By Dmitry Filipoff

For the past two weeks, CIMSEC featured short notes submitted to our Call for Notes to the New CNO. In this special series, authors conveyed their thoughts on what they believe are the most pressing issues for the U.S. Navy’s new top leader, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle. 

Authors wrote about a wide variety of topics, including changes to force structure, naval strategy, and the need for more warfighting focus. There were several common themes, including calls for more decisive leadership, a requirement to reconsider old paradigms, and a profound urgency to drive reform.

The featured authors are listed below, and we thank them for their contributions.

“Sir, Be Radical,” by Chris Rielage

“The problem is not charting what the new Navy should look like. The problem is acting on it. This is the moment to be radical – for Admiral Caudle to lean fully into the “C-Notes” and make once-in-a-generation changes to how the Navy thinks and works. It is time for the CNO to steer us to the boldest course, despite the risks – we cannot afford anything else right now.”

“Change the Navy’s Narrative: The Future Fight and the Hybrid Fleet,” by Peter Dombrowski

“By articulating a powerful vision statement, the CNO will help unify effort within the Navy and provide insight to the other sea services about how the Navy will conduct its business for the next three years and beyond.”

“Accelerate Human-Machine Teaming in the Maritime Operations Center,” by Michael Posey

“MOCs serve as the decision hubs of numbered fleets, responsible for executing campaigns at sea and managing maritime task forces. As our Navy fights from the seabed to space and through the electromagnetic spectrum, the volume of data demands our watchstanders employ data-enhancing tools that augment, not replace, human judgment.”

“Sink the Kill Chain: A Navy Space Guide to Protecting Ships and Sailors,” by Alan Brechbill

“Their killchains depend on persistent surveillance, tracking and targeting multi-phenomenology satellites, long-range radars, and networked command systems. In other words, they will not win with their missiles, but with their ability to find us. Breaking that killchain is the Navy’s main line of defense. The uncomfortable truth is that Navy leadership still underappreciates this vulnerability.”

“Train to Win Below the Threshold of War,” by Vince Vanterpool

“The actions seen against the Filipinos by the PRC is only the beginning. There may be similar actions against U.S. assets in the future. In order to adequately deter and defeat these future attempts, the Navy Deterrence Concept needs robust tactics and techniques for naval units operating at the tactical level just below the threshold of armed conflict.”

“We are at Risk of Forgetting the Lessons of the 2017 Collisions,” by John Cordle

“Organizational drift to failure is always a risk, and an important protection against it is constant, critical self-assessment. These three mishap reports – viewed holistically – are a perfect opportunity to do just that. The question should not be ‘have we completed all of the CR recommendations?’ But ‘did they work?’ Recent events indicate they might not have.”

“What Unifies the Foundry, Fleet, and Fighting Triad? Warfighting Focus,” by Paul Viscovich

“The CNO has inherited a fleet that has suffered creeping administrative overload for years. Unless the CNO can put an end to the suffocating administrative accretions from decades of poorly prioritized requirements, our next war may feature more ‘victory marks’ on the enemy’s bridgewings and fighter cockpits than on ours.”

“Fix the Navy’s Flawed System of Warfighting Development,” by Dmitry Filipoff

“For the U.S. Navy, the first 30 years of post-Cold War experience featured a major institutional reorientation toward the low-end spectrum of operations in a highly permissive threat environment. This facilitated widespread dysfunction across critical warfighting development functions that are crucial for preparing the Navy for war. The result has been one of the most pivotal eras of decay and atrophy of high-end warfighting skill in the modern history of the U.S. Navy.”

“Revisiting A Modest Proposal for Improving Shipyard Production and Repair Capacity,” by Ryan Walker

“I recommend the Chief of Naval Operations push the 8-4-2-10 as a potential realistic solution rooted in historical insight, operational experience, and a deep respect for the challenges facing the shipyard worker. If implemented thoughtfully, the 8-4-2-10 schedule could become a model for other defense programs, reinforcing readiness while preserving workforce well-being.”

“The Submarine Force Needs More Flexible Training Tools,” by Andrew Pfau and Bridger Smith

“As shipyard availability delays continue to challenge the submarine force, sailors assigned to the these units require better and more consistent training tools. Sailors must be ready to support at-sea operations and units must quickly transition to a combat-ready state after shipyard periods. Low-cost, high-density training tools like wargames and an “attack center in a box” can provide opportunities for sailors to build and maintain perishable at-sea skills, leading to a more ready and lethal force.”

