By Spike Dearing

From the moment we leave our homeports, the ships of 7^th Fleet live under the shadow of Chinese weapons and in the ever-present gaze of their ISR network. We are far from home, and very near to those who may wish us harm. This reality is embodied in the phrase “Tip of the Spear.” We expect to be the first to fight, the first to deliver and sustain damage, and the first to die. As such, the priority of the surface force in 7^th Fleet ought to be in line with the Secretary’s hardcore focus on warfighting, of keeping the spear sharp. But it has dulled. Our priorities instead have pivoted to preservation. Rust and paint have taken precedence over combat readiness at exactly the moment when our time could not be more valuable.

Preservation in and of itself is not a bad thing and it certainly has a place in our list of priorities. Those who defend the primacy of preservation rely on two arguments. First, a well-preserved ship is indicative of a well-trained crew. The battle between steel and seawater is eternal, they do not play well together. Running rust can ruin a deck, and beyond the purely cosmetic, it can do damage to the hull and various systems exposed to the outside of the ship. It takes the dedicated efforts of many sailors to effectively keep it at bay. This first argument presupposes that if a ship is well-preserved, it is because the crew is working hard at it. And if they work hard at preservation, then they must be working hard at everything else too. Perhaps.

The second argument is that a well-preserved ship sends a message to friends and foes alike. To our friends it is a message of pride, fortitude, and reliability. For eight decades ships of the United States Navy have been patrolling the waters of the Indo-Pacific, safeguarding the peaceful flow of maritime traffic and commerce. That our ships are well maintained and present demonstrates to our friends that we will be there to carry on this legacy and can be trusted to preserve this system if challenged. To our foes the message is that we are still here, still committed, and still lethal. Our finely manicured exteriors are a sign that rather than a fleet in decline that is wanting for manpower and resources, we are still the preeminent naval force in the world.

I do not dispute the inherit truth in either of these arguments. That being said, should preservation of ships be such a high priority? Should it be more important than combat readiness? Should it consume a lot of a Commanding Officer’s attention and potentially ruin their careers? The press releases and official statements centered on the Navy are geared more towards preparing for war and ensuring the Fleet maintains its lethal advantages over potential adversaries. But when it comes to defining priorities however, words pale in comparison to how time and effort is actually being expended. In the 7^th Fleet surface force today, much more time and focus has been allotted towards preservation rather than warfighting readiness. This will have an adverse effect on our wartime performance if not properly realigned.

Since returning to 7^th Fleet nearly 14 months ago, I can recall four instances where senior officers (ranking O-6 and above) toured the waterline and inspected ships on “preservation tours.” These high-ranking officers would walk down the piers in Yokosuka or take a small-boat ride out to a ship at anchorage, scope out the warships, determine whether their level of rust was defensible, and then turn around. While such preservation spot-checks have become a common occurrence, these senior officers hardly – if at all – come aboard the “Tip of the Spear” ships and request that the Combat Information Center (CIC) be fully manned up and a combat scenario be run for their observation. I personally have not witnessed this ever taking place, which I find alarming.

What exactly is the current state of paint and rust going to reveal about a ship’s ability to actually fight and win a war at sea? Certainly not more than observing trained watchstanders execute simulated combat operations in a stressful environment and gauging their performance.

This is not a radical idea. After the burning and decommissioning of USS Bonhomme Richard (BHR) the Navy instituted a new process of no-notice fire safety inspections. Assessors would show up to ships, request the entire in-port emergency teams (ship version of firefighters) be mustered for accountability, and conduct safety walkthroughs. Ships responded to this shift by increasing training and vigilance amongst the crew. No captain wanted to get caught slacking by the fire safety inspectors. This action shifted a priority. While fires have still broken out on ships in the time since, none have suffered the same fate as BHR.

Instituting a similar practice for combat scenarios is necessary. Snap combat inspections are a time-honored practice of great power fleets preparing for war. Doing so would provide an honest look into how ships are preparing to execute their primary purpose – to intimidate and destroy the enemy. Commodores and Flag Officers should be interested in stopping by their ships to see how well they actually fight.

