By Bruce B. Stubbs

The Problem

Every year the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) submits a posture statement to Congress. It is the Navy’s principal annual self-assessment, the one document in which the service’s senior uniformed officer reports, over a personal signature, on readiness, force structure, and strategic requirements. For the congressional committees charged with raising and maintaining a Navy, it is among the most important pieces of evidence they receive, because it is the Navy’s official account of its own condition.

It is also almost entirely unconstrained. No statute dictates what a posture statement must contain, what form it must take, or what baseline should be used to evaluate it. What the document emphasizes or omits, and how it frames what remains is shaped, as we will see, not by the Navy alone but by several powerful players with competing agendas, none of whom holds the pen entirely. The result is not a standardized assessment but an annual narrative, its register set less by the requirements of oversight than by the incentives of advocacy and different agendas.

This is a peculiar gap, and it has nothing to do with the character of any individual CNO. Even if every CNO communicated in perfect good faith, an unconstrained annual narrative would still be a poor instrument of oversight, because oversight depends on structure, continuity, and comparability that no single year’s narrative can supply. Congress has long understood this everywhere else in its dealings with the Navy, and has imposed that structure by law on shipbuilding, acquisition, and fleet-requirement reporting. The posture statement is the conspicuous exception. This essay argues that Congress should impose the same reporting discipline upon the posture statement that it already applies to other required Navy reporting, by legislating its format.

The Evidence: Thirty-Five Years of Warning Without Consequence

A review of Navy posture statements from 1991 through 2026 reveals a consistent and durable pattern. In almost every year the statement paired a warning, whether shrinking force structure, deferred maintenance, an aging fleet, industrial-base erosion, manpower shortfalls, or rising operational risk, with a reassurance that the Navy remained ready and capable of meeting its commitments. The warning was usually present. Rarely, however, was it allowed to stand alone long enough to alarm.

Read one at a time, each statement seemed reasonable. Read in sequence, the pattern becomes unmistakable, and it runs in three movements. First the warning, naming a real and worsening condition. Then the reassurance, set in the same passage, affirming present readiness. Then, year after year, normalization set in, as a deficiency acknowledged every cycle without consequence stopped reading as a deficiency at all and became a feature of the landscape. Repetition without consequence is the mechanism. A problem reported annually, and annually absorbed, ceases to look like a problem.

The pairing is visible in the CNOs’ own words. In 2006, CNO Michael Mullen told Congress that the fleet “stands at 281 ships—not enough in my view,” then assured the committee in the same breath that the Navy’s plan “centered on 11 aircraft carriers with a fleet of about 313 ships, affordably meets these needs.”¹ In 2014, CNO Jonathan Greenert warned that under Budget Control Act caps the Navy “would be unable to execute at least 4 of the 10 primary missions,” even as he testified that the budget “delivers sufficient readiness to meet our GFMAP [Global Force Management Allocation Plan] presence commitments and provide sufficient ‘surge’ capacity for contingency response.”² Each warning was real, but neither was allowed to stand without the reassurance that blunted it.

A recurring weakness in many posture statements was the tendency to describe conditions rather than consequences. The statements might warn that: fleet size was insufficient; maintenance was deferred; readiness was declining; or industrial capacity was strained. While these were important warnings, they often stopped short of explaining what would happen if the deficiencies remained unaddressed. The language of “risk” was frequently used, yet the specific operational, strategic, fiscal, or human consequences of that risk were not always clearly articulated. A reader of three decades of these documents is left to ask the question every congressional staffer eventually asks of a vague brief. So what? Unsustainable when? Which mission fails? Which ship does not deploy? The statements seldom were answered. A warning that never states its consequence cannot compel action, because it never tells anyone what they stand to lose by waiting. The problem was not that Congress lacked warnings. It was that the warnings rarely matured into explicit statements of what the nation would lose if they were ignored. As a result, Congress was often informed of problems without receiving a corresponding assessment of the consequences of inaction.

This was not for lack of information. Over the same decades a separate body of evidence stated the problems and consequences plainly. The 2010 Balisle Fleet Review Panel concluded that cumulative decisions made over the preceding decade had produced a measurable decline in material readiness across the surface force, and traced the fall to 2000.³ The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) was blunter still, concluding in its 2010 Tipping Point study that “when you are no longer present in one or two areas of vital national interest with dominant maritime forces, you are at the ‘tipping point.'”⁴ CNA’s warning extended beyond the immediate moment. It concluded that absent corrective action the Navy would “continue to leak capabilities and capacity throughout the next two decades.” The Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) recorded falling material-condition scores year after year.⁵ The Government Accountability Office (GAO) counted the cost in hard numbers, including 10,363 days of attack-submarine idle time and maintenance delay between 2008 and 2018.⁶ The contrast between posture statement warnings and these reviews is the point, because each of these reviews named a consequence and attributed it to a cause. The same conditions that presented as alarms in an audit read as manageable challenges in the posture statement.

That cost came due in the summer of 2017, when the separate collisions of USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) in the western Pacific killed seventeen sailors. Much of official Washington reacted as though the Navy’s readiness problems had appeared out of nowhere, but the Washington policy world had got it wrong. The problems had been documented for years, in some cases for decades, as two internal authoritative post-collision Navy reviews underscored. The Strategic Readiness Review concluded that the accidents reflected broad institutional and readiness failures that had accumulated over years, not isolated mistakes.⁷ The Comprehensive Review reached a similar conclusion. It found that “the risks that were taken in the Western Pacific accumulated over time, and did so insidiously,” and that the operating environment had become normalized to the point that sailors and headquarters staffs could no longer recognize that the processes used to identify, communicate, and assess readiness were failing.⁸

These external and internal reviews generally stated consequences more directly and concretely than the Navy’s annual posture statements. They described readiness systems breaking down, training standards atrophying, maintenance being deferred, risk accumulating, and capacity becoming unsustainable. It was the Navy’s own senior leaders, in the end, that documented those consequences more explicitly and forcefully than its annual posture statements had. The issue was not the absence of warning which were common and occasionally stark. The problem was that their implications were often underdeveloped and that they were frequently paired with reassurances that the Navy remained ready and capable of meeting its commitments.

The interesting question, then, is not whether warning existed. It is why warning, and by extension risk, became normalized. The harder questions are why the Navy’s own signed account of its condition so rarely stated the consequences that would have made the warning impossible to defer, and why the oversight system built to catch such a decline did not. Part of the answer lies in what the posture statement was asked to do, and in the process it was meant to serve.