“A Navy for War in the Age of Intelligent Missiles,” by Craig Koerner

“Unable to hide, the future of conventional air and sea-surface platforms is grim. When fighting competent opponents, those few, valuable, and conspicuous legacy platforms are likely to be destroyed. Modern warfare is not boxing, it is hide-and-seek. We should redesign our forces accordingly.”

“Anchor Acquisition and Force Development on Targeting China’s C4ISR,” by Nicholas Weising

“U.S. Navy operational concepts must make an explicit priority of targeting the C4ISR architecture that fundamentally enables China’s A2/AD approach and have it serve as a core organizing principle for Navy acquisition and force development.”

“Expand the Navy’s Over-the Horizon Targeting Solutions,” by Richard Mosier

“Since the fielding of the Harpoon missile in the 1970s and the original Tomahawk Anti-ship Missile (TASM) in 1982, maritime over-the-horizon targeting has been an insufficient and largely unresolved ISR capability requirement for the U.S. Navy. The Navy has had limited long-range sensors for detection and tracking, an inability to sustain continuous tracking of targets of interest after detection, and few direct tactical network exchange capabilities to pertinent commands and shooting ships from satellites and primary processing commands.”

“To Win the Fight, We Must First Win the Mind: Create NDP-1.1 Naval Warfighting,” by Paul Nickell

“The new CNO’s vision to place the Sailor at the center of the Foundry, the Fleet, and the Way We Fight provides a powerful focus for the U.S. Navy. The enduring question is how we build the intellectual foundation to connect these pillars. While our service possesses an abundance of technical and procedural manuals, we lack a unifying warfighting philosophy that informs Sailors on not just what our forces do, but also how to think about the fundamental nature of combat at sea.”

“The Indian Ocean: An Opportunity to Strengthen Alliances and Deter China,” by Renato Scarfi and Gian Carlo Poddighe

“The naval instrument is a powerful tool for manifesting shared will and projecting influence, and the theater where this will be most effective is the Indo-Pacific. The main competition will take place in those waters, and marks an opportunity for the U.S. Navy to strengthen its naval cooperation with Europe.”

“Start Building Small Warships,” by Shelley Gallup and Ben DiDonato

“Small warships have a long history in the U.S. Navy and are poised to offer an evolutionary leap in capability. Small, highly automated, lightly crewed, blue-water warships will help offset the capabilities of competing fleets and ensure enduring maritime superiority for the U.S. Navy. It is time to build a prototype of the LMACC and its flotilla of innovations.”

“The Imperative for Integrated Maritime Operations,” by Steven Bancroft and Ben Van Horrick

“Beyond the ARG/MEU team, 21st-century naval integration is more than a technological or organizational shift — it is an operational imperative. Combining the agility and expeditionary mindset of the Marine Corps with the firepower and reach of the Navy into a single, lower-level command, the naval service can build a more lethal, resilient, agile maritime force. This integrated approach—exemplified by formations such as TF-76/3, TF 61/2, and TF-51/5—ensures that U.S. naval power projection and dominance remain ready to meet the demands of the modern era. “

“Conduct Legal Preparation of the Battlespace,” by James Kraska

“Much of our collective experience in international law is from the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not operations at sea. We should refocus on the laws that apply throughout the global commons – sea, air, and space – that surround our Homeland and connects us to allies in Asia and Europe.”

“Rugby and Rivalry: Use Sports Diplomacy to Counter China in the South Pacific,” by Jason Lancaster

“Navy rugby matches with Pacific Island teams are an excellent way to provide the administration with exciting and high-profile opportunities to engage with leaders in countries vital to U.S. interests. The PRC can build stadiums, but does not field competitive rugby teams, while the U.S. Navy does. The Navy can use sports diplomacy to demonstrate presence and benefit U.S. regional interests.”

“Technical Interoperability in Contested Environments is a Must,” by Nicholas A. Kristof

“The need for interoperability in naval operations has never been more critical. However, these operations will increasingly be forced to occur in contested communication environments, where data access and connectivity cannot be guaranteed. Balancing these two imperatives—interoperability and resilience in contested conditions—will be vital to successful maritime operations.”

“Navigate the Future Through Maritime Wisdom,” by Roshan Kulatunga

“Cognitive preparation has to be one of the key considerations for the new U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. Knowledge alone is inadequate, it must be developed alongside intellect. By embracing these intellectual traditions and prominently embedding them in military education, navies can ensure their sailors are not just operators of ships, but custodians of an enduring wisdom that continues to guide humanity’s engagement with the sea.”

