by a margin of four to one—a strong demand signal, to be sure.² However, the survey offers a narrow definition of “generalist” that does not align with a historical understanding of the U.S. Navy’s use of the term.

Choosing the SWO career path is itself a form of specialization. Accordingly, the GAO report defines the concepts of Specialist and Generalist within this narrow context. A “specialized” SWO typically serves within a single department throughout their career (Operations, Combat Systems, or Engineering) or in a single ship type. By contrast, a SWO generalist rotates across multiple departments and ship types.³

Traditionally, however, the term Generalist carried a broader meaning. During much of the 20th century, the concept of “generalist” described an officer with wide experience serving in a variety of roles ashore and afloat, often transcending a single platform type to include tours in surface ships, submarines, and/or aviation. Yet identifying as a generalist involved more than diverse assignments, it required an ability to weave technological and human elements together into coherent action.

In short, the naval generalist was—and should remain—not merely a technical expert with some experience beyond their specialization, but a leader who understands and practices the art of war at its highest level. As naval historian Mark Hagerott observes, “there was in the past, and will be in the future, an urgent need for those officers who can synthesize the many facets of sea power into a coherent whole.”⁴ Hagerott labels such officers “generalists and integrators,” capable of seeing beyond individual systems and specializations to grasp the larger strategic and operational picture.⁵

What is the Art of War?

At its core, the art of war frames how human agency shapes conflict. Wars unfold amid uncertainty, chance, fear, and material constraints. To navigate these conditions and prevail, combat commanders must exercise situational awareness, adaptive thinking, and judgment, while forging trust, teamwork, and esprit among those they lead. Commanders must also anticipate the dynamic and often obscure nature of enemy thought and action, while seeking to gain and retain the initiative.

Carl von Clausewitz placed human elements at the center of his theory of war, emphasizing the essential role of “moral factors” in war. For Clausewitz, war was not a technical problem, but a clash of opposing wills, shaped by passion, chance, and intellect. Recent scholarship amplifies this interpretation, arguing that the human elements constitute the timeless nature of war, even as advancing technology, new methods, and shifting cultures may evolve its character.⁶

Yet modern militaries—and the U.S. Navy in particular—today struggle to sustain focus on the human dimension. As technological complexity increases, institutional focus and professional culture gravitate toward material solutions, quantitative metrics, and technical mastery. In the process, the moral and psychological components of warfare often become marginalized. “Will and morale now represent critical aspects of warfare,” military scholar Byran Terrazas argues, “that the U.S. military has neglected in favor of material factors.”⁷ This tendency reflects not a rejection of the art of war, but a gradual obscuring of its human elements by the promise of seeming technical certainty.

Writing more than century ago, naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan warned against such trends. For Mahan, the art of war was grounded in “the mental and moral processes which determine action.”⁸ War, Mahan insisted, could not be reduced to mechanical processes or “made a rule of thumb”—attempting to do so would invite disaster by failing to account for the friction and unpredictability of human conflict.⁹ Mahan argued that the effective employment of navies required not merely wielding ships and weapons, but officers capable of understanding, synthesizing, and harnessing the diverse elements of sea power in pursuit of national goals.

This emphasis on synthesis lies at the heart of the naval art of war. Sea power does not reflect a single capability, but a complex amalgam of platforms, personnel, leadership, logistics, information, political and economic context, and culture. 19th-century naval reformers recognized a need for officers to cultivate their ability to integrate the elements of sea power through deliberate study, reflection, and practice. They believed that the art of war was best understood through engagement with the history and theory of conflict, reinforced whenever possible by practical experience through wargames, fleet exercises, and actual combat. As Captain Henry Clay Taylor observed in 1896, such activities are “calculated to bring into play the military qualities of the mind” that cannot be developed through technical training alone.¹⁰

It was precisely for this reason that Stephen Luce founded the Naval War College in 1884. Luce sought to institutionalize the study of the art of war, providing naval officers with the intellectual tools necessary to think and act critically in matters of strategy, operations, and command. After a rocky start, the College found its footing during the 1890s. However, interest plateaued during the first decade of the twentieth century as officers increasingly pursued technical education and specialized expertise. This shift did not eliminate the need for understanding the art of war—but it did complicate the Navy’s efforts to foster such understanding, setting the stage for enduring tensions between the need for human-centric integrators and technology-centric specialists within the U.S. naval profession.

“A house divided against itself”: U.S. Navy Specialization, 1842-1917

As the Naval War College sought to inculcate naval officers with the art of war, debates over specialization fragmented the U.S. naval profession. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, two distinct lines of specialization drove this trend: deck officers and steam engineers.