Why It Happened: A Document Serving Many Masters

Over time, posture statements evolved from relatively straightforward professional assessments into hybrid documents that simultaneously served oversight, budgetary, political, institutional, and strategic-communication purposes. Warnings were embedded within a narrative that simultaneously described the Navy’s current condition, the future force readiness, and assurances of continued mission execution. The narrative tended to blur the distinction between the Navy’s current posture, the future force envisioned under the forthcoming President’s Budget, and the consequences of continued fiscal constraint. The result was not an absence of warning. It was a warning embedded within a narrative that simultaneously assessed current readiness, advocated for future resources, projected future capability, and reassured Congress that mission execution remained possible. This pattern persisted across the post–Cold War era under successive administrations and CNOs, which is the first clue that its source is structural rather than personal. A document produced by that many different people, under that many different Presidents, in that consistent a form, is not expressing anyone’s individual choice. It is expressing the incentives of the system that produces it.

Those incentives pull in different directions, because the posture statement is expected to serve several masters at once. The Secretary of the Navy, (SECNAV), through the Secretary of Defense, answers to the President, and no administration wants its officials telling Congress that the President’s budget is inadequate or the service is heading toward trouble. That induces an incentive toward reassurance. Congress is not one audience but many, with the majority often inclined to support the administration and the minority more inclined to expose its shortfalls. And the Navy itself wants resources without inviting the detailed direction that every admission of weakness can provoke. This concern is evidenced by the steady growth of the National Defense Authorization Act from roughly 20 pages in the early 1960s to “more than 3,000 pages” for FY2026, becoming an ever more prescriptive document.⁹ Nor are members of Congress immune from incentives of their own, often attending more closely to the shipyards, bases, programs, and jobs in their districts than to the aggregate condition of the fleet, which makes a clear, standardized account of that aggregate condition all the more necessary.

Combine all those pressures and the posture statement emerges as a negotiated document, not negotiated line by line, but in a way that accommodates various institutional preferences. The administration wants reassurance, the two parties in Congress want material that serves their differing aims, and the Navy wants resources without micromanagement. The warning satisfies the Navy’s need to signal requirements; the reassurance satisfies the administration’s need to demonstrate competence; the ambiguity holds detailed intervention at bay. The warning-and-reassurance pattern is the natural product of those crosscurrents. It is, in the end, a compromise document, and a compromise document makes a poor instrument of oversight, because the very ambiguity that lets it satisfy everyone is what drains it of the consequence, continuity, and comparability that oversight requires. Indeed, these annual documents are so compromised that retired Army Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr observed that posture hearings have “largely devolved into ‘information-free’ events.”¹⁰

Congress Already Knows How to Fix This

If this problem were unique to posture statements, reform might be difficult. In fact, Congress has confronted similar reporting failures repeatedly and has developed a consistent solution. The reform this essay proposes is not novel. It advocates that the rule Congress already follows in all other dealings with the Navy be applied at last to the one document that has escaped it. Again and again, when Congress found executive-branch self-reporting too optimistic, too inconsistent, or too vague to support oversight, it has responded the same way, not by asking the service to do better, but by legislating what the report must contain.

The pattern began with acquisition. Dissatisfied with rosy program reporting, Congress created the Selected Acquisition Reports¹¹ and, through the Nunn-McCurdy provisions, required formal notification and justification whenever a program breached defined cost thresholds.¹² The intent was not to manage programs from Capitol Hill but to force a standardized, comparable account that optimism could not soften.

Congress extended the same logic to force planning, though with an instructive limit. Under 10 U.S.C. § 231, the Secretary of the Navy must submit with the budget an annual 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan, carrying the views of the CNO and the Marine Corps Commandant, along with a certification that the budget actually funds it. The plan does useful work.¹³ It lays out a procurement timeline that lets the shipbuilding industry plan, budget, and prepare, and it lets Congress see the Navy operating with intent toward a stated force-level goal. But its purpose is narrow. It is, in effect, a funded-or-not construction schedule, valuable for industrial coordination and budget markup, and largely silent on readiness, maintenance, risk, and consequence. It can show how many ships the Navy wants, and by when, but it was never built to justify a larger fleet, to explain the failure to reach one, or to connect the fleet’s condition to the stakes of inaction. The record bears out that narrowness. The plan has been submitted faithfully every year since 2003, yet in March 2025 the GAO reported that the Navy has no more ships today than when it issued that first plan, despite a near-doubling of its shipbuilding budget over the same two decades.¹⁴ The plan recorded the intent and the timeline; it neither caused that stagnation nor was equipped to arrest it. That is the lesson for posture-statement reform. A report is only as useful as the substance Congress requires it to contain, and a timeline of intentions is not the same as an instrument of oversight.

Congress has shown it can do exactly that. There are three prime examples of statutory reports mandated by Congress primarily because Congress could not get the information it required for effective oversight of the Navy and the other armed services.  These reports are the Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement (BFSAR), the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels, and the Annual Aviation Inventory and Funding Plan.¹⁵ In each report Congress did three things it has never done for the annual posture statement. It named the official who signs and submits the report, it set a deadline or triggering event, and it prescribed the specific content the report must contain. No comparable statute governs the posture statement. The precedent to mandate its originator, format, and contents is well established. (See Table 1.)

Table 1: Statutory Precedents for a Congressionally Mandated Navy Report

Report	Statute	Originator (signs and submits)	Purpose	Major Data and Information Elements Required
Annual Aviation Inventory and Funding Plan Current form: Annual Aircraft Procurement Plan and Aircraft Inventory Report	10 U.S.C. § 231a16 Annual plan and certification, submitted not later than 30 days after the President’s budget.	Secretary of Defense Submits the plan and signs the certification.	Show whether the budget funds the aircraft needed to sustain the aviation force structure the national military strategy requires, and disclose the risk if it does not.	•   A 15-year procurement program for fighter, attack, bomber, lift, and ISR aircraft •   The aviation force structure required by the national military strategy •   Estimated annual investment funding for each program •   Estimated annual life-cycle operating and support funding •   An annual aircraft inventory by type, model, and series •   A certification that the budget funds the plan, with a shortfall and risk assessment if it does not
Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement (BFSAR)	10 U.S.C. § 869517 Submitted not later than 180 days after a covered event (a change in strategic guidance, laydown, operating concepts, or missions).	Chief of Naval Operations Submits to the congressional defense committees.	Establish and update the battle force ship requirement, the force-level goal and mix the fleet must reach to meet strategy and combatant-commander demand.	•   A review of the federal, DoD, and Navy strategic guidance the force must follow •   The steady-state demand for maritime security and security force assistance •   The force options that meet combatant-commander theater campaign plan demands •   A force optimization analysis of the day-to-day global posture required •   Amphibious warfare and Marine-lift requirements set by the Commandant of the Marine Corps
Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels The 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan	10 U.S.C. § 23118 Annual plan and certification, submitted with the President’s budget.	Secretary of the Navy Submits and signs plan, which carries the unaltered assessment of Chief of Naval Operations and Commandant of the Marine Corps. Secretary of Defense certifies funding adequacy.	Present the 30-year plan to build, maintain, and modernize the battle force, and certify whether the budget funds it.	•   A 30-year construction program by fiscal year, ship type, and quantity •   The battle force inventory the plan would produce •   The estimated annual construction cost and the basis for it •   The estimated funding to operate, maintain, and modernize the force •   The unaltered assessment of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps •   A certification that the budget funds the plan, with risk if it does not