This is the ultimate test for ship COs and would absolutely re-focus their priorities if they have been drawn away from their tactical roots. The potential of the Commodore swooping by to spot-check a combat evolution would motivate commands to always have their teams well-trained and prepared for an unannounced visit – which extends to being more ready for an unannounced war. This is even more important for 7^th Fleet ships who do not have the luxury of a long transit to a conflict to train themselves up.

The execution of such a program could be made simple. It is a reality that setting up a CIC for a scenario is time-intensive for sailors. A call to a ship’s CO from their immediate superior that a visit will be conducted the next day would provide an opportunity to have the system properly configured while not allowing so much time that the watchstanders could get away with not being adequately knowledgeable or trained. These snap combat inspections should also be genuinely stressing and not easily gamed. The senior officer could have a set of multiple scenarios sent over to the ship in advance and then select a scenario once they arrive to push the watchstanders to adapt and improvise. This would eliminate the possibility that the ship could practice a certain scenario multiple times and perform well due to their familiarity with the sequence of events. Snap combat inspections should guard against assessing heavily scripted drills that sailors can easily prepare for.

Regardless of the details of such an initiative, the central purpose should remain intact. It is not a given that warfighting readiness will get prioritized. It demands active and sustained attention from senior leaders to drive this focus into their commands. Perhaps Commodores and Admirals – by being more deliberate about what they choose to inspect – can bend the surface force towards victory.

LT Spike Dearing is a Surface Warfare Officer and Integrated Air and Missile Defense Warfare Tactics Instructor serving on USS JOHN FINN (DDG 113) as the Damage Control Assistant.

These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any U.S. government entity. 

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Feb. 1, 2024) Petty Officer 1st Class Nikolai Raab stands watch in the combat information center (CIC) aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Rafael Peralta (DDG 115). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Devin Monroe)

The following is republished with permission.

By Jan van Tol

Dear Admiral,

Astonishingly, I find myself at the end of my time in OBRIEN already. At the risk of being too forward, I will take the opportunity to enclose a few thoughts from a serving CO’s perspective on a couple of issues in the same spirit as my earlier comments on the Tactical Training Strategy.

Not surprisingly, my time in OBRIEN has flashed by. Things have gone quite well by and large. I have done well in the FITREP sweepstakes, so I very much hope to do this again in a couple of years. Our March-August MEF deployment received good reviews from what I have heard. I have had a great crew and wardroom throughout the tour, high morale and retention, few disciplinary problems, good tactical execution. In short, within the lifelines, it has been great! As you told me during a visit to GATES years ago, it is a gratifying thing to be able to make life a bit better for three hundred people and their dependents.

But, while this tour has been immensely satisfying professionally and personally, I have to say that much of it has not been particularly enjoyable – and that this view is common among my fellow COs out here. I have spent entirely too much of it angry professionally for reasons I will note. In many ways, I have found myself as CO being not much more than a glorified janitor, carrying out a multitude of tasks and requirements imposed by various staffs and outsiders with little input asked or tolerated. In many cases, some staff O3 or O4 has more influence on my ship than I do as CO. I say this even having worked for a pretty good commodore.

Yet, were this only personal frustration, I wouldn’t have the temerity to bother you with it. However, I am very concerned about how junior officers are looking at our profession. What I hear them saying on the Yokosuka waterfront is that most of their time and effort is not spent working on “naval things” – shiphandling, tactics, leadership – but on an ever-growing cancer of administrative requirements. Every inspection and assist visit seems to have a longer and longer “checklist” of micro-things (all equally important, of course) that must be just so, or else an area is unsat or “ineffective.” Reporting requirements and the care and feeding of staff databases grow inexorably.

The problem is that this kind of administrative minutiae is much closer to that found in many civilian occupations than it is or should be to the profession of arms. So, say many JOs in conversation, why do essentially the same thing for less money and the opportunity to be separated frequently from home and family? It is this – the defining downward of what constitutes the naval profession – that in my view underlies the JO retention problem. It is not about SWO bonuses or more medals. It is about whether there is meaning in what we ask our people to do.