Since the Navy’s inception, deck officers had formed the Navy’s “line” corps, dominating service leadership and embodying what it meant to be a naval professional. During the age of sail, officers of the line commanded all warship functions: operations, seamanship, navigation, gunnery, and propulsion (in the form of sail-handling). As David Kohnen has noted, these “salt horse” line officers valued action and practical experience over formal schooling.¹¹

However, shortly after 1800, steam engines began to supplement and eventually supplant sails as the motive force for ships. Recognizing a growing need for specialists to operate the new propulsion systems, the U.S. Navy established a Corps of Steam Engineers in 1842, with its own rank structure and specialized educational requirements. This action served to realign shipboard authority and fracture officer identity in ways that many deck officers viewed as detrimental. With engineers playing an increasingly critical role in ship operations and forming a distinct core of specialists separate from the line, discord arose between the two corps.

During the 1870s, rivalry between line and engineer officers erupted into a bitter fight that went far beyond their technical roles—it became a struggle over identity and influence within a Navy in transition. As steam power displaced sail, engineers demanded rank and authority equal to the line corps, while line officers fought to preserve their primacy even as they themselves pressed to master emerging technologies like electricity and metallurgy. One official dubbed the quarrel a clash of “warring creeds,” underscoring its cultural depth.¹²

This line-engineer feud endured for three decades, fracturing the service and undermining both administration and operational effectiveness. One engineer officer described an atmosphere of “rivalry, jealousy, and strife for preferment.”¹³ War College founder Stephen Luce repined, “It is like the house divided against itself, or an organism carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”¹⁴ At its core, the conflict reflected the Navy’s challenge to reconcile a culture of technical specialization to the wider needs of naval command. The “line-staff conflicts,” recounts historian Donald Chisholm, “were really battles over how professional ‘naval officer’ would be defined. The definition that prevailed would determine the place of specialization in a naval environment of increasing institutional and technological complexity.”¹⁵

By the late 1890s, the line-engineer fissure became so acute that civilian leadership intervened. Acting on recommendations from a personnel board chaired by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Congress mandated in 1899 that the two corps unify into a single body. Accordingly, the Navy’s steam engineers became line officers, and all junior officers within the amalgamated corps were now required to perform both deck and engineering duties. Although amalgamation ultimately succeeded, it took nearly two decades of continuing debate and adjustment to strike an effective balance between deck and engineering expertise within the unified corps.¹⁶

One important consequence of the line-engineer merger was a surge of younger officers seeking to develop their technological knowledge and skills. When the Navy opened a new School of Marine Engineering at Annapolis in 1909, some 20 percent of the amalgamated line corps applied for its inaugural graduate program.¹⁷ Consequently, Luce expressed concerns that the push to recreate line officers as “fighting engineers” was in fact creating a new body of stove-piped engineering specialists, untutored in the art of war. Faced with declining enrollment trends at the Naval War College, he lamented “the majority of our young officers prefer the mechanical arts to the military arts.”¹⁸ While acknowledging that the Navy was making “ample provision for specialization,” Luce cautioned that they needed to be balanced with measures for developing the capacity of naval leaders to practice the art of war.¹⁹ Despite Luce’s warnings, line corps enrollment at the Naval War College continued to lag, even as interest in advanced engineering education remained strong.²⁰

Great Power War and its Aftermath

The Navy’s uneven performance in the First World War validated many of Luce’s concerns. As it entered the conflict, the service possessed a growing cadre of technical experts, yet it lacked sufficient depth in understanding and practicing the art of war. Navy leaders and planners struggled with a host of issues: deployment planning; complex logistics and sealift; training bottlenecks, adapting to new technologies; command, control, and coordination (at the intra-service, joint, and combined levels), alliance management, industrial mobilization; and civil-military relations, among others.

In sum, the Navy failed to balance its drive for technical specialization with a coherent grasp of warfighting. This neglect left too many of its officers unprepared to address the complex elements of great power conflict, expansive multi-theater operations, and coalition warfare. As B.J. Armstrong observed, “some senior leaders didn’t discover the study of strategy until they had to do it.”²¹

Recognizing these deficiencies, in 1919 Navy leadership convened a board to examine officer education and career development. The three members—Captains Dudley Knox and Ernest J. King, and Commander William S. Pye—brought to bear their extensive wartime experience on fleet and theater staffs.²² In its final report, the board affirmed the need for technical specialization to accommodate rapidly advancing technologies that were already transforming naval warfare—most notably aircraft and submarines. However, the report also argued that such specialization must not come at the expense of developing capacities for integrating the technical and human aspects of conflict. Too often, officers attained senior rank without a full grasp of the complexities of modern naval warfare, leaving them poorly equipped to command in combat.

