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Strategy

The Tri-Service Maritime Strategy: Reading Between the Lines

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By Robert C. Rubel

The Navy routinely publishes capstone documents that serve as top-level policy statements and guidance for the Service. Some are either directly titled maritime strategies or are at least referred to as such, implying that they describe ways that naval forces will be used to achieve national objectives. In truth this cannot be the case because the Navy has no authority to determine such ways; that is the province of the joint chain of command that runs from the President through the Secretary of Defense down to the Unified Combatant Commanders, bypassing both the Joint Staff and the Services. If the Navy has no authority to engage in such strategizing, why issue such documents, the latest of which is entitled “Advantage at Sea” but is commonly called the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy (TSMS)?

The widely accepted strategic syllogism is ends/ways/means; strategy specifically constituting the ways. As previously stated, developing ways in which the means – the military forces – can be used to achieve the ends – national security objectives – is the business of the joint chain of command. The Services are tasked to provide the means, so any top-down document the Navy issues must be somehow connected to that responsibility. The context in which such documents are issued is commonly resource scarcity, which means that in some way the document either outlines a way for the Service to deal with that scarcity or pleads for more resources. When internally focused, the documents tend to be straightforward guidance for adapting the Service to existing conditions. When externally focused, the actual Service strategy is to get what it wants by publishing a “strategy” document that it hopes will influence its target outside audience, be it Congress, the American public, potential adversaries or friendly countries. This desire to achieve influence via a public document appears to be behind the TSMS thus requiring us to read between its lines to infer the underlying ways.

Strategies can be thought of as solutions to problems, and the TSMS contains a formal problem statement that says China’s and Russia’s “revisionist approaches” in the maritime domain threaten U.S. interests, undermine alliances, and threaten the global order. Moreover, their aggressive naval growth and modernization are eroding U.S. military superiority. Left unchecked this will leave the Naval Services unprepared to ensure U.S. advantage at sea (this last printed in bold). There are a couple of ways to read this, one being that the Naval Services must check gray zone operations, which, as discussed, is outside Service authority. The second is that Chinese and Russian naval growth, at least in relative terms, must be checked. Presumably this is the real problem that must be solved, a view supported by the paragraph preceding the problem statement, which lists challenges to building additional capacity, including increased costs and developmental timelines of systems and weapons, and continuing budget pressures; in other words, resource scarcity.

From all this we can infer that the basic strategy behind TSMS is to publish a strategy document to add to the momentum for building a bigger fleet that was created by the Secretary of Defense’s Battle Force 2045 plan. As such, a key element of the pleading purpose of the document is to articulate a persuasive utility argument – why the nation should invest more in its Naval Services – and the TSMS is full of such language. 

But the document also contains a more novel and dramatic element; it asserts that the three Naval Services will more closely integrate their efforts. In the face of resource scarcity it makes sense to try and find efficiencies and synergies, and to the extent that this is the motivation behind this part of the problem solution it is a brilliant move.

However, a close reading of the TSMS reveals a somewhat more problematic motivation and strategy. The document clearly colors outside the lines of Service authority by asserting the Naval Services will more aggressively confront Chinese and Russian gray zone operations even at the cost of incurring greater risk. In several places the document mentions the advantage the unique authorities possessed by the Coast Guard brings to the table. This implies that an underlying deal with the Department of Homeland Security has been reached to empower some anti-gray zone operational strategy. One hopes the relevant combatant commanders have been consulted, but in any case it seems to be an end run around joint authority and also appears to preempt policy making by the incoming Biden Administration. Aggressive and even risky forward naval maneuvers to intimidate an adversary was a key provision of the 1980s Maritime Strategy, which the TSMS seems to echo, but the times and the adversaries are different, and one wonders if such a frontal assault strategy is appropriate in current conditions. The document itself might be intended as a means of such intimidation since it articulates how U.S. naval forces would be successful in confronting and defeating the enemy, including the implication that U.S. forces either have or shortly will possess hypersonic weapons.