A related problem is that this de facto changing of the substance of what it means to be a naval officer has also concomitantly placed a fast-growing time burden on JOs and crews. One day early during my time on BRISCOE, you and I discussed “smart scheduling” and the fact that many things could be done simultaneously since not everyone onboard was involved in every evolution. I have used that notion in OBRIEN and mostly been able to keep our work hours down to about 8 hours/day (except during preps for specific evolutions like E-CERT or certain TTS events) inport for the crew. But our system requires major planning/scheduling efforts which have placed heavy demands on CO/XO/DHs since slippage anywhere has rapidly cascading effects due to the overwhelming burden of inspections and preps. I have found that a large part of my personal energy has gone to just keeping this whole mechanism going over the last 18 months. I simply don’t remember you or any of my other COs having to devote nearly so much time to this kind of thing as my peers and I have had to.

This, coupled with the growing manning problems, is also driving another kind of vicious circle. As the manning levels go down and the time demands rise, many ships are still able to get most of the work done through various efficiencies and longer workhours. Since the work is still ostensibly getting done, one of the more pernicious effects, namely reduced training of junior personnel, has been relatively obscured. As an example, we just finished a rather mediocre Mid-Cycle Assessment right after standdown (a price paid for maintaining faith with the crew on a real standdown after a brutal year). One of the weaknesses turned up was that junior engineers weren’t getting enough training on the basics because the reduced number of senior personnel were too busy keeping things running during deployment. The senior personnel themselves don’t have the time they need to remain current on new information or pub revisions. Worse, as some of the seniors reach PRD, the experience level is notably falling.

As a numerical measure, OBRIEN had 51 pers assigned to M-division for her E-CERT two years ago. I had 31 at CART II the next year and, after a bump-up in numbers leading up to deployment, am once again back down to 31 today. Yet the inspection and engineering standards remain the same. Higher authority can do all the screaming they want, but ultimately there are only so many manhours available. I have been able to have my wardroom spend several hours a week on tactical training inport and underway (since the tactics part is one of my particular professional interests). Each of the JOs have fired the guns (including 5-inch) and driven the ship around in tactical scenarios. Not surprisingly, that’s the stuff that grabs them, and we need much more of it.

This letter has been a long time in gestation. On the positive side, after I started writing it, there have been a couple of things which seem to initially address some of the above concerns. I felt a shot of relief and hope from two recent messages. The first was your message on “Warrior Spirit,” the second the CNO’s message on lowering the ITDC “time tax” on our crews. I see the two as quite related – when the time burden of professionally irrelevant admin burdens is greatly excessive as it is today, it is almost impossible to inculcate “Warrior Spirit.”

Today it is too obvious to JOs that reward and punishment incentives for COs are greatly skewed towards getting the admin and inspection requirements done rather than fostering a psychological spirit of combat readiness on the part of officers and crew. It seems to me that there is no way out of that bind other than to rigorously carry out the ITDC reductions described in CNO’s message. And yet, one already hears the “yeah buts” on the part of various constituencies. As a current CO, I can’t urge strongly enough the pressing need to continue the thrusts contained in both messages – that is what will start staunching the outflow of JOs, and squadron and ship COs who might otherwise happily have stayed a lot longer after 20 years.

One other comment on “Warrior Spirit,” based on what I saw in the Gulf. When we have been out on our own (i.e., not under the TTS burden), we have tried to train hard and as realistically as possible with the idea that we might have to go to Korea at any time – because it could be a life-or-death issue not to. We kept the same attitude in the Gulf. I can honestly say that my guys and I gave our MIO and other ops our best shot. We were aggressive in doing night-time non-compliant boardings, even in very shallow waters – and, I think, tried to maintain the traditional U.S. Navy offensive spirit of taking reasonable risks in order to carry out our mission.

A couple of other ships out there had the same spirit, but others, it seemed to me, were unwilling to take many risks at all because of the potential consequences of making mistakes. I wonder if the subtle apparent changes in what it means to be a naval officer these days – i.e., the focus away from “naval matters” – is not contributing significantly to a sort of “psychological disarmament” of some of the officer corps. If so, your “Warrior Spirit” message is especially on the mark.