In response, the board recommended a blended, generalist career path, combining specialization “in at least one branch of the profession” with an advanced, progressive education in fleet operations, strategy, logistics, and international relations.²³ It further proposed that officers complete advanced courses at the Naval War College before promotion to senior grades, ensuring their development as sea power integrators alongside technical expertise and practical experience. Working with the Navy’s technical experts and “salt horse” officers, these integrators would craft holistic solutions under wartime conditions of uncertainty, friction, and chance.

The Rise and Decline of the Generalist Naval Officer

The Knox–King–Pye Board’s recommendations reshaped the Navy’s approach to officer development. By adopting much of the board’s prescription, the service produced a generation of innovators and integrators—leaders who combined technical specialization with a deep understanding of strategy, policy, operations, logistics, and the human elements of warfare. Figures such as Chester Nimitz, Raymond Spruance, and William Halsey exemplified this fusion, practicing the art of war with remarkable success during World War II. Their ability to orchestrate complex campaigns across multiple theaters reflected the efficacy of the ‘blended’ career model, an outcome affirmed by Trent Hone’s analysis in Learning War, which shows how collaborative learning, experimentation, and diverse experience across systems and platforms were essential for operational success.²⁴ And countering the historically divisive tendencies wrought by unmitigated specialization, the blended model fostered a more unified professional identity, bridging the technological and human elements of sea power to strengthen the Navy’s leadership culture.

Although the Knox–King–Pye system endured into the 1950s, it gradually declined after World War II. Several factors drove this erosion: an enlarged postwar officer corps overwhelmed the Navy’s educational institutions; a growing faith in technological solutions; the growing influence of specialized platform-specific communities in the form of aviation, submarine, and surface; Congressional mandates prioritizing “jointness” over unified service identity, and persistent cultural biases against formal education in the art of war.²⁵ Cold War pressures amplified these trends, as rapid technological innovation and budget priorities favored hardware over human capital, reinforcing preferences that privileged advanced technology over strategic and operational insight. These developments diluted the integrative vision championed by Knox, King, and Pye, leaving the Navy increasingly fragmented along lines framed by platforms, technology, budgetary imperatives, and joint priorities. “As specialized platform and technical communities carved up the Navy’s officer corps,” Hagerott recounts, “the larger organizational value attached to integration was gradually discounted.”²⁶

Blending Specialization with the Art of War

As with the Navy’s past reckonings with specialization, the current SWO debate ultimately turns on balance. Specialization delivers indispensable depth for warfighting—technical mastery, effective systems problem-solving, and deep expertise in rapidly-evolving technologies and domains of warfare. Yet specialization also introduces detriments: fragmented professional identity, siloed and sub-optimized thinking, and potentially a diminished focus on developing commanders with mastery in the art of war.

The traditional generalist model—rooted in integrative command—offers a counterweight. It cultivates breadth: the capacity to forge technology and human agency into decisive action. This approach fosters adaptability and unity of effort—qualities central to success in great‑power contests marked by multi-domain complexity. However, a generalist without sufficient grounding in the Navy’s technology and systems, and platforms would be unprepared to effectively command modern ships, forces, and fleets in combat. In sum, professional breadth unbalanced by technical depth is a brittle quality.

The Navy’s historical experience suggests that officer specialization is critically important but in itself insufficient. SWOs must also understand and harness the art of war—adaptive judgment, strategic sensibility, and the human elements of leadership. Overvaluing specialization risks dividing the SWO community—and indeed the wider Navy—into “warring creeds.” Underinvesting in the art of war risks leaving the fleet technologically sharp yet operationally blunt.

The challenge, then, is to produce SWO officers with technical expertise and warfighting command competencies aligned with Mark Hagerott’s call for “generalists and integrators.” Accordingly, the SWO community might consider these specific measures as it forges new career paths for the 21^st century:

• Pair technical mastery with integrative skills: Couple specialization with measures to broaden understanding and practice of the art of war. This would include mandatory Naval War College education, reinforced by iterative fleet-based training, problem-solving case studies, and intensive wargaming, similar to the interwar system that prepared the U.S. naval leaders of WWII.
• Align incentives: Shape the performance evaluation system, promotion, and detailing to recognize and reward officers who demonstrate both technical ability and competence in the art of war.
• Cross‑pollinate tours: Require at least one tour outside a specialist track to build breadth and strengthen ship team cohesion (e.g., Engineering or Combat Systems specialization plus an Operations tour). The “non-specialty” tour(s) could take place at the division officer or department head level.

