Notes to the New CNO Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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