All that said, I would happily do this all over again. I have constantly told my JOs that there is no satisfaction like it and that what we do is important, and some of them believe me. I have also told them that there is growing awareness at the senior levels about much that disturbs them and that things will get better. But there is also a high level of wary cynicism on the waterfront which practically shouts, “Show me!”

I am certain, Admiral, from reading some of your recent interviews, that you are aware of most of these points. But, again, I don’t want to be part of the problem by not speaking up.

Very respectfully,

Jan van Tol
1 November, 1998

Jan van Tol served over 28 years as a naval officer. Assigned to several different kinds of warships, he was successively captain of a minesweeper, a destroyer, and a largedeck amphibious assault ship. While on sea duty, he deployed extensively throughout the Mediterranean Sea, the Western Pacific, and Southeast Asia, and made several deployments to the Persian Gulf. In his shore assignments, Mr. van Tol was employed in multiple strategic planning positions, including at the Naval War College (NWC), the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel (CNOEP), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSDNA).

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Oct. 7, 2020) Fire Controlman 2nd Class Steven Shoemate, from Lansing, Kan., right, fires a .50-caliber machine gun and Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Cameron Howard, from Houston, maintains communication with the bridge during a Small Craft Action Team (SCAT) live-fire exercise aboard the amphibious dock landing ship USS Germantown (LSD 42). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Taylor DiMartino)

By Chris Rielage

Time is our critical resource now. The Navy knows that we have a few scant years before we face major risk for an invasion of Taiwan. In the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) headquarters in San Diego, countdown clocks on the wall measure the days before mid-2027 arrives. The force is in a dead sprint, not a marathon – and we need to throw off excess weight.

To meet the challenge of war with China, the surface force has been driving hard towards more tactical competence. New equipment is rapidly hitting the fleet. New simulators are being built around the world. New cohorts of Warfare Tactics Instructors (WTIs) are graduating. SMWDC is even expanding the Surface Warfare Combat Training Continuum (SWCTC) to boost and standardize tactical knowledge across the surface force.

All of this looks good on paper. But when these efforts reach the ships, they collide with the tight schedules of sailors who count the hours in the day and often come up short. Sailors already work an average of 88.3 hours a week while underway. Where will the time for these warfighting reforms come from?

If sailors are already fully occupied and their schedules are overflowing, it hardly matters how good the new simulators or WTIs are. The present system of time allocation in the surface fleet is not a deliberate product of a warfighting-centric focus, but rather an unchecked process of creeping administrative overload. When new tacticians and training tools hit the fleet, they are eclipsed and diluted by a vast array of miscellaneous requirements. The leaders of the surface force must launch an effort to systematically protect time for tactics by aggressively pruning other requirements, or else these new efforts will fall short.

Guarding the Fleet’s Time

Thankfully, a model for how to do this already exists – a “night court.” Twice, Secretaries of Defense have convened night courts, which are rapid reviews of large groups of programs by a top official to aggressively triage acquisition programs. Most recently, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper convened a night court for both the Army and the larger Pentagon in 2019. In the process, Secretary Esper refocused billions of dollars to better fund reform efforts. In the defense world, night courts like this are also occasionally called “zero-based reviews.” The difference is subtle – a zero-based review starts from a clean slate and adds programs that are considered the most necessary, while a night court starts with the existing plan and cuts out excess.

The term “night court” will be used here, but the Navy could reasonably use either method. The end goal is the same. Senior admirals should review every program that owns a fraction of a sailor’s day, and ruthlessly remove the ones that, as the Secretary of War wrote recently, get in the way of “winning our Nation’s wars without distraction.” 

Are there truly programs the fleet can afford to cut? Certainly. Consider the Fall Protection program. Warships are expected to:

• Appoint a Fall Protection Program Manager and several “Competent Persons” to run the program. 
• Send those individuals to school – three days for the program manager and four days for each Competent Person. These individuals are usually senior Combat Systems personnel, already hard-pressed to maintain equipment and train for war.
• Develop a command instruction for fall protection and rescue plans for a fall.
• Perform a shipwide inspection for hazardous areas – anywhere with any height over four feet – and make design changes to the ship to remove the hazard. When this is impossible (which is usually the case on warships), post warning signs.
• Train end users – any sailor who might go near a height over four feet – on the program. 
• Regularly inspect the program, and be prepared for outside assessors to audit it.

The Department of the Navy’s Fall Protection instruction, which outlines these requirements, is 185 pages long – twice as long as many of the surface fleet’s latest tactical publications. 

We all agree that stopping falls is good in the abstract. No one wants to see a shipmate get injured. However, the truth is that the fleet simply cannot afford to spend precious time like this when pressing warfighting demands are calling. Sailors are continuously ensnared by programs, well-intentioned but ultimately misguided, that detract from fundamental tactical work. Warships do not have two crews – one that handles programs and one that handles combat. We face a zero-sum game with our time. Every minute that a sailor spends on an administrative program is a minute not spent on sharpening combat skills. 

Leading the Night Court

Commander, Naval Surface Force Pacific (CNSP) – the surface fleet’s Type Commander (TYCOM) – is best placed to run this night court. Not only is CNSP close enough to ships to personally speak to the urgency of the problem, they also have the senior authority to directly cut many programs. CNSP has the holistic perspective to rebalance the time allocations of the surface force, understanding both the urgency of the strategic situation and which administrative requirements do truly matter. No one leader can remove every detrimental program alone. Fall Protection, for example, will require congressional action to exempt warships from OSHA. CNSP is senior enough, however, to cut a wide swath using the span of their own authority, and to advocate for the changes that require departmental or congressional authority. 

CNSP is not the only path to success, but it is the simplest. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) or Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) could also build a programmatic night court – more directly replicating the acquisition night court that Secretary Esper created – but they are too distant from the fleet. The more echelons a leader is removed from a problem, the more they face what public economist Anthony Downs called a “message-distortion problem.” In any large bureaucracy, each layer of the chain of command, even when completely well-intentioned, naturally filters out some portion of any message as it works its way up. This feature of large bureaucracies makes the Navy’s most senior leaders ill-placed to judge which programs should be removed to improve time allocations at the deckplate level. Not only is CNSP closer to the fleet, senior leaders at CNSP have bypass mechanisms – tours, direct conversations with sailors, and a network on the waterfront – available to get to the core of each program’s value. Instead of leading it directly, the CNO and SECNAV are better suited to act as senior champions for a TYCOM-led night court.

The Night Court Process

The night court should go through three phases. First, measurement. Surface force leaders need to understand every program that takes up a sailor’s time. The team that runs the night court should be careful here. If they turn this information-gathering step into yet another tasker for ships, they may actually make the problem worse. The better answer is to put three or four SWO-qualified officers who have just departed sea tours in a room, and have them brainstorm a list of every requirement they encountered. Start the night court off of that rough draft, and only afterwards follow up with more comprehensive studies and requests for information. The goal is to move quickly, not to waste a year waiting for a formal – and quickly outdated – product.

The next step is adjudication. Each program must defend its existence to the night court. The key here is that program owners must not simply explain that a problem exists, but convince CNSP that their program meaningfully addresses the problem. Using Fall Protection again as an example, it is not good enough to list fall statistics – the Fall Protection team must convince CNSP that their program stops falls without putting an undue burden on ships.

Once the night court judges against a program, the last and hardest step is removal. The night court should identify the source of the program requirement, and if it is within CNSP’s influence, cut it directly. If the requirement is imposed on the surface fleet by a higher authority like congress, CNSP should push them for reform. Some of this work will generate natural friction amongst stakeholders. To build support, the night court should aggressively publicize how many hours of fleet time it saves, emphasize how many pages of administrative requirements it has cut, and cultivate support from combat-focused leaders who can speak to the warfighting benefits.

The goal is that, in the long run, regular night court reviews – perhaps every 1-2 years – cease to be radical. Ideally, guarding sailors’ time to emphasize warfighting will become a standard part of how the surface fleet operates and conceives of its identity: a more austere and focused force, supported by a more disciplined bureaucracy.

Dragging the Fleet Down

If surface force leaders like CNSP do not do the work of cutting time requirements, more time will not magically appear. Instead, the task of prioritizing will fall to unit commanders, junior officers, and chiefs. They will be forced to make changes within the margins of a system overflowing with years of creeping administrative overload, which has long surpassed the available time of sailors. The best of them will be honest about the fact that they cannot do everything, and accept hits to their record in exchange for a ruthless prioritization of combat skills. Ships with strong warfighting focus will fail more administrative inspections, earn fewer awards, and look worse on paper. Those leaders – the ones willing to be honest – will be winnowed out by a personnel system that does not appreciate nuance. The remaining leaders will take dishonesty as a norm and even an unavoidable price to be paid in exchange for career security. They will superficially hit their required administrative wickets at the cost of lethality. The Army War College report “Lying to Ourselves” famously described this dynamic within its own service, and the surface fleet is just as prone to it. Our failure to control excess time demands on ships yields an overflowing system that incentivizes dishonesty.

At this late hour, we cannot keep everything. When a crew member falls overboard, we teach them to immediately shed their steel-toed boots. Boots are normally vital – they keep our sailors safe in a shipboard industrial environment. But in the crisis of a man overboard, they drag sailors down. Our peacetime programs are the same. We can shed weight now, or we can drown in wartime.

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

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (May 3, 2017) Rear Adm. James Bynum, commander of Carrier Strike Group (CCSG) 9 addresses the Wardroom of the guided-missile destroyer USS Sampson (DDG) 102, during a Group Sail training unit exercise (GRUSL). (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Bill M. Sanders/Released)

By Seth Breen

As the U.S. Navy pivots toward preparing for high-end maritime conflict, the SWO community must ask itself a difficult question – Are we allocating our limited time to develop the warfighters we need, or are we clinging to legacy requirements that no longer align with the modern threat environment?

Train for the Fight, Not Just the Float

Currently, officers pursuing command at sea are required to be qualified as both Tactical Action Officer (TAO) and Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW). In the latest SWO Manual (SWOMAN) COMNAVSURFORINST 1412.7B, both are essential for future commanding officers, but this dual requirement deserves critical reexamination in light of today’s warfighting priorities. While being familiar with the engineering plant of the ship is essential, the EOOW qualification not only consumes a significant amount of time and bandwidth during the formative years of a SWO’s career, that time could be better spent developing tactical competencies that directly affect combat effectiveness, such as Surface Warfare Coordinator (SUWC) or Anti-Air Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) qualifications.

For EOOW, the rationale is clear: an officer in command should understand the propulsion plant and engineering systems that keep the ship functioning and maneuverable. As a wise TOPSNIPE once told me when I was ELECTRO, “without engineering, a ship is just a well-armed barge,” and I agree entirely. In theory, EOOW promotes holistic leadership, reinforcing the notion that SWOs should be capable of leading in both engineering and warfighting domains, reinforcing the perception of SWOs as “a jack of all trades.” But as the threat of China looms and the Navy continues to fight in real-world combat operations, such as in the Red Sea, is a jack of all trades what we really need when a TAO, often a LT or LCDR, is the only thing standing between the Fire Inhibit Switch rolling green and a salvo of incoming anti-ship missiles?

EOOW demands intensive amounts of preparation, studying, and a significant number of watches under instruction (U/I) if a SWO is to properly deal with everyday operations and any equipment casualties by knowing the engineering operational casualty controls (EOCC). Yet this qualification is one that most SWOs will likely never stand as department heads in the future, even after they are qualified, except for the 30-day requirement outlined in the SWOMAN. Depending on the ship’s operational schedule and an officer’s timeline, EOOW is typically earned at the expense of a warfare coordinator watch. Officers who excel tactically but have not spent hours in CCS may find themselves disadvantaged in milestone screenings, despite being better prepared for the future fight.
This structure sends the wrong message that time spent tracing lube oil paths is as valued as managing an integrated air defense picture. Every hour spent qualifying for EOOW is an hour not spent studying tactics and rehearsing CIC scenarios. I found myself in a similar situation. As an FCO, despite qualifying as AAWC and Force AAWC, and being on track to qualify for TAO, I had to shift my focus and prioritize EOOW over TAO because it was required for future progression.

Tactical Proficiency: The Real Development Gap

The SWO pipeline offers multiple paths for junior officers to take between their first and second tours. This presents a tactical gap that exists between junior officers as they arrive at Surface Warfare Schools Command (SWSC) for department head school. Those who qualify for a coordinator watch during their divo tours have a major advantage in the future over those who do not. Getting that tactical experience early builds a foundational understanding of warfighting early in an officer’s career. These tactical watches train junior officers to interpret sensor data, build air and surface pictures, manage killchains, and coordinate fires—skills that directly translate to TAO and future command responsibilities. The department head TAO pipeline is only growing more complex and demanding as direct feedback from the fleet is received and lessons learned from current combat operations are applied. This evolving curriculum tests students’ understanding and application of the tactics they have learned. Officers with these tactical backgrounds arrive more confident, capable, and better prepared for the TAO curriculum, as the foundation has already been laid.

The SWO community has a solid groundwork for a better approach. To better align the qualification system with operational imperatives, the Navy should decouple the EOOW qualification from the command qualification. Instead, commands should ensure that the SWO-Engineering PQS is a robust qualification that provides SWOs with a strong familiarity with the engineering plant, but not to the level of a qualified senior enlisted EOOW. Instead, we should incentivize early qualifications in tactical watchstations, such as surface or air, during division officer tours. Unless the junior officer wants to be a Battle CHENG in the future, EOOW should not be a requirement. This reform would not compromise readiness, it would enhance it by placing more weight on tactical skill. Officers would still understand the fundamentals of shipboard engineering, but without the time-intensive watchstanding, they would then be able to devote more focus toward gaining deeper tactical insight and readiness for warfare.

When crisis escalates into conflict, can the Navy afford to wait months for department heads to complete lengthy pipelines? They spend six months at SWSC, followed by two to four months learning either AEGIS or SSDS. It could take longer than six months for one department head to arrive on a ship. If they had more tactical experience early in their careers, this would provide more flexibility for senior leadership to buy back risk if a decision needs to be made to truncate some of the DH pipeline during a time of war and surge the fleet. If they have previously qualified on a specific AEGIS baseline, a two or three-week refresher rather than the whole course could accelerate the process of getting warfighters to the fleet faster.

Conclusion

The SWO community has made significant strides in recent years, reforming shiphandling and training, and introducing milestone assessments. However, to truly dominate the high-end fight, we must continue to evolve. That means investing our time, energy, and talent into the watches that matter most – those that prepare our officers not just to lead, but to win at fighting. It is time to prioritize tactical readiness over traditionally engineering-heavy requirements. Let us develop SWOs who are more than shipboard generalists. Let us build lethal warfighters.

Lieutenant Seth C. Breen is currently an Integrated Air and Missile Defense Warfare Tactics Instructor at Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in Criminology and enlisted in the Navy in 2013 as a Cryptologic Technician. He subsequently commissioned as an officer in 2017. LT Breen served aboard USS Monterey (CG-61) from 2017 to 2021. He held successive billets as Electrical Officer and Fire Control Officer, completing two deployments to FIFTH and SIXTH Fleets. During these tours, Monterey executed Tomahawk strike operations into Syria, served as Air and Missile Defense Commander and Ballistic Missile Defense Commander with the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, and conducted operations in the Black Sea in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Ashore, LT Breen has served as an exchange officer with the Royal Navy, teaching Air Warfare Tactics to RN Warfare Officers at HMS Collingwood. While ashore, he earned a Master of Arts in International Relations and Global Security from American Military University. 

Featured Image: GULF OF ALASKA (Aug. 23, 2025) Lt. Alex Celestin, from Randolph, Mass., works on a terminal in the combat information center (CIC) aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121) during exercise Northern Edge 2025 (NE25). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christian Kibler)