Technological prowess hones the Navy’s combat edge. Combat leaders well-anchored in the art of war can make it victorious. The SWO community needs both.

Captain Scott Mobley, USN (Ret.) commanded the USS Boone (FFG-28) and USS Camden (AOE-2). He also served as reactor officer in the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75). After retiring from the Navy, he authored Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873–1898 (Naval Institute Press, 2018). He earned an M.A. in national security affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he currently teaches in the Political Science Department.

References

[1] Scott Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898 (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 10, 266-267.

[2] Cary Russell, Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Evaluate and Improve Surface Warfare Officer Career Path (Washington, D.C.: Government Accountability Office, 2021), 126.

[3] Ibid., Highlights.

[4] Mark Hagerott, “Commanding Minds: Naval Leadership in the Age of AI,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 151, no. 12/1,474 (December 2025), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/december/commanding-minds-naval-leadership-age-ai.

[5] Ibid.

[6] For a vibrant ongoing discussion comparing the nature of war to its character, see: Gerard Roncolato, “The Character of War Is Constantly Changing,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 4/1431 (May 2022), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/character-war-constantly-changing; F Hoffman, “Will War’s Nature Change in the Seventh Military Revolution?,” Parameters 47, no. 4 (November 2017): 19–31; and Christopher Mewett, “Understanding War’s Enduring Nature Alongside Its Changing Character,” War on the Rocks, January 21, 2014, https://warontherocks.com/2014/01/understanding-wars-enduring-nature-alongside-its-changing-character/.

[7] Bryan Terrazas, “The Human Element: The Other Half of Warfare,” The Strategy Bridge, June 2, 2022, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2022/6/2/the-human-element-the-other-half-of-warfare.

[8] Alfred T. Mahan, “The Naval War College,” The North American Review, July 1912, 72.

[9] Alfred Thayer Mahan, “The Practical Character of the Naval War College,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 19, no. 2/66 (April 1893), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1893/april/practical-character-naval-war-college.

[10] Henry C. Taylor, “The Study of War,” The North American Review, February 1896, 181.

[11] David Kohnen, “Charting a New Course: The Knox-Pye-King Board and Naval Professional Education, 1919–23,” Naval War College Review 71, no. 3 (May 2018), 2.

[12] William G. McAdoo, “Reorganization of the Personnel of the Navy,” The North American Review, October 1894, 457.

[13] Frank M. Bennett, The Steam Navy of the United States: A History of the Growth of the Steam Vessel of War in the U.S. Navy, and of the Naval Engineer Corps (Pittsburgh: W.T. Nicholson, 1896), 604.

[14] Stephen B. Luce, “Annual Address,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 14, no. 1/44 (January 1888), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1888/january/annual-address.

[15]. Donald Chisholm, Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes: Origins and Development of the U.S. Navy’s Officer Personnel System, 1793-1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 419.

[16]. The 1899 merger quelled the worst friction between the two specialist groups, but it did not end debate. Some officers in both corps initially resisted the change, and critics questioned whether former deck officers could safely manage increasingly complex propulsion plants compared to professionally trained engineers. For years, discussions continued over the proper mix and depth of engineering and deck expertise required for effective command. See Dana L. Mathes, “The Fight for the Soul of the U.S. Navy: Engineering the Officer Corps of the New Steel Navy, 1886-1916” (University of Texas at San Antonio, 2018), 143-161, 164-166.

[17] Stephen B. Luce, “On the Relations Between the U.S. Naval War College and the Line Officers of the U.S. Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 37, no. 3/139 (September 1911), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1911/september/relations-between-us-naval-war-college-and-line-officers-us; U.S. Department of the Navy, Register of the Commissioned, Warrant, and Volunteer Officers of the Navy of the United States Including Officers of the Marine Corps and Others (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 6-50.

[18] Luce, “Relations Between the U.S. Naval War College and the Line Officers.”

[19] Ibid.