For illustrative purposes, the Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement (BFSAR) report, codified at 10 U.S.C. § 8695, does not solicit input from the Secretary or the administration. It directs the CNO, by name, to submit to the congressional defense committees an assessment of the fleet the Navy requires. And Congress did not merely ask for a number. It specified the contents, a review of strategic guidance, an analysis of steady-state demand, modeling of the Navy’s ability to fight and win approved scenarios, and based on all of that, the required number and posture of each class of ship, projected across five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years. The detail was the point, because Congress had learned that left to define the report’s contents itself, the Navy would not reliably say how many ships it needed, or why. The reports bear this out. The first, in 2022, set the requirement at 373 ships;¹⁹ the second, in 2023, at 381.²⁰ The number moved, but for the first time Congress could see, in a specified form, the reasoning behind it.

The BFSAR also exposes the limit of what format reform can promise, and the objection deserves a direct answer. That assessment did everything this essay advocates. It was mandated in detail, signed by the CNO, and specific to the ship. It set the requirement at 381. And it changed almost nothing: no administration funded it, and the battle force still sits below 300. A skeptic may fairly ask why mandating the posture statement’s format would fare any better. The answer is that legislating format compels accounting, not appropriations, and such distinction is the point rather than a concession. A mandated format cannot force Congress to buy ships. What it can do is strip the Navy of the ability to let a warning quietly disappear, to state a requirement one year and fall silent the next, to name a problem and never report what became of it. That is the specific failure this essay diagnoses, and it is the failure a disciplined format would cure. Accountability is not the same as appropriation, but it is the precondition for it.

Alongside these mandated self-reports, Congress built a second layer of defense, independent analysis. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores the Navy’s shipbuilding plans against its own cost models. The GAO audits acquisition and maintenance. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) supplies standing expert analysis to the committees. Congress created these institutions precisely because it understood that agencies are poor judges of their own performance. The purpose was not to eliminate agency expertise but to ensure that congressional oversight did not depend exclusively upon it. The Navy is a documented case in point, and the most telling testimony comes not from a critic but from Congress’s own analyst. CRS naval analyst Ronald O’Rourke has observed that the incentive toward optimistic Navy cost estimates is so strong that it has become, in his words, “almost standard operating procedure.”²¹ That is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is a description of exactly the institutional optimism this essay has traced in the posture statements, identified independently, in another reporting stream, by the very office Congress created to check it.

The conclusion writes itself. Across acquisition, shipbuilding, fleet requirements, and budget analysis, Congress has already decided that it cannot rely on unstructured Navy self-assessment, and it has imposed structure by law in every one of them. The posture statement is the lone holdout, the one major annual account of the Navy’s condition that Congress still receives as whatever narrative the Navy chooses to write. There is no principled reason for the exception.

The question is no longer academic. The Navy faces a fleet below the size its own strategy demands and which is still shrinking, submarine-maintenance delays measured in years, a strained shipbuilding and repair base, munitions shortfalls, aging infrastructure, and an adversary in China that numerically “has the largest navy in the world.”²² In the coming decade Congress will be asked to make consequential decisions about force structure and resources, very likely involving the largest naval buildup since the 1980s. Those decisions require a reporting instrument capable of connecting conditions to consequences and preserving institutional memory across administrations. The posture statement, as currently written, is not that instrument.

Caudle’s 2026 posture statement demonstrates that candid discussion of readiness consequences is possible. However, the historical record reviewed here shows substantial variation in how CNOs have presented risk, readiness, and implications. Effective oversight should not depend upon the communication style or priorities of a particular CNO. The purpose of reform is to ensure that Congress receives consistent, comparable, and decision-relevant information regardless of who occupies the office.

A Navy Posture Statement Reform Act

The remedy follows directly from the diagnosis. If the posture statement fails as an oversight instrument because it is an unconstrained narrative, the fix is to constrain it, not by dictating the Navy’s conclusions but by mandating the categories it may not omit, soften, or quietly drop. The aim is to convert an annual advocacy document into an oversight instrument with continuity from one year to the next. The lesson of the 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan must be heeded. The mandate must drive the contents, not merely the calendar. This degree of specificity is neither unusual nor unprecedented. Congress already prescribes detailed content requirements for numerous defense reports, including those governing acquisition, shipbuilding, and force-structure assessments.

A reformed posture statement would fall into three parts as presented in Tables 2, 3, and 4. The current-year assessment in Part I would preserve what the Navy already does well and discipline it. It would provide: (1) a short assessment of the current security environment; (2) a ranked list of the service’s ten most serious problems. By design, this is a list of problems, not challenges, with each problem carrying its status, trend, severity, corrective action, and the consequence of leaving it unresolved. By providing this list, the Navy lives its management motto to “Embrace the Red” which, according to ADM Stephen Koehler, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander, is “Navy speak for embracing problems and adjusting quickly and holistically to fix them” and is a major plank in its “Get Real, Get Better” command philosophy.²³ In addition, Part I would address: (3) an assessment of the changing character of war caused by developments in the threat capability, geo-political actions, technology, and warfare concepts, etc.; (4) CNO’s risk assessments; (5) CNO’s personal assessment of the Navy’s current readiness; (6) CNO’s evaluation of the implications and consequences of the navy’s top ten problems and current readiness; (7) the top ten accomplishments of the past year (“Embrace the Green”); and (8) formal acknowledgment and praise of Congressional support. Part I would also include an Annex A to address the status of major programs of record and procurements. In regard to risk, as previously explained, Navy posture statements frequently used that term without specifying the type of risk and not always clearly articulating the consequences of that risk. Congress, consequently, while informed of problems was not exposed to the consequences.

Many posture statements exhibited inconsistent treatment of consequences. Some CNOs articulated them clearly while others described only conditions or generalized risk. Even when consequences were identified, they were often accompanied by reassurances that the Navy would continue meeting its commitments. As a result, Congress was frequently presented with warnings without a standardized assessment of what inaction would mean. Section 6 would address this deficiency by requiring the CNOs to state explicitly the consequences of failing to correct major deficiencies.