Beyond the motivations and underlying strategies just mentioned there seems to be a third element in the TSMS: relationships with allies. In a number of places the document calls for increased cooperation with international navies, especially at the higher levels on the spectrum of conflict. This echoes language in the 2015 Cooperative Strategy, but absent some kind of underlying strategy for achieving it, the words are only boilerplate. But giving the TSMS writing team credit for strategic thinking, such language can be interpreted as a move to counteract the Trump Administration’s confrontational approach to allies and partners. This echoes but is not the same as the approach taken by the 2007 Cooperative Strategy. That document portrayed the US on the strategic defensive and emphasized the peacetime uses of seapower to allay the suspicions of other nations concerning U.S. intentions due to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That document was a part of an underlying strategy of courting international cooperation on maritime security that also involved extensive international consultation during strategy development and bringing international officers into the process. The document itself did not directly spell out any of this.

The TSMS appears to be anticipating a more internationalist policy and approach by the Biden Administration, but simply calling for more cooperation, especially in warfighting, is not an actual strategy for securing it, and other than envisioning increased exercises, the document gives us little indication of how it will be achieved. In fact, more aggressive confrontation of Chinese and Russian gray zone operations, or even their international naval engagement activities and perhaps instances of gunboat diplomacy, might serve to alarm potential partners and allies who do not want to be dragged into conflict by the U.S. In any case it is all a policy matter above the pay grade of the Services, so in the best case the TSMS will serve as an educational document for those duly authorized to make and implement such policies.

There is one element of the TSMS that is puzzling and harder to decode. On the one hand it calls for emphasizing future warfighting readiness over near term demand. On the other hand, the document calls for robust forward presence as well as conducting large fleet exercises. It is not clear how the Services will square this circle. Besides, the combatant commanders call the shots on what forces will be deployed where. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who had also previously served as Undersecretary of the Navy, attempted to establish a “supply-side” approach to force deployment and was unsuccessful. While integration of the Naval Services to achieve efficiencies is laudable, it is not clear that this in itself will relieve the pressure to send forces forward.

Finally, the TSMS may be a tool for mending organizational discontinuities within the Navy. For decades the resources directorate, N8, has operated in an insular manner, repelling any attempts by the strategy office, which had been in the N3/5 directorate but which now resides within the N7 directorate, to influence the Navy’s programming. N8 relies on a numerical, computer-based analysis process called campaign analysis to determine what kinds of ships should be built, what kinds of weapons procured, etc. The more qualitative ideas coming out of the strategy process cannot be easily accommodated by the campaign analysis process and have been therefore largely disregarded. The TSMS, in addition to calling not only for a new fleet design but also a new integrated Naval Analytic Master Plan, seems to be aiming to break the logjam between the two directorates – a good thing. However, it should be noted that the team that penned the TSMS was likely composed of N7 folks and it remains to be seen what effect the document will have on the flow of influence from strategy to programming.

The intent here is not to critique the TSMS, although I have done a little of that, but rather, understanding the true nature of strategy documents issued by the Navy, to divine the intent behind it. The Navy has not had a formal strategy process, most capstone documents being the products of an ad hoc effort, so it is never a routine occurrence when one is issued. Thus it is a worthwhile exercise to try and read between the lines of a new document. Hopefully this exercise will be of use to readers.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

FEATURED IMAGE: ATLANTIC OCEAN (Nov. 2, 2012) A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter prepares to land on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1). For prudent planning, the Navy has begun to preposition Wasp, USS San Antonio (LPD 17) and USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) for primary assistance in the affected North East region if required by FEMA following the devastation brought on by Hurricane Sandy. San Antonio and Carter Hall got underway Oct. 31 from Norfolk, Va., and began transiting north to the affected areas on Nov. 1. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Markus Castaneda/Released) 121102-N-WI365-326

Future Tech

State of War, State of Mind: Reconsidering Mobilization in the Information Age, Pt. 1

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By LCDR Robert “Jake” Bebber, USN

This article is part one of a two-part piece, drawn from a recently completed report by the author that was published by The Journal of Political Risk, and is available in its entirety here. 

Introduction

Recently, American policymakers and national security thinkers have begun to recognize that revisionist powers in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have no interest in preserving the current liberal order, and instead have embarked on a course to challenge and supplant the U.S. as the world’s superpower. However, the United States is not postured to mobilize for long-term strategic competition or war with great powers. 