[20]. The U.S. Navy line corps more than doubled between 1900 and 1917, growing from 882 officers to 2113. Naval War College enrollment, however, did not keep pace. From 1894 to 1897, more than 3% of active line officers enrolled annually. During the decade following the line-engineer merger, average enrollment dropped to 2% per year. Between 1911 (the year of Luce’s warning) through 1917, the rate declined further to about 1.5% annually. Register of the Commissioned, Warrant, and Volunteer Officers of the Navy, volumes 1894-1917; Naval War College, Register of Officers, 1884-1979 (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College, 1979).

[21] B.J. Armstrong, “A 96-Year Old Report Can Teach Us About Velocity in Naval Learning,” War on the Rocks, September 9, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/09/a-96-year-old-report-can-teach-us-about-velocity-in-naval-learning/.

[22] Kohnen, “Charting a New Course,” 128-129.

[23] “Report And Recommendations Of A Board Appointed By The Bureau Of Navigation Regarding The Instruction And Training Of Line Officers,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 46, no. 8/210 (August 1920), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1920/august/report-and-recommendations-board-appointed-bureau-navigation.

[24] Trent Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945, Illustrated edition (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 323-330.

[25] In 1937 (before world war expansion kicked in) the U.S. Navy officer corps numbered 9,897 persons. In 1947, as postwar mobilization proceeded and before Cold War rearmament began, the officer corps numbered 58,689, down from a wartime peak approaching 324,000. See “US Navy Personnel Strength, 1775 to Present,” Naval History and Heritage Command, July 27, 2020, http://public1.nhhcaws.local/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/usn-personnel-strength.html. Multiple developments underpinned the Navy dropping the Knox-King-Pye prescription, as synthesized from Robert B. Kelly, “The Education Of The Line,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 85, no. 12/682 (December 1959), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1959/december/education-line; John T. Kuehn, “US Navy Cultural Transformations, 1945–2017,” in The Culture of Military Organizations, ed. Peter R. Mansoor and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 356-357; Steve Wills, Strategy Shelved: The Collapse of Cold War Naval Strategic Planning (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021); 4-8; Scott Mobley, “How to Rebalance the Navy’s Strategic Culture,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 11/1437 (November 2022), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/november/how-rebalance-navys-strategic-culture.

[26] Hagerott, “Commanding Minds.”

Featured Image: U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY (Nov. 26, 2024) A U.S. Navy surface warfare officer takes bearing while standing watch on the bridge aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Cole (DDG 67) in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. (Official U.S. Navy photo)

SWO Specialization Week

By MIDN 1/C Jeffrey W. Jaeger, USNR

Since 1899, the U.S. Navy has used a generalist career track for its surface warfare officers. This coincides with the Arthur administration’s imperative that the Navy rehabilitate itself from traditionalist mores that restricted steam engines, available in common maritime usage from the early 1800s as auxiliary systems for primary sail power. Congress responded to President Arthur and authorized the Navy’s first all-steel, all-steam warships in 1883.¹ The Spanish- American War finally convinced most of the Navy’s recalcitrant officers that machinery-powered warships were the future. The Great White Fleet followed, and tall ships were relegated to history.

Although sailing had long been viewed throughout the world as a specialized profession, those within the profession qualified “able-bodied” seaman as generalists. This meant that just about every sailor aboard ship had the capability of working with sails and rigging, and the officers were possessed of knowledge not just of navigation but of how the propulsion system had to be operated and maintained. Even so, a major criticism of this transition from the officer corps was that the more crew-efficient, technically-specialized nature of machine-driven plants would degrade the teamwork required amongst the seamen, petty officers, and junior officers to work en masse with the labyrinthine sail rigs.² This was in addition to the perceived unreliability of machine plants, which was justified in part due to the specialized skills required to maintain, operate, and repair such plants. The navigator was relieved from the burden of having to constantly optimize the set of his sails in dynamic conditions over distance and fixing position by celestial sights at frequent intervals as the dead reckoning course became more reliable. With regular propulsion not dependent on environmental factors and operated from a remote position away from the quarterdeck, much of the watch officer’s duties could be refocused toward other deck-related tasks.

The Navy believed that redundancy and the operational needs of gunnery and damage control meant that military crews would remain more generalist, while merchant crews grew leaner and more profitable. Crews did indeed become more fragmented into the divisions and departments that exist today instead of gun crews and messes. They were broken up by technical function into smaller and more disparate teams across larger vessels. Watch officers became disengaged from the operation of the propulsion, since their navigational duties became increasingly disconnected from the means of propulsion itself and was more reactive, or corrective, than proactive in nature.