Table 2: Major Elements of a Congressionally Mandated Posture Statement—Part I Current Fiscal Year Assessment

The Current Year Assessment Topic	What It Requires
1.   Assessment of Current Security Environment	Professional judgment through a naval lens.
2.   Assessment of the Top Ten Problems (Embrace the Red)	Status, trend, severity, corrective action, and consequence of individual problems.
3.   Assessment of the Changing Character of War	What is changing, and what is not.
4.   Risk Assessments	Specific current “risk.” to mission, force, strategy, the industrial base, and the nation.
5. Current Readiness	Greatest readiness concerns, vulnerabilities, opportunities, and assumptions most likely to prove wrong.
6. Evaluation of Navy’s Top Problems and Current Readiness	Strategic implications and national-security consequences for current environment.
7. Top Ten Accomplishments of the Past Year (Embrace the Green)	Year’s principal achievements, briefly.
8. Acknowledgment of Congressional Support	Enacted authorities and appropriations recognized.
Annex A: Overview of Programs and Procurement (Description and Status)	Detailed reference material on major programs.

Part II would focus on and assess the Navy’s future readiness, performance, and environment based on the assumption that Congress will approve the President’s Budget submitted for the next fiscal year. This component of a reformed posture statement would provide: (1) an assessment of the future security environment; (2) strategic planning assumptions; (3) the CNO’s personal assessment of the Navy’s future readiness, given passage of the President’s Budget for the next fiscal year; (4) the CNO’s future risk assessments; (5) on-going and potential future problems; and (6) consequences and implications of these on-going and future problems. As in Part I, Section 6 of Part II requires the CNO to identify, in concrete terms, what will occur if major deficiencies remain unresolved.

Table 3: Major Elements of a Congressionally Mandated Posture Statement—Part II Next (i.e., Future) Fiscal Year Assessment

The Future Year Assessment Topic	What it Requires
1. Assessment of Future Security Environment	Professional judgment through a naval lens.
2. Strategic Planning Assumptions	Premises on: budget, recruiting, retention, shipbuilding and maintenance capacity, industrial base, operational demand, and threat.
3. Assessment of Navy’s Future Readiness Based on Submitted President’s Budget for next FY	Greatest readiness concerns, vulnerabilities, opportunities, and assumptions most likely to prove wrong.
4. Risk Assessments	Specific future risk to mission, force, strategy, industrial base, and nation.
5. On-going and Future Key Problems and Future Readiness	Problem description, status, trend, severity, and corrective action. Every major external review status (for example, 2010 Balisle Report, GAO Reports, Annual INSURV Reports, the 2017 Strategic and Comprehensive Readiness Reviews, etc.)  kept visible until formally closed. For each major problem, what happens if Congress does nothing, stated concretely. Each problem named in any prior year carried forward with status, trend, and resolution or abandonment, so none can quietly drop off the list.

Part III, would focus on longitudinal assessment, building the institutional memory that posture statements have always lacked. This third component of the reformed posture statement tracks the Navy across time rather than freezing it in a single budget cycle. Section 1 in Part III requires the CNO to track from 1991, at the end of the Cold War, to the present, the condition of the fleet using standardized categories such as force structure, readiness, maintenance, munitions, infrastructure, industrial capacity, and personnel. But describing conditions alone is insufficient. Section 3 requires the CNO to explain the consequences of inaction by identifying the operational, strategic, and fiscal risks that will result if these longitudinal deficiencies are not addressed. In addition, Section 3 requires those warnings and risks to be tracked from year to year until resolved, preventing them from disappearing into successive posture statements. This reporting requirement transforms warnings from isolated observations into potentially enduring Congressional oversight items. It compels the articulation of consequences and thus provides continuity and accountability to eliminate a central weakness identified in this posture statement review.  Furthermore, by using 1991 as the benchmark year, trends cannot be passed off as snapshots.

Part III should reveal where the Navy is headed and whether longstanding warnings are being addressed. Requiring the longitudinal assessment distinguishes this proposal from a routine reporting requirement, because it is a proposal for institutional memory. No existing statutory report provides a longitudinal assessment of readiness trends, unresolved deficiencies, corrective actions, and the consequences of inaction.

Table 4: Major Elements of a Congressionally Mandated Posture Statement—Part III Longitudinal Assessment

Part III — Longitudinal Oversight	What it requires
1. Historical Readiness Assessment with Cumulative Data on Key Indices	Multi-year trends in personnel, maintenance, aviation, surface, submarine, and logistics readiness, reported as trends, not snapshots. From 1991 (end of the Cold War) to the present.
2. Longitudinal Assessment: Deficiencies, Corrective Actions, and Consequences	Consequences of inaction by identifying the operational, strategic, and fiscal risks that will result if these longitudinal deficiencies are not addressed.

Conclusion

Congress already requires long-range reporting for ships and aircraft because force structure cannot be understood in a single fiscal year. Readiness and risk evolve over similarly long periods. Yet no comparable statutory mechanism exists to track the condition of the fleet, the persistence of readiness deficiencies, or the consequences of failing to address them.

Furthermore, the experience of the Royal Navy offers a cautionary lesson. For nearly two decades, official reports, parliamentary inquiries, retired officers, journalists, and independent analysts warned of declining Royal Navy capacity, readiness shortfalls, maintenance backlogs, personnel shortages, and the growing gap between commitments and resources. Yet because the Royal Navy continued to deploy and meet immediate operational demands, the cumulative consequences of those trends remained difficult for policymakers and the public to see clearly. The result was not a sudden collapse, but a gradual erosion of capability that became unmistakable only after critical mass had been lost. The implicit lesson is that Britain had shipbuilding plans, budgets, reviews, and testimony. What it lacked was a single, enduring, publicly accessible mechanism that continuously connected warning, consequence, trend, and accountability over decades.²⁴  The proposed reform is designed to provide exactly that function for the U.S. Navy.

The reforms proposed here would not guarantee against a similar outcome for the U.S. Navy. No reporting system can substitute for sound strategy, adequate resources, or effective leadership. They would, however, create a longitudinal public record of U.S. Navy readiness, force structure, operational risk, and the consequences of inaction. By providing Congress and the American people with a consistent, comparable assessment over time, the U.S. Navy’s posture statement would become more than an annual budget justification. It would serve as an enduring institutional record, making long-term trends visible before they become crises and helping ensure that future warnings are neither overlooked nor forgotten.

The intent of this proposal is for the Navy to account, in a form Congress and its analysts can read against the prior year and the years before that. Congress has imposed exactly this kind of discipline on acquisition reporting, on the shipbuilding plan, and on the fleet-requirement assessment. Extending it to the posture statement asks nothing new of the institution, only that the Navy’s most important annual account of itself finally meet the standard Congress already requires of the rest. The Navy’s problem was never an absence of warning. It was the absence of a reporting system capable of preserving those warnings, tracking their resolution, and explaining their consequences in frank terms. Congress solved that problem in acquisition reporting. It solved it in shipbuilding. It solved it in fleet-requirement assessment. The posture statement is the remaining exception. It should not remain so.

Bruce Stubbs had assignments on the staffs of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations from 2009 to 2022 as a member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service. He was a former director of Strategy and Strategic Concepts in the N3N5 and N7 directorates. As a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, he served as the assistant commandant for capability at Headquarters, served on the staff of the National Security Council, taught at the Naval War College, commanded a major cutter, and served a combat tour with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive.

References

1. Michael G. Mullen, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Chief of Naval Operations, Opening Statement, Before Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate, Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2007, 15 March 2006. Mullen stated: “Our long-range ship building plan submitted with this budget, likewise, strikes a balance between near- and long-term requirements. The fleet today stands at 281 ships—not enough in my view to deliver the joint warfighting capabilities the combatant commanders will need over the course of this long war. Our plan, centered on 11 aircraft carriers with a fleet of about 313 ships, affordably meets these needs for the good of the Navy, for the good of the Nation and for the good of our allies and partners.”

2. Jonathan Greenert, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Chief of Naval Operations, Opening Statement, Before Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate, Hearing on the Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2015, 26 March 2014. The full quote: “We would be unable to execute at least 4 of the 10 primary missions articulated in the Defense Strategic Guidance in the Quadrennial Defense Review. And his prepared statement which declared, “Despite the reduction in funding below levels planned in PB–14, PB–15 strikes this balance and the result is a program that delivers sufficient readiness to meet our GFMAP presence commitments and provide sufficient ‘surge’’ capacity for contingency response.”

3. Vice Admiral Phillip M. Balisle, U.S. Navy, Ret, Letter to Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command and Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Enclosure (1) Final Report, Subject: Fleet Review Panel of Surface Force Readiness, 26 February 2010.

4. Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price. Neil Jenkins, and Peter Swartz, “The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake?”, Center for Naval Analyses, CAB D0022262.A3/1REV, March 2010, p. 43.

5. Geoff Ziezulewicz, “Fleet’s Material Condition Keeps Getting Worse, New INSURV Report Says,” Navy Times, 2 June 2023. “The Navy fleet’s overall material condition declined slightly in fiscal 2022, ‘resuming a slight but steady negative trend’ that has occurred since fiscal 2017, according to the Navy’s annual Board of Inspection and Survey, or INSURV, report released by the Navy on Friday.”

6. United States Government Accountability Office, Report to the Subcommittee on Readiness, Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, Navy Readiness Actions Needed to Address Costly Maintenance Delays Facing the Attack Submarine Fleet, GAO-19-229, November 2018.

7. The Honorable Michael Bayer and Admiral Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy (Retired), Strategic Readiness Review, 3 December 2017. Released by Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer. 

8. Admiral P. S. Davidson, U.S. Navy, Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Memorandum for Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Subject: Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents, Enclosure (1): Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents, 26 October 2017. The report also noted: “Evidence of skill proficiency (on ships) and readiness problems (at headquarters) were missed, and over time, even normalized to the point that more time could be spent on operational missions.”

9. Michael Wilson, “FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act: A Comprehensive Holland & Knight Analysis,” Holland & Knight Alert, 22 December 2025.

10. Thomas Spoehr, ‘What Congress Gets Wrong About Defending the Homeland,” The National Interest, 23 January 2024.

11. U.S. Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs),” Press Release, 22 September 2023.

12. Congressional Research Service, “The Nunn-McCurdy Act: Background, Analysis, and Issues for Congress,” R41293, 12 May 12, 2016.

13. This Navy document is formally titled Report to Congress on the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year XXXX and is drafted by OPNAV N9 for signature by the Navy secretary. The Navy has a statutory requirement (10 U.S.C. §231) to submit annually to Congress this plan that provides “supporting information for assessing and marking up the Navy’s proposed shipbuilding program.” It provides a 30-year shipbuilding procurement profile along with broad guidance about the Navy’s intentions to meet its force structure demands. According to Ron O’Rourke, Congressional Research Service analyst, the plan enables Congress to assess whether (1) the Navy intends to procure enough ships to achieve and maintain its stated ship force-level goals; (2) there is a fundamental imbalance between program goals and projected resources; (3) ship procurement plans are likely to be affordable within future defense budgets; (4) ship procurement planning is reasonable in terms of assumed service lives for existing ships and estimated procurement costs for new ships; and (5) there are potential industrial-base implications. Ronald O’Rourke, Statement before the Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing on “Future Force Structure Requirements for the United States Navy,” 4 June 2020, p. 1.  In addition, according to Dr. Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office, the plan benefits congressional oversight and decisions by potentially revealing: (1) cumulative long-term effects of annual appropriation decisions that may not be apparent from a shorter perspective; (2) imbalances between long-term objectives for inventories and projected budgetary resources; and (3) information on  assumptions about the service lives of major weapons systems and how those assumptions may affect its inventory goals. Eric J. Labs, Senior Analyst for Naval Forces and Weapons, “The Value of 30-Year Defense Procurement Plans for Congressional Oversight and Decision-making,” Congressional Budget Office, Statement before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Committee on Armed Services U.S. House of Representatives, 1 June 2011.

14. Shelby S. Oakley, Director, Contracting and National Security Acquisition, United States Government Accountability Office, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, “Navy Shipbuilding: A Generational Imperative for Systemic Change,” GAO-25-108136, 11 March 2025.

15. The Navy develops this shipbuilding plan; the Secretary of the Navy certifies it and includes it in the defense budget materials; the Secretary of Defense submits those budget materials to Congress; and the unaltered assessment of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant accompanies the shipbuilding plan.

16. 10 U.S.C. § 231a, “Budgeting for life-cycle costs of aircraft for the Army, Navy, and Air Force: annual plan and certification.” The earlier 30-year aviation procurement plan under former § 231a (Pub. L. 110-417, § 141 (2008)) was repealed by the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019.

17. 10 U.S.C. § 8695, “Navy battle force ship assessment and requirement reporting” (added by Pub. L. 117-81, § 1017(a), Dec. 27, 2021).

18. 10 U.S.C. § 231, “Budgeting for construction, maintenance, and modernization of naval vessels: annual plans and certifications.”

19. Sam Lagrone, “New Navy Fleet Study Calls for 373 Ship Battle Force, Details are Classified,” USNI News, 19 July 2022.

20. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress, Report RL32665 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 31 March 2025), Table I-1: Total Number of Ships in Navy Since FY1948 and p. 3. “In March 2024, as part of its FY2025 30-year (FY2025-FY2054) shipbuilding plan, the Navy released the details of this new goal, which calls for achieving and maintaining a fleet of 381 manned ships of certain types and numbers, plus 134 large, unmanned surface and underwater vehicles.” U.S. Naval Institute Staff, “Fleet and Marine Tracker,” USNI News, 4 August 2025.

21. Ronald O’Rourke, Congressional Research Service, Testimony Before the Armed Services Committee, Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing on “The State of U.S. Shipbuilding,” 11 March 2025.

22. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2024, Annual Report to Congress, Executive Summary, December 2024, p. vii.