American policymakers’ assumptions regarding war preparation, prosecution, and sustainment are not aligned to the emerging 21st Century landscape dominated by three major trends: advances in understanding of neuroscience, dual-use technologies, and new financial business models. These articles take a holistic approach toward identifying how war mobilization in the 21st Century will look different from the industrial models of the mid-to-late 20th Century. Looking beyond the Defense Department, they explore economic, policy, social, technological, and informational aspects of planning and preparation. Part Two will identify why the intelligence and national security communities are not postured to detect or anticipate emerging disruptions and strategic latency. It will put forward strategies and recommendations on how to grow American power and create new sources of comparative advantage that can be rapidly converted into both kinetic and non-kinetic effects in all domains, not just military.

21st Century Trends That Will Shape the Coming War 

Three main forces will shape the 21st Century: advances in neuroscience, emerging dual-use technologies, and new financial business models. The convergence of these forces creates disruptions on a mass scale. Chinese and Russian operations, policies, and investment decisions, along with market forces and changing consumer preferences each play a part in the changing geopolitical landscape, threatening the efficacy of American assumptions in strategic competition, war preparation, prosecution, and sustainment. This requires rethinking how the U.S. considers strategic warning and intelligence during peacetime, the transition from competition to conflict, the resiliency and capacity of current forces to “weather the storm” of initial combat, and whether the country is postured to transition to other means of using force during a global war with a great power. Perhaps most important will be the means by which the U.S. sustains its economic power and the political will to fight. Right now, adversaries are conducting systematic attacks on U.S. and allied sources of economic power, reducing and eliminating what was once considered the principle advantage of industrialized democracies, while at the same time using non-kinetic means to deliver mass cognitive attacks, destabilizing political societies.

The Brain as the Battlefield

Over the past forty years, scientists have made significant advancements in the study of the human brain. James Giordano and others point to immense potential for neuroscience and neurotechnology to “study, predict and influence” human ecologies, potentially affecting human activities on individual, group, and population levels, and human relations on a local, regional, and global scale. These understandings will permit the U.S. and its competitors to develop capabilities to assess, access, and affect the human brain. It will come to influence, and perhaps dominate, the posture and conduct of national security and the defense agenda.

The growth in understanding of the human brain, from evaluating its components and functions, to accessing and influencing it, will be a central focus of strategic competition, not unlike the space program of the Cold War, but with perhaps even more profound implications — the weaponization of brain sciences. Neuroscience can be leveraged as a soft weapon to create economic advantages, intelligence capabilities, and advanced psychological influence operations such as narrative networks. More concerning is how neuroscience can help develop hard weapons that use chemicals, biologicals, toxins, and devices to have physical effects.

Neuroscientific advancement also has significant neuro-enablement application potential to enhance the performance military operators and intelligence officers. More broadly, these understandings can also be used to understand and shape public behavior.

Strategic competitors have invested considerable resources in the research, development, and fielding of neuroscience and biotechnology. China has announced initiatives to position itself as the leading power in brain science and is openly exploring the application of brain sciences to hard and soft power. Military writers and researchers in China argue that future battlefield success will depend on “biological dominance,” “mental/cognitive dominance,” and “intelligence dominance,” and are applying insights from neuroscience to exploit vulnerabilities in human cognition, to include the development of “brain control weaponry.”

Dual-Use, Radical Leveling, and Emerging Technologies

A key driver of strategic competition is the explosive growth in globally powerful “dual-use” or “dual purpose” technologies. These include mobile internet, cloud computing, the exploitation of “big data,” the “internet of things,” ubiquitous sensors, nano-materials, additive manufacturing, self-navigating vehicles, autonomous industrial and civilian robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced energy storage, renewable energy, and “do it yourself” genomics. Since the end of the Cold War, advances in these technologies have had a significant impact on military technology and operational concepts1 in areas as diverse as space and cyberspace operations, biological weapons development, precision guided munitions (PGM), the realization of transoceanic-range precision strikes, autonomous unmanned combat systems and platforms (to include swarms), directed energy combat systems, and enhanced and protected infantry.2

More profound perhaps is how existing and emerging developments in science and technology enhance power in non-kinetic engagements, creating mass disruptive “weapons” that “incur rippling effects in and across targeted individuals, societies and nations.” These actions “can adversely impact, if not defeat, an opponent …” without meeting the current legally accepted criteria of an explicit act of war. These engagements may cause immediate-to-long-term damage to popular stability, but because the perpetrator of these engagements might remain ambiguous, it is politically problematic for the victim to respond. These types of operations are exceptionally difficult to identify in advance as threats, or can evoke effects which “may not be easily recognizable or attributable to the technology or the actor(s).”3

Adversaries pursue these dual-use technologies as means to deliver effects on a population’s brains, or even its genetic code, through the use of the electromagnetic spectrum via radio frequency or directed energy.4 The increased proliferation of Chinese telecommunications hardware, platforms, and infrastructure may provide a way for the PRC to conduct surveillance, collect intelligence, and execute influence operations. It is also a means to use the frequency spectrum to deliver effects at the neurological and even genetic level.5 This would likely be done using mundane and ubiquitous technology, such as 5G networks, cell phone applications, or even music or video streams.6

Economic War Matters More

Investment decisions may telegraph human behavior and intent,7 and identify future asymmetric disruptions in ways superior to traditional strategic intelligence tradecraft. Investments can have multiplier effects that can move entire commercial sectors globally, with profound implications in a strategic competition where understanding future business models is more important than understanding future technology. 

For example, Chinese telecommunication firms can now exert considerable influence because they enjoy approximately 78% of the leverage in the $3.5 trillion global communications industry.8 These firms should not be confused with traditionally understood commercial firms in the democracies, however. The Chinese Communist Party has put in place a legal and political regime that effectively controls corporate operations. This influence began when a Chinese state-owned enterprise made the initial investment in Huawei, telegraphing the Party’s intent to influence the global telecommunications industry.9 The Party has translated its investment into geo-economic effects that create debt obligations among developing countries (“debt-trap diplomacy”) as well as provide entry to Chinese “techno-authoritarian” influence and control of communities and states outside of China.

American national security planners must consider how to build sources of economic power, and sustain that power in a time of strategic competition and conflict, when America’s competitors exercise significant leverage over American, allied, and global industries. The capture and control of key industries such as telecommunications or space systems will circumscribe U.S. power and force policymakers into more difficult trade-offs to sustain a conflict. Information is a strategic resource and should be treated as such.10

Conclusion

The strategic competition between the United States and Allies, China, and Russia, and how states attempt to create and wield power on a global scale will drive the future security environment. There are two broad competing visions of international order: the Chinese and Russian techno-authoritarian model of control, and the liberal model of broadly supported international rules. The chance of this strategic competition erupting into outright conflict is very real.

The fact that both China and the United States – and important powers such as Russia, Great Britain, India, France, Pakistan, and others – are nuclear powers shape the competition in ways similar to the Cold War. Each side will seek to achieve strategic effects while attempting to limit the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. However, as the balance between conventional and non-kinetic powers of each side fluctuate, the risk grows that competitors will see their options reduced to “go nuclear or surrender,” as President Kennedy famously suggested.

This competition, like the one with the Soviets, will require a national effort toward sustained power creation and planning toward the sustained conversion of power into wartime, crisis, and peacetime capabilities. The United States is in the early stages of evaluating its level of preparedness. There are also important distinctions between the current Information Age and how future technologies will reshape human behavior and our understanding of it, and what that means for power creation, sustainment, and rapid conversion. Theoretical frameworks drawn from the Cold War provide some broad insights, but new approaches will be required.

Ultimately, strategic competition, mobilization, and preparedness are still acts of political will, and no effort will be sustainable that does not have the broad buy-in from the American people. It will require not only engagement from senior leaders and elected officials, but also their bipartisan leadership in explaining, gaining, and keeping political support.

Part two of this article will outline what steps the U.S. and Allies should take. When the brain is a battlefield, American paradigms of conflict preparation and executions must change to meet the challenges of an increasingly connected world.

LCDR Bebber is a Cryptologic Warfare officer assigned to Information Warfare Training Command Corry Station in Pensacola, Florida. The views expressed here do not represent those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy or the U.S. government. He welcomes your comments at [email protected]. 

Endnotes

1 Snow, Jen “Radical Leveling Technologies: What They Are, Why They Matter, and the Challenges to Come” Seminar Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Monterey, April 25, 2016.

2 Peter A. Wilson. “Concepts of National Mobilization circa 2036: Implications of Emerging Dual-Purpose and Military Technologies” prepared in support of the “Mobilization in 2030+” tabletop exercise played by the Long-Term Strategy program, (NDU Eisenhower School) March 30, 2016.

3 James Giordano, Joseph DeFranco & L.R. Bremseth “Radical Leveling and Emerging Technologies as Tools of Non-Kinetic Mass Disruption” Invited Perspective Series: Strategic Multilayer Assessment Future of Global Competition & Conflict Effort, February 3, 2019.

4 Markov, Marko S. ““Biological windows”: a tribute to W. Ross Adey.” Environmentalist 25.2-4 (2005): 67-74.

5 Ranzato, M.A., Boureau, Y.L., Chopra, S. and LeCun, Y., March. A unified energy-based framework for unsupervised learning. In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. 2007. (pp. 371-379).

6 Adey, W.R., Brain interactions with RF/microwave fields generated by mobile phones. International Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Third Edition. New York: Elsevier. 2003.

7 Rhemann, Maureen. Exploring Asymmetry to Detect Disruption 2018. Journal of Futures Studies 23(2), pp.85-99.

8 Rhemann, Maureen. “Disrupted. Space 2030”; Reperi Analysis Center (RAC). December, 2019.

9 USCC Research Staff, “The National Security Implications of Investments and Products from the People’s Republic of China in the Telecommunications Sector” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. – China Economic and Security Review Commission, January 2011).

10 Robert J. Bebber, “Treating Information as a Strategic Resource to Win the ‘Information War,’” Orbis Summer (2017): 394–403.

Featured Image: A naval honor guard at the in 2012 onboard the Chinese carrier Liaoning. (Xinhua News Agency Photo)

Podcast

Sea Control 222 – TOPGUN’s Leadership Lessons with Guy Snodgrass & Graham Scarbro

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By Jimmy Drennan

Retired Navy pilot and author Guy Snodgrass joins CIMSEC President Jimmy Drennan and TOPGUN grad Graham Scarbro to discuss his latest book, TOPGUN’s Top 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit. 

Download Sea Control 222- Top Gun Leadership Lessons with Guy Snodgrass and Graham Scarbro


Links

1. TOPGUN’S TOP 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit, by Guy Snodgrass, Sep 15, 2020.
2. “Take a Seat at the Campfire: TOPGUN’s Top Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit,” by Graham Scarbro, CIMSEC, January 10, 2021. 

Jimmy Drennan is President of CIMSEC. Contact him at [email protected]. Contact the Sea Control podcast team at [email protected].

Book Review

Take a Seat at the Campfire: TOPGUN’s Top Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit

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Commander Guy M. Snodgrass, TOPGUN’s TOP 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit, Center Street, 2020, $17.99/hardcover.

By Graham Scarbro

The image is an iconic one in American culture: after a long day on the range, a group of cowboys settles in for the night at the campfire. Under a starry sky and over chow, they regale each other with stories of gunfights, lost loves, strange sights and sounds, cantankerous horses, and lessons learned from a life on the plains.

In naval aviation, pilots and flight officers have a similar tradition. Around a wardroom table or in the squadron ready room, aviators gather around one or a group of storytellers and discuss the same topics as their Wild West forebears. Gunfights are replaced with dogfights, and horses with fighter jets, but “cowboy time” is a revered institution in the Navy’s fighter squadrons. Cowboy time can sometimes yield nothing more than an embarrassing story or two, but more frequently it involves valuable lessons and mentorship, true confessions of lessons learned through trial and error (mostly error), and occasional (quixotic) attempts to fix the Navy’s myriad problems.

Out of these discussions may come life lessons, new policies, and even war-winning tactical innovations like the World War II “Thatch Weave,” but most often cowboy time is a way to connect with each other and share experiences with colleagues and friends.

Enter Commander Guy “Bus” Snodgrass, retired, an FA-18 pilot who upended the Beltway apple cart last year with his memoir Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon With Secretary Mattis. Bus’s first book (I will address him by his callsign, the mark of respect between aviators for whom first names are reserved for their mothers and friends from high school days) was a solemn pondering of the highest levels of military bureaucracy, a look at the uncertainty surrounding the relationship between Secretary Mattis and the President. When I read the book, I picked up on the subtext of Bus’s writings: the Pentagon was a long way, physically and spiritually, from the cockpit of a fighter jet. Bus alluded to his time in the jet several times in Holding the Line, mostly to contrast it with the Pentagon, and there was the sense that he was straining to make sense of the byzantine world of the “Five Sided Circus” through the lens of decades in the cockpit.

A year later, and the lessons seem to have crystalized for Bus in his newest book, part leadership lesson and part cowboy time. TOPGUN’s Top 10: Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit (“TOPGUN” written as it should be: one word, all caps) represents a return to Bus’s roots in the jet, perhaps a natural consequence of a tumultuous year of self-reflection, following the publication of Holding the Line after an equally unpredictable stint at the Pentagon.

Bus illustrates his top ten leadership lessons with a series of anecdotes that recall nothing more than an evening in the ready room with shipmates. Stories of screwups big and small that, repeated and examined over the years, shape the course of a career and yield the life lessons learned in the fast-paced community that is naval aviation.

The book is a quick read, and Bus’s facility with speechwriting comes through as each leadership lesson only needs a few pages to make the point. This is typical of strike-fighter culture, in which flight briefers have limited time to communicate essential data before taking to the skies to execute the mission. Another aviation staple, the flight debrief, informs Bus’s use of bold-faced, succinct lessons to punctuate each chapter. After a long flight in which a thousand variables yield incalculable discreet results, identifying and examining key takeaways is a prime skill in aviation, used to good effect in the book. Bus follows his own advice to “Put the bottom line up front,” and despite it being the reviewer’s least favorite military aphorism, he uses the technique to good effect, explaining the intended lesson succinctly, illustrating each with a story, and wrapping up the chapter with a quick revisiting of the main point.

True to his title, Bus draws lessons from the everyday world of strike-fighter aviation and avoids an over-reliance on his days as a squadron commanding officer as a source for lofty words of inspiration. A common trope in leadership tomes is to pick stories designed to underscore the writer’s credibility as a commanding officer: the maneuvering of a billion-dollar warship, the ordering of a thousand troops into danger, the left hook into the Iraqi desert, and so on.

Instead of this approach, Bus chooses stories primarily from times when he was not in command, underscoring that leadership is a function of how one acts, and not necessarily the job one holds. This approach was thoroughly refreshing and a marked difference from many military leadership lessons that begin and end with: “Well, when I was in command…” and despite the fact that Bus was by all accounts a successful commanding officer. Bus’s connection of leadership with the daily grind of life in the cockpit as a junior or mid-level officer makes the stories more relatable. A reader can picture him or herself in so many similar situations, whether confronted with small decisions to do the right thing, the need to prioritize the important over the interesting, or being in need of a wingman.

From the personal: “Don’t Wait to Make a Friend Until You Need One,” to the professional: “Don’t Confuse Activity with Progress,” Bus’s advice applies beyond the cockpit to the boardroom, the office, and, ideally, to the Pentagon. Bus eschews complex acronyms and jargon for the sake of explaining in plain voice what he means. The result is understandable prose that remains accessible to all readers.

Readers with aviation backgrounds will recognize the book as a published version of cowboy time in the ready room, although Bus chooses stories that are more chaste and makes the lessons learned more obvious than in a typical aviator’s sea story. TOPGUN’s Top 10 gives readers a glimpse at why the Navy’s TOPGUN culture sets the standard for honest critique, self-reflection, and progress in the face of challenges both external and internal, large and small.

Commander Graham Scarbro is a Naval Flight Officer on active duty. The views expressed here do not represent those of his chain of command, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.

Featured Image: ATLANTIC OCEAN (Aug. 1, 2020) An F/A-18F Super Hornet attached to the “Gladiators” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 106 prepares to launch from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) during flight operations, Aug 1, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Aimee Ford)