The deck and engine departments formed themselves, which panicked the Navy. Redundancy, they decided, required every officer aboard to return to the Age of Sail and know every other officer’s job aboard so that a loss of men would not result in combat ineffectiveness of the unit. Steeped in tradition, and mourning a time that would never return, the Navy clung to the adage that an officer could only be effective if he had a passable knowledge of every system aboard ship, rather than in-depth expertise of certain systems.

The Merchant Marine, on the other hand, leapt into steam power with gusto. Scottish engineers in Glasgow created the Charlotte Dundas, a canal tug, as the world’s first practical steam-powered vessel in 1802, less than a century after the original Newcomen steam engine was built on land but decades before the Navy adopted steam power.³ Robert Fulton built the first commercially viable steamship in America five years later, using a Watt engine of mid-eighteenth century design. By 1819, the auxiliary steamer SS Savannah had completed the first trans-Atlantic voyage under partial steam power. Although maritime steam languished for several decades, better understanding of the relationships between cubic capacities versus the square water resistance of ships along the waterplane led to the creation of larger, more economical vessels, while naval vessels unconcerned with cargo profits focused on armament, armor, survivability, and maneuverability. Professionalization of marine steam engineers relieved many of the concerns about steam boiler explosions, since they were operated by experts rather than captains pushing unfamiliar systems to the limit. In 1838, the SS Sirius won the first unofficial Blue Riband by crossing the Atlantic entirely by powered machinery in record time.⁴ She made the crossing with a crew of 36. A U.S. Navy first-rate tall ship of the line launched in the same year, the USS Pennsylvania, carried 1,100. An early Navy steamship of the 1830’s, the USS Fulton, mounted only four 32-pounders but carried a complement of 130. Setting aside gun crews, Sirius was far more efficient ton-for-ton by deadweight and displacement. Amongst commercial ships of the time, Sirius had half the crew of full-rigged tall ships. The Age of Steam was well upon the Merchant Marine.

Driven by the business necessities of minimizing crew costs, lowering transit times, and maximizing carriage capacity, the Merchant Marine’s adoption of steam power was an economic imperative. It did not have the luxury of clinging to tradition for tradition’s sake, and could not afford to overbuild ships for minimal risks that were underwritten by insurers anyway. This capitalist mandate for innovation spurred the Merchant Marine to adopt engineers as a separate and distinct department of maritime labor. More efficient engines in terms of machinery and fuel, along with additional developments such as multiple-expansion boilers, condensers, and economizers, came with increased demands for specialists that could keep these plants running with minimal laytime and personnel.

Authority is more horizontal in the Merchant Marine than in the Navy, and duties are less formally assigned. This necessitates broader swaths of knowledge despite the separation of departments. On the deck side, officers fill roles that are flexible, often interchangeable, and usually according to informal tradition. This flexibility amongst the captain’s mates allows the master (as the captain is legally known) to exercise broad authority for the entire crew and vessel, despite being licensed solely as a deck officer. Engineering officers have even more flexibility in their roles and are usually assigned a broad group of systems to supervise. Both sets of officers stand watches within their departments, although automation has resulted in “unmanned” engine rooms for many newer ships that permit the engine crew to operate as dayworkers. These officers are usually the only licensed personnel on duty at any time, so they must have a complete knowledge of every task and duty which might befall them during the watch. Unlicensed watch personnel are also typically limited to just one or two on either side. Most unlicensed sailors do daywork, fulfilling their working hours on a normal schedule with overtime for after-hours cargo, locking, or docking operations.

In the Navy, however, officers are considerably more siloed and yet pulled in more directions throughout the day than their Merchant Marine counterparts. A junior officer is assigned control of a division, which comprises a chief petty officer, one or more petty officers, and several enlisted sailors that are grouped together by their technical rating or the specific systems they operate on a daily basis. They will fill different roles in different situations, according to multitudes of station bills written up for every conceivable circumstance the ship could find itself in. The officer in charge of that division has no specialized or technical training for that division’s equipment. He is made to manage a small group of sailors, who are the experts that train new enlisted sailors rotating in from A-school already in possession of foundational training.

Contrast that with a Merchant Marine officer, who is not only licensed by proving that he has expertise in every facet of his department on a grueling series of exams, but has also sailed for no less than a full calendar year as a trainee in his department (half that for engineers, since their roles are more easily trained on land). His unlicensed personnel are either highly experienced, requiring little supervision, or new with minimal union schooling, thereby requiring considerable supervision and training with a capitalistic impetus to learn rapidly. This is a more efficient crew structure that maximizes usage of each individual and of automated equipment.