23. Nuray Taylor, “U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Calls to ‘Embrace the Red’”, Signal Magazine, 28 January 2025. ADM Koehler’s full quote: “”Let’s take a holistic, innovative approach that brings transformative, strategic gain to our force. That includes considering things we’re not doing that we should be doing. It includes embracing the red, which is Navy speak for embracing problems and adjusting quickly and holistically to fix them.”

24. “Is the Royal Navy in Crisis?” Navy Lookout, 8 January 2024.

Featured image: The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill conduct a replenishment at sea with the Military Sealift Command fast combat support ship USNS Bridge. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class James Evans)

By Brent D. Sadler

Introduction

On September 18, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Lisa Franchetti released her Navigation Plan (NAVPLAN) laying out the course ahead for the Navy. The main takeaway is that the Navy must be ready to deter a militarily confident China by 2027. Achieving this is a tall order. NAVPLANs have been used by senior naval officers to provide guidance and caution against potential pitfalls along a course. CNO Admiral Jonathan Greenert began using these documents in 2015 to inform the path to rebuilding the Navy. In recent years, the Navy’s NAVPLANs have taken on urgency to deter a rapidly expanding Chinese fleet.

That said, these plans have been ineffective for the better part of 10 years. The fleet has only grown from 271 warships in 2015 to today’s fleet of 295. This happens at a time the Navy, White House, and Congress have all committed to a fleet of 355 warships. But it took several years to even get a plan that could achieve that goal and by now should have delivered a fleet of 314 warships. Instead, the Navy is 19 ships behind.

Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party has grown its Navy – the PLAN – by over 112 warships between 2004 to 2022, while the U.S. Navy’s size shrunk by three ships. Buoying the PLAN’s meteoric rise is a massive, modern commercial shipbuilding industry that is over 200 times the capacity of the U.S., giving China the ability to out-produce the U.S. fleet in a prolonged war. The challenge of growing the fleet is also hampered by inadequate munitions production and capability. In short, getting the Navy on course will require more than just building new warships.

Setting a Course

Given these challenges, in the NAVPLAN CNO Franchetti makes a clear preference for action focused on readiness by 2027. This framing provides needed urgency and focus to ensure a large organization of over half-million officers, sailors, reservists, and civilians act in concert with limited resources.

With limited warships and munitions, creative new ways of waging naval war are required. Enter the Navy’s almost decade-old concept – Distributed Maritime Operations. By dispersing the fleet across a wider area, China would have to deploy more sensors, platforms, and weapons to degrade the U.S. Navy. This concept assumes a high degree of connectivity across U.S. warships, submarines, and aircraft to work. Rightly, the new NAVPLAN embraces this concept and focuses effort on maturing critical enabling capabilities, including autonomous systems, big data analytics, and the maritime operating centers to fuse multiple data streams into actionable information for commanding officers at sea.

The rationale for CNO Franchetti’s update to the last NAVPLAN issued in 2022 by her predecessor is the more dangerous security environment today. To address this, and the most interesting aspect of the NAVPLAN, is Project 33. This refers to her core objectives as the 33^rd Chief of Naval operations, and encompasses seven key targets:

1. Readiness – By 2027, achieve and sustain an 80 percent combat surge-ready fleet.

2. Robotics – By 2027, integrate mature autonomous platforms into every deploying carrier strike group and expeditionary strike group.

3. Warfighting Headquarters – By 2027, all numbered fleets will have fully functioning Maritime Operation Centers (MOC) to coordinate naval operations across the globe.

4. Manning – By 2027, achieve 100 percent active and reserve components manning, with 95 percent of authorized deployed billets filled.

5. Improved Quality of Life – By 2027, eliminate involuntary billeting onboard ship while in homeport, which is critical for sailors stuck in shipyards for prolonged maintenance with unsatisfactory onboard living conditions.

6. Better Fleet Training – By 2027, implement more realistic wartime exercising of the fleet for high-end warfare, especially through Live Virtual Constructive training (LVC).

7. Infrastructure – By 2027, act to address the Navy’s antiquated infrastructure and shipyard capacity to sustain the fleet.

Admiral Franchetti’s emphasis on 2027 is welcome given China has invested significant resources and political capital on being ready to persevere in a war with the U.S. by that year. Making a down payment alone on Project 33 will require growing the Navy’s budget three to five percent above inflation. Fully addressing the needs of the Navy will likely be a taller order.

Aside from specifics to remedy outdated shipyards unable to sustain today’s Navy, another issue not raised was the need to fuel the fleet. Since before World War II, the U.S. military had stockpiled fuel at the strategically important Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage facility in Hawaii. Due to years of neglect, that facility has been shut down, and no replacements have yet to been announced. Without adequate fuel reserves and the ability to move fuel to the ships and aircraft using it, the Navy is in a potentially precarious position. The DMO concept also depends on a robust logistical foundation that could outstrip the Navy’s current capabilities. Distributed logistics and robust fuel access are not effectively described in the NAVPLAN, an oversight that will need to be addressed in the near future by the CNO.

Without adequate manning and infrastructure the fleet will not grow to meet the threat nor can it be sustained. On this point the NAVPLAN’s details are too thin. It has been clear for many years that the Navy needs more shipyard capacity to build new warships and repair them. Yet no call for returning public shipyards to do nuclear maintenance on submarines nor calling for the building of new drydocks is mentioned. There is a political dimension to this of course, which is why leadership is required to get the Navy these needed resources from Congress.

Where the NAVPLAN is scant on details, it must not necessarily mean inaction. Seeking a new public shipyard is a herculean political and fiscal task, and would be a first since World War II. Congress in recent years has been willing to support larger budgets for getting the Navy needed resources, but the Department of Defense has been less willing. As such, leadership is required to propose a plan for a new public shipyard, which is well past due.

Another point that is caught between the bullet points of Project 33 is practicing for the next war. Standing up a maritime operations center (MOC) at each numbered fleet is past due, as is fully leveraging real-world exercises with virtual environments to most closely approximate wartime conditions. Yet to be truly ready, the fleet needs to be exercised in the harshest environment and threat conditions to persevere against a foe like China. Missing in the NAVPLAN is the value and urgency for exercising at the fleet-level to challenge planning assumptions, test systems performance, and validate crew competencies. With Congressional support, the Navy should evolve the current Fleet Battle Problem series of exercises into events similar in scale and design to the Fleet Problem series of exercises of the interwar period to prepare for modern naval warfare.

Finally, new approaches to recruiting and preparing sailors for the rigors at sea are urgently needed. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was ostensibly intended to expand recruitment, but the record is far less than positive. That said, the Navy and the nation needs every physically able, patriotic citizen who seeks a life at sea to succeed. This means investing more in wider recruitment while not alienating traditional sources of recruits.