“Three Focus Areas for the New CNO,” by Jacob Wiencek

The “Davidson Window” is closing and we need the sea service to deliver the crucial component of the Joint Force. Part of the solution is found in better physical health, greater formal training, and emphasizing the importance of cyberspace operations.

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

Featured Image: Adm. Daryl Caudle, on the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), Feb. 9, 2024. (U.S. Navy photo)

Notes to the New CNO Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

“After their examination, the recruits should then receive the military mark, and be taught the use of their arms by constant and daily exercise. But this essential custom has been abolished by the relaxation introduced by a long peace. We cannot now expect to find a man to teach what he never learned.” –Vegetius, De re militari

For the U.S. Navy, the first 30 years of post-Cold War experience featured a major institutional reorientation toward the low-end spectrum of operations in a highly permissive threat environment. This facilitated widespread dysfunction across critical warfighting development functions that are crucial for preparing the Navy for war. The result has been one of the most pivotal eras of decay and atrophy of high-end warfighting skill in the modern history of the U.S. Navy.

A pointed example of the U.S. Navy’s atrophy in warfighting development can be seen in its combat training program and weak opposition forces. For decades, the U.S. Navy’s primary format for training carrier strike groups consisted of training only one warfare area at a time against opposition that was deliberately made to lose. No matter how poorly U.S. Navy forces perform in their pre-deployment exercises, they will still get certified as ready for war. This is because it is ultimately more important for the Pentagon to push naval forces out the door and meet demand signals on time, rather than to ensure its naval forces feature genuinely high readiness for great power war. This system has been normalized over decades and led to a deeply distorted understanding of what deploying naval forces are actually capable of.

This 30-year era of atrophy is some of the most fundamental background context for understanding the current state of the modern U.S. Navy. It is also the formative career experience of a full generation of naval officers and heavily shaped them. This experience has unfortunately contributed to major blindspots over first-order considerations of how a Navy prepares for great power war, as well as shortfalls in tactical literacy in high-end warfighting. This has made it difficult for the Navy to overcome the systemic dysfunction that resulted from its post-Cold War experience, and effectively pivot toward high-end warfighting to meet the rise of China’s superpower fleet.

The widespread problem in tactical literacy is especially consequential, and its impact is hard to overstate. Almost everything the Navy does boils down to its tactical warfighting implications, whether it is what force design it should have, how it should operate, or who it should promote. Almost everything is a function of tactics and has a direct tactical implication. But tactics are not minor details or actions – they are the governing logic of how fleets are destroyed in combat. And that logic infuses everything a Navy does.

If the Navy does not effectively understand that logic, then so much naval policymaking and administration will be seriously impaired when the warfighters do not have a good idea of what the combat is going to look like or how to prepare for it. It is extremely difficult to make good decisions about what force structure will be relevant, how to design warfighting concepts, or how to reform force generation, if the warfighters do not  understand how the fighting is going to work.

These issues are reflected in how the governance of the Navy’s warfighting development has a fundamental structural problem. The Navy is one of the U.S. military services that does not have a high-echelon warfighting development command for the whole service. There is no command in the Navy that is charged with acting as a true integrator of the warfighting development of its communities. Instead, those functions are heavily concentrated in community silos, who develop their forces with great independence. OPNAV N7 and NWDC have warfighting development in their names, but they do not have the actual core equities and authorities that are befitting of a true service-wide warfighting development command. They do not control combat training or tactical development, and they cannot compel the community warfighting development centers to make tradeoffs for the sake of integrating into an overarching warfighting concept.

But high-end warfighting is inherently combined arms warfighting and fleet-level warfighting. A fleet warfare doctrine must feature a combined arms doctrine that features deliberate tradeoffs and holistic integration across multiple types of forces, rather than a doctrine that is only a sum of parts that were separately grown by independent communities. This flawed architecture seriously impairs the Navy’s ability to generate and then implement service warfighting concepts, especially ones that yield real binding directives for how the Type Commands update their warfighting development.

The Navy should consider establishing a high-echelon warfighting development command that is empowered with the right authorities to truly integrate community tactics into fleet-level doctrine, and lead a broad range of warfighting development reforms. It should make reforms that ensure many warfighting development functions are better integrated and feature more responsive feedback loops that get quickly updated to pace the threat environment. SMWDC’s Red Sea combat lessons process is a positive example of sharpening these feedback loops, and there are many others that deserve similar updates.