Throughout their careers, surface warfare officers acquire training and warfare-specific knowledge through on-the-job training and sporadic schooling ashore. Merchant Marine officers arrive to the fleet fully-trained and expected to stand a watch on day one, which they are qualified to do. The Navy previously shipped officers directly from their commissioning source (college, OCS, or USNA) to their ships. Practically zero of them had any shipboard experience whatsoever and had to get a crash course on the basics such as COLREGs or maneuvering. Some watchstanding training is now provided ahead of time, first through a distance-learning course derisively known as “SWOS in a box” and now through the Basic Division Officer Course in Newport.⁵ However, these officers must learn the basics while managing a division of sailors, with all the needs and wants of sailors wholly dependent on their leadership for their careers and well-being, standing watches on the bridge, and then at some point in the engine control room. As a result, surface warfare officers are constantly burned out, overtaxed, and less knowledgeable about the thing that makes them a SWO – their ship – than their Merchant Marine counterparts. Even the SWO pin qualification is less an exercise in actual proof of understanding, as the curricula for Merchant Mariners’ “sea years” are, and more just a matter of rote memorization.

The fact remains that a Navy SWO is less trained and less experienced than a more junior Merchant Marine officer at that thing that unites them professionally – being a mariner. The lack of seamanship has gotten so critical that the Navy, who commissions a small cadre of under 2,200 licensed Merchant Mariners as reserve Strategic Sealift officers (SSOs), has to send these mariners out to sea to teach SWOs basic shipboard concepts such as bridge resource management.

While there can be a need for officers to be well-rounded leaders and know their entire ship, the fact of the matter is that combat redundancy is no excuse for simultaneously pigeonholing officers into a division with no relevant training and then forcing them to understand every department’s equipment and operations through slapdash “training” performed almost entirely as a competition to their already-strained workday. If so many engineering officers are killed in combat that a deck officer must fill their role, then the ship is already combat ineffective. Generalist officers often cannot offer enough instruction, expertise, and advice to the more specialized enlisted sailors they are meant to supervise. Passing that buck to their chief petty officers robs the officer of their responsibility to become a mariner and a leader of mariners.

By contrast, Merchant Marine officers are either deck or engineering officers from their first day as cadets. They spend up to four years training in academies and at sea, or even longer if they “hawsepipe” (that is, learn from observation and classes taken during vacations on land while working as an unlicensed sailor), just to master the basics of their department. Front- loading training and then specializing them in one of just two major functions common to every ship afloat means they are effective on day one of work. Specialization permits more in-depth knowledge of tasks and equipment, which still takes many years of intense training to master. Forcing them to learn both halves of the ship would cause the training sufficient for them to be ready “day one” to take seven or more years, or else result in officers who are somewhat familiar with both halves but incapable of properly manning any role in either half. Specialization, to the extent that the Merchant Marine does so, strikes the right balance between the technical expertise of individual ratings that rightfully belongs to the enlisted Navy sailor while allowing them to be effective supervisors, managers, and – most importantly – mariners.

Navy generalists argue that SWOs operate vessels that are orders of magnitude more complex than merchant vessels and have weaponry and sensors to operate that merchantmen do not. They argue that a SWO must have a total understanding of the entire vessel so they can employ their division or department within the context of the whole. How, we ask, is that any different than what a merchantman does? While a modern merchant vessel no longer employs weapons systems, the ship’s “weapons” are the interlinked cargo-handling gear systems that give the vessel its purpose just as a destroyer’s missiles give it its mission. For the same reason that merchantmen took on steam power in its infancy, commercial trade dispensed with longshoremen as soon as better technology was available. While more efficient, this increased the technical and engineering demands on both departments of the ship crews. Yet no one would argue that merchant officers should have become less expert in their fields as a result.

There is also a major difference in that merchant mariners are constantly employing their vessel’s central capabilities and functions to full effect. The same cannot be said of SWOs who have not had to fight their ships in a great power war in decades. This lack of experience in performing their ultimate function may be masking a need for specialization because the generalist model has not been subjected to the stress of modern great power conflict. Recent sustained missile conflict in the Red Sea has offered the closest glimpse, and perhaps shown some cracks in the system. Yet the generalist model is arguably already struggling to meet peacetime demands beyond the bare minimum. With the advent of warfare tactics instructors, it is possible for a third department to emerge within the surface warfare community – operations – which focus on the weapons and sensors used to fight the ship.