Getting the sailors the Navy needs means investing more in new recruits as well. This will of course add to the Navy’s budget and delay entry of these new sailors to the fleet. The Navy must accept that not everyone starts at the same point, but those giving their all are needed in these dangerous times. As such, more is needed to ensure new recruits are kept and brought up to meet and exceed technical training requirements. For this reason, programs like BOOST that were ended in 2008 need to be brought back and given an update. BOOST was intended to give promising enlisted sailors from disadvantaged education systems preparation for college and officer commissions. Today this is needed for able-bodied and driven recruits to prepare for not only commissions, but for highly technical specialties in short supply, like nuclear mechanics.

Conclusion

Admiral Franchetti clearly takes inspiration from her predecessor, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was CNO from 1970 to 1974, during a tumultuous period for the Navy. As she more forcefully pushes the rudder over on a new course for the Navy, another Admiral’s words come to mind, Admiral William J. Crowe, “The CNO . . . can turn the helm, but the rudder doesn’t necessarily go with it, because there are a bunch of people down in the bowels pushing it the other way.”

A strategy or checklist will not deliver results alone. Bold leadership is called for, from the deckplate to the CNO. Admiral Franchetti’s NAVPLAN is welcome and needed, but its success will not be decided by how convincing the document is. She will need the support of forceful leaders throughout the organization who are driven by the vision of what is required, and who are held accountable beyond the limited tenure of their current assignments.

The consequences of further delays and procrastination only benefits the designs of rivals. The CNO has stated she intends to act vigorously and provide a stronger Navy for her successor. Hopefully there are more such leaders in the ranks with the backing required to finally bend the too-long downward trajectory of the Navy and get it on track for facing down today’s great power threats.

Captain Brent Sadler (Ret.) joined the Heritage Foundation as a Senior Research Fellow in 2020 after a 26-year naval career in nuclear submarines and as a foreign area officer. He has extensive operational experience in the Western Pacific, having served at Seventh Fleet, Indo-Pacific Command, as Defense Attache in Malaysia, and as an Olmsted Scholar in Tokyo, Japan.

Featured Image: Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 314 launch and recover F-35C as they work to renew their carrier qualifications onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). (U.S. Marine Corps photo by 1stLt. Charles Allen/Released)

By Dave Winkler

With the decommissioning of the Naval Historical Foundation, the online journal International Journal of Naval History (IJNH) (www.ijnhonline.org) continues to exist as an unaffiliated website that last published in early 2023. It is in a transitional period as the current Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Charles Chadbourn with the Naval War College, is planning to step down.

In publication since 2002, IJNH has provided a forum for lengthy academic, peer-reviewed articles to examine various naval issues and histories. This journal has attempted to fill what would have been a gap in maritime/naval academic journals following the departure of the leading journal in the field, and if the journal remains in a state of limbo, will stymie opportunities for the publication of scholarly articles that may offer insights on how to address contemporary maritime challenges. Navalists and academics must explore options for sustaining the future of this journal and in doing so, to generate interest to recruit and shape the composition for a new, potentially multi-institutional management team. 

Background

The last issue in 2002 of American Neptune after 62 years of publication by the Peabody Essex Museum created a void for an academic, peer-reviewed journal that would provide scholars opportunities to publish well-researched articles that could advance the understanding of maritime/naval history. In addition, such a journal also provided an important venue for another academic endeavor – book reviews. Recognizing this void, Dr. Gary Weir, then head of the Contemporary History Branch of the then USN Naval Historical Center (NHC), took on the initiative to create an online journal: the International Journal of Naval History (IJNH). In doing so, he gained the support of well-known overseas naval historians who would be hosted by the Naval History Center (now Naval History and Heritage Command) on the day prior to the commencement of the U.S. Naval Academy’s McMullen Naval History symposium held every two years.

The mission statement drafted by Dr. Weir, included below, emphasizes the research-based, independent ethos of the journal:

“The objective of the International Journal of Naval History is to provide a pre-eminent forum for works of naval history researched and written to demonstrable academic standards. Our hope is to stimulate and promote research into naval history and foster communication among naval historians at an international level.

IJNH will welcome any scholarly historical analysis, focused on any period or geographic region, that explores naval power in its national or cultural context. The journal will remain completely independent of any institution and will operate under the direction of an Editorial Board that represents various regions of the globe as well as various genres of naval history.”

As for the administrative structure, the IJNH webpage called for an all-volunteer effort led by a troika of editors who would work with a board of eighteen scholars “of international reputation.” The objective was to publish the journal in April, August, and December of each year beginning in 2002.  

In reality the “all-volunteer” effort did not occur in practice. The first editor-in-chief, Dr. Weir, obtained permission to work on the journal “on company time.” In addition, the Naval Historical Foundation not only agreed to cover the nominal costs of the establishing and hosting the website, it authorized its content developer to post updated volumes on the IJNHonline.org website. Under this “volunteering on company time” arrangement the IJNH came out on a regular schedule of three times a year for its first eight years. And then it ceased production for three years.

What happened? Dr. Weir, as the Chief Historian, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, could not perform editor-in-chief duties on company time. Hence, Dr. Chadbourn took on the Editor-in-Chief duties. Like Dr. Weir previously, he was allowed to work on the journal during his workday hours.

Unfortunately, the challenges of the academic year wreaked havoc on his production schedule and IJNH averaged one edition a year. An additional setback for the journal was that the impressive editorial board Dr. Weir assembled would be underutilized. Finally, the decommissioning of the Naval Historical Foundation deprived the IJNH of its host and content posting support. On a positive note, as an online journal the content is “evergreen” in that articles published two decades ago are being viewed and cited in current maritime publications. 

The posting of the journal on the web sans subscription in essence means IJNH is an open-access publication. As a consequence, the journal does not generate revenue – it is a totally altruistic endeavor. The question at hand is whether IJNH can be sustained utilizing its current business model. To answer that question, it would be worth taking a brief look at similar journals in the military-maritime milieu.

Other Journals Featuring Naval History Scholarship

For openers, publications such as the National Maritime Historical Society’s Sea History and the U.S. Naval Institute’s Naval History offer scholars an opportunity to publish short-to modest-sized articles that have broad appeal. The U.S. Naval Institute is to be especially commended for hosting the Chief of Naval Operations annual naval history essay contest that inspires submissions from well-established historians, up-and-coming historians, and midshipmen and cadets. However, word-count restrictions eliminate consideration of these publications as academic journals of the type that offer book-chapter length articles of 8,000 to 12,000 words in length. With this distinction established, current academic peer review publication opportunities include multiple journals of note.

The Mariner’s Mirror – the international journal of the Society for Nautical Research (SNR). Recognized as a world-leading journal of both naval and maritime history, the journal has been in publication since 1911. Per the SNR website:

The content reflects the aim of the society and publishes ‘research into matters relating to seafaring and shipbuilding in all ages among all nations, into the language and customs of the sea, and into other subjects of nautical interest’. Subject matter ranges from archaeology and ethnography to naval tactics and administration, merchant seafaring, shipbuilding and virtually anything that relates to humankind’s relationship with the sea.

A review of the journal’s editorial board reflects its British origins and the content reflects the regional interests of its subscribers as The Mariner’s Mirror is a subscription journal, a benefit of membership to the society. SNR maintains a partnership with the academic journal publisher Taylor & Francis which makes the journal available to academic institutions. It is published quarterly in print and online through Taylor & Francis. The Mariner’s Mirror staff is compensated.

The International Journal of Maritime History (IJMH) is the journal of the International Maritime History Association established in 1989. Per that organization’s website:

“The IJMH is a fully-refereed, quarterly publication which addresses the maritime dimensions of economic, social, cultural, and environmental history. Truly international in scope, the IJMH publishes studies of a multidisciplinary nature on a broad range of maritime historical themes, including shipping, shipbuilding, seafaring, ports, resorts and other coastal communities, sea-borne trade, fishing, environment and the culture of the sea.”

A review of the editorial board has the Editor-in-Chief and Book Review editor based at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. As with Mariner’s Mirror, IJMH is a subscription journal. In the case of IJMH, since 2014 there has been a partnership with Sage Journals which bundles IJMH with other journals for sale and distribution to university libraries. The production staff is compensated.

The Journal of Military History (JMH) is the quarterly journal of the Society for Military History. JMH has published scholarly articles on the military history of all eras and geographical areas since 1937. Fully refereed, the JMH publishes articles and book reviews, as well as a list of recent articles dealing with military history published by other journals, an annual list of doctoral dissertations in military history, and an annual index. Though much of the content is land-warfare focused, there have been some notable naval articles featured in this journal. The Society of Military History and JMH are hosted by the Virginia Military Institute. JMH is a subscription journal and an arrangement is in place with Proquest to offer digital content to libraries and other archival institutions. The production staff is compensated.

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord is published in Canada by the Canadian Nautical Research Society (CNRS) with the support of the North American Society of Oceanic History (NASOH). Per the CNRS website, The Northern Mariner is

“devoted to the study of maritime affairs and the inland waterways of the nations that touch the seas of the northern hemisphere. The journal’s content spans the fields of naval, political, diplomatic, social, cultural, gender, Indigenous, economic, and environmental history. Specific topics of interest include – but are not limited to – ships, shipbuilding, technology, merchant shipping, trade, labour, seafaring, maritime life, coastal communities, ports and harbours, naval warfare, maritime aviation, fishing, whaling, sealing, underwater archaeology, disasters and emergencies, and maritime biography.”

Though the journal is a subscription benefit of membership in CNRS and NASOH, digital copies are available on the CNRS website making it an open-access publication. The journal does not appear to have an academic institutional affiliation. 

There are other publications as well. The four journals mentioned above are not the only outlets for the publication of scholarly naval history work. For example, The Naval War College Review and the Journal of Advanced Military Studies published by Marine Corps University also offer outlets for publication. The Naval War College Press also publishes selected papers from the McMullen Naval History Symposium. In Germany, the Kiel Seapower Series, produced by the Institute for Security Policy, Kiel University, has produced a number of compilations of scholarly papers presented at various conferences. Depending on the content, opportunities exist in other academic journals, and naval historians should be encouraged to publish to different audiences to foster a broader understanding of the role sea power plays in a variety of fields. This author recently reviewed an article on the naval confrontation with wildlife for Animal History. 

Continuing IJNH

The good news is that outlets exist for the publication of naval history scholarship. However, none of the journals cited above focus solely on naval history. Mariner’s Mirror may be the closest but it is Eurocentric in its coverage. Meanwhile, growing attendance at McMullen Naval History Symposiums in recent years has demonstrated that more scholarship is being generated that is begging for publication in academic journals. A revitalized IJNH can fill that need and serve to facilitate the growth of a community. A study of other maritime/military history journals offers the following options for ways forward.

Publishing – Academic/Non-Profit Partnership: An arrangement with an academic journal publishing house could generate revenue to sustain management expenses. Of course, that would change the nature of the journal away from open access. Unfortunately for a potential journal publishing house, any arrangement could not grant rights for previously published work as authors never transferred those rights to IJNH at the time of publication. Before setting up such an arrangement, IJNH should look to reestablish a partnership with an academic institution or non-profit organization or consider establishing itself as a non-profit. Once IJNH finds an academic/non-profit home, an immediate effort should focus on the recruitment of an Editorial Board. 

Academic/Non-Profit Partnership: An arrangement with just an academic institution and non-profit organization can enable the journal to continue on as an open-access publication. The institution/organization taking IJNH on would need to fundraise to sustain management expenses and/or dedicate staff “company time” to keep the issues coming out on time. Once IJNH finds an academic/non-profit home (or homes – consider a consortium of universities with maritime programs collaborating), an immediate effort should focus on the recruitment of an Editorial Board.

Stay Completely Independent:  Independence is a viable option but would require a dedicated volunteer effort. As part of that volunteer effort, non-profit status for the journal should be sought to facilitate contributions to cover management expenses. As with previous options, recruitment of a new editorial board should be an immediate priority.

Recommendations

The quote “when you come to the fork in the road you should take it” attributed to Yogi Berra is appropriate in that a direction needs to be taken if IJNH is to remain a viable entity for the publication of new naval history scholarship. To facilitate a direction, it is recommended this point paper be shared to gather comments and additional ideas on the three options  that have been presented.

As for the selection of the editorial board, the new management team should aim to recruit individuals who have entered the profession in recent years to encourage submissions from younger scholars. Given the “International” scope of the journal, the board needs to aim for overseas recruitment as well. For the younger board members, serving on the board will assist in furthering personal career objectives and create networking opportunities and lifelong friendships. Additional consideration should be given to establish a smaller advisory panel where diversity and breadth and depth of experience would enhance the quality of the journal and provide mentorship.

Conclusion

The retention and re-invigoration of IJNH serves the interests of the naval historian community as a tool for professional development for both contributors and those associated with the journal. The content published in past editions is finding its way into the footnotes of recent scholarship, and new content can inform the thinking of contemporary leaders engaged in naval/maritime affairs. Comments and constructive ideas will be welcome and considered. Contact the author at the address below.

David F. Winkler is a retired Navy commander having received his commission through Penn State NROTC. Having earned his Ph.D. at American University, he served as staff historian at the Naval Historical Foundation for 25 years, has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval War College, and held the Charles Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He has published five books with the Naval Institute Press and writes a monthly historical perspective column for Sea Power Magazine. Contact Dr. David F. Winkler at david.winkler@usnwc.edu.

Featured Image: U.S. Navy carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) afire and listing after she was hit by a Japanese air attack while operating off the coast of Japan, 19 March 1945. (Photo via U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)