The Navy should also systematically review and update its curriculum, qualifications, and administrative requirements to place greater emphasis on tactical warfighting and ensure the content is accurately pacing the high-end threat environment. It should also update career incentives and promotion precepts to ensure tactical warfighting skill and contributions to warfighting development are more heavily weighted in career progression. Lastly, the Navy should advocate for more service-retained deployments so it can resource its warfighting development agenda with more ready naval forces, rather than have almost all of them exclusively go toward combatant command demand signals.

Thankfully much of the system of warfighting development does not run through the Pentagon’s annual budgeting process. This should hopefully afford service leadership far more decision-space in making reforms, and making them quickly. Things like combat exercise regimes, tactical development agendas, certifications, qualifications, and curriculum can likely be changed far more quickly and substantively than a program of record in a POM submission. Updating a training syllabus can have a near-term, deckplate-level, fleet-wide impact on the Navy’s warfighting skill in a way few things can.

These efforts will be a concrete way to put warfighting first at an institutional level and elevate the importance of lethality. A reformed system of warfighting development will do far more than equip the Navy with better governance and readiness for great power war. It can set the stage for a fleet that dominates future high-end conflict, and help the U.S. Navy finally put a historic era of atrophy behind it. 

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. He is the author of the Fighting DMO and How the Fleet Forgot to Fight series. He is the author of “Distributed Maritime Operations: Solving What Problems and Seizing Which Opportunities?,” and coauthor of “Learning to Win: Using Operational Innovation to Regain the Advantage at Sea against China.” Contact him at Content@cimsec.org. 

Featured Image: PORT HUENEME, Calif. (Feb 27, 2025) – The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) conducts a port call onboard Naval Base Ventura County (NBVC) Port Hueneme. (U.S. Navy photo by Master-at-Arms 1st Class Jon Cason)

By Dmitry Filipoff

For the next two weeks, CIMSEC will be featuring short notes submitted to our Call for Notes to the New CNO. In this special series, authors convey their thoughts on what they believe are the most pressing issues for the U.S. Navy’s new top leader, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle. From calls for new force structure to a reinvigorated warfighting focus, the Navy’s new leadership is confronting many challenging issues, while also having many opportunities to make major reforms. 

The featured authors are listed below, and will be updated with more names as the series unfolds.

“Sir, Be Radical,” by Chris Rielage
“Change the Navy’s Narrative: The Future Fight and the Hybrid Fleet,” by Peter Dombrowski
“Accelerate Human-Machine Teaming in the Maritime Operations Center,” by Michael Posey
“Sink the Kill Chain: A Navy Space Guide to Protecting Ships and Sailors,” by Alan Brechbill
“Train to Win Below the Threshold of War,” by Vince Vanterpool
“We are at Risk of Forgetting the Lessons of the 2017 Collisions,” by John Cordle
“What Unifies the Foundry, Fleet, and Fighting Triad? Warfighting Focus,” by Paul Viscovich
“Fix the Navy’s Flawed System of Warfighting Development,” by Dmitry Filipoff
“Revisiting A Modest Proposal for Improving Shipyard Production and Repair Capacity,” by Ryan Walker
“The Submarine Force Needs More Flexible Training Tools,” by Andrew Pfau and Bridger Smith
“A Navy for War in the Age of Intelligent Missiles,” by Craig Koerner
“Anchor Acquisition and Force Development on Targeting China’s C4ISR,” by Nicholas Weising
“Expand the Navy’s Over-the Horizon Targeting Solutions,” by Richard Mosier
“To Win the Fight, We Must First Win the Mind: Create NDP-1.1 Naval Warfighting,” by Paul Nickell
“The Indian Ocean: An Opportunity to Strengthen Alliances and Deter China,” by Renato Scarfi and Gian Carlo Poddighe
“Start Building Small Warships,” by Shelley Gallup and Ben DiDonato
“The Imperative for Integrated Maritime Operations,” by Steven Bancroft and Ben Van Horrick
“Conduct Legal Preparation of the Battlespace,” by James Kraska
“Rugby and Rivalry: Use Sports Diplomacy to Counter China in the South Pacific,” by Jason Lancaster
“Technical Interoperability in Contested Environments is a Must,” by Nicholas A. Kristof
“Navigate the Future Through Maritime Wisdom,” by Roshan Kulatunga
“Three Focus Areas for the New CNO,” by Jacob Wiencek

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

Featured Image: Adm. Daryl Caudle, the 34th Chief of Naval Operations, delivers remarks during an assumption of office ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington D.C., Aug. 25. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Vanessa White.)