With retention being one of the most critical issues apart from maritime expertise facing the SWO community, specialization will only enhance a sense of professionalism that lends itself to more fulfilling careers served in full. Despite bonuses into the six figures, SWO department head retention rates are stubbornly stuck around 35 percent, well below other warfare communities.⁶ SWOs have complained of overwork and being pulled in too many directions. Specialization into a single department just as Merchant Mariners enjoy, combined with more frequent shore time in the model of the submarine service’s blue-gold crewing structure, will relieve these issues. The SWO will become more mission-focused in a field in which he is not only allowed but encouraged to develop deep professional expertise, and permitted to stay in the area of his expertise in the same way that naval aviators fly the same aircraft type for their entire career. Professional satisfaction and welfare will increase retention, building up into manpower levels that permit more flexible crewing structures.

On the topic of aviators and submariners, the generalist argument that broad knowledge is required to assume higher levels of responsibility rings hollow. While it is true that Merchant Marine captains are exclusively licensed as deck officers, chief engineers are accorded similar levels of respect within the community. The Navy relegates this position to mid-level management as a department head with no particular engineering expertise.

Thanks to bridge manning with watch officers and officers of the deck, it is entirely feasible that a captain can be drawn from any department. Even if the Navy chooses to emulate the Merchant Marine and draws captains from the most “seaman-ly” department, the deck, this is little different than distinguishing between the unrestricted and restricted lines. Officers motivated to stay in their fields from which they draw professional satisfaction instead of being forced into management positions they are less engaged in are more likely to stay in service and hone their craft.

MIDN 1/C Nicholas Punla Smith, USNR, previously served as a bosun’s mate aboard the USCGC Barque Eagle (WIX 327) and has argued that generalized training for new officer candidates is valuable precisely because it demands the teamwork and foundational seamanship that Navy generalists cling to with their traditional mindsets left over from the Age of Sail. Generalized operations, however, are counterproductive. We cannot ignore the fact that our vessels today are far more complex than even the largest ships of the line. While electronics and automation have reduced the requisite number of crew for equivalent tasks, many shipboard tasks today were unimaginable to tall ship sailors who were simply not technologically advanced and would not recognize the style of warfare we now practice. The Merchant Marine embraced change and adapted to new technologies with their commensurate labor roles as soon as it was feasible and demanded by economics. The Navy, thanks to their ability to stand outside the flow of constant market forces, clung to tradition for tradition’s sake even to the point of ordering all-sail ships half a century after the introduction of marine steam plants.⁷

The time was a century ago for the SWO officer corps to accept that the future had arrived, and it is past high time for them to do so now. The U.S. Navy surface warfare community must adapt accordingly, as their Merchant Marine brethren have to great effect, for their benefit as professional mariners.

MIDN 1/C Jeffrey W. Jaeger, USNR, is in his final year at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy and will be licensed as a third mate and first-class pilot in the U.S. Merchant Marine as well as commissioned as an ensign in the Navy’s Strategic Sealift Officer Force. He has sailed in unlicensed and cadet capacities aboard the M/V Edwin H Gott, USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11), USS Mason (DDG 87), and M/V Herbert C Jackson. MIDN Jaeger has been previously published in the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings and is a former indirect fire infantryman and infantry officer of the U.S. Army.

References

1. US Navy. (2024, February 20). Sail to Steam Propulsion. Naval History and Heritage Command. https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/communities/surface/steam.html

2. US Navy. (2024a, January 17). The Steel Navy. Naval History and Heritage Command. https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/exploration-and-innovation/steel-navy.html

3. Fry, Henry (1896): The History of North Atlantic Steam Navigation: With Some Account of Early Ships and Shipowners, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London.

4. Britannica Editors (2019, September 13). Sirius. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sirius-steamship

5. Faram, M. (2017, August 27). Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships. Navy Times. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/08/27/navy-swos-a-culture-in-crisis/

6. Stancy, D. (2024, January 9). Here’s what the Navy is doing to boost SWO retention. Navy Times. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/01/09/heres-what-the-navy-is-doing-to-boost-swo-retention/

7. National Park Service. (2011, June 5). USS Constellation (frigate). National Historic Landmarks Program. https://web.archive.org/web/20110605234813/http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=697&ResourceType= Structure

Featured Image: The Cape Edmont Ready Reserve Force vessel docks in Agadir, Morocco, Feb. 29, 2020. The cargo vessel, operated by Merchant Marines from the U.S. Department of Transportation, carried nearly 7,000 tons of military equipment for use in African Lion 20, the largest exercise in Africa. (Photo by Maj. Cain Claxton U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa)