Notes to the New CNO Series

By Peter Dombrowski

With Admiral Caudle assuming the post of Chief of Naval Operations, the Navy has a timely opportunity to realign its strategic narrative with its emerging operational reality, especially in the Indo-Pacific. After years of experimentation with distributed maritime operations, integration of unmanned systems, and renewed industrial partnerships, the Navy must overcome headlines about past scandals and failures to restore the faith of the President, the Department of Defense, Congress, and the American people. The task before the new CNO is to seize this moment and make clear how the Navy will prevail in the next maritime era.

President Trump and his national security leaders have already made clear that it is a priority to reestablish maritime dominance. Further, bipartisan groups of legislators have proposed bills to support maritime dominance in all its dimensions.

Admiral Caudle has an excellent opportunity to shift the narrative to emphasize recent successes and, more important, set a clear path to the future. Shifting the narrative is necessary for rallying support for the taxpayer-funded investments the Navy needs to meet its missions. It also will reinforce the hard work and morale of our sailors.

The two pillars of a new narrative are: 1) how the Navy has adapted to shifts in maritime warfare and 2) how the Navy is buying new platforms and systems to take advantage of emerging technologies. The first point is not simply about technology. Rather, it is about warfighting and the operational lessons learned in the Black and Red Seas. The second is to clarify how the American naval industrial base, in collaboration of partner nations and new entrants into the defense sector, can and will provide, advanced systems to allow new operational concepts.

New Way to Fight. The Navy has been discussing distributed maritime operations (DMO), “means dispersing the fleet while concentrating effects.” DMO represents the Navy’s effort to employ widely dispersed yet tightly networked forces in order to complicate adversary decision-making and enhance combat resilience. By integrating sensors, communications, and strike systems across a broad maritime battlespace, the concept seeks to preserve sea control and extend American power despite increasingly contested environments.

New Fleet to Fight. It took longer to understand what type of fleet made sense for distributed operations. Dating back to the aborted net-centric warfare revolution of the later 1990s, the Navy has understood that dispersion could improve survivability to allow for great lethality. But the technologies for C4ISR and non-ship platforms lagged behind theory. Today, with unmanned systems of all types entering the fleet and enabling communications systems, sensor, and AI algorithms improving daily, the Navy is ready to implement a new fleet to match a new way of fighting.

Admiral Caudle can aid the Navy’s supporters by using his bully pulpit to amplify commitments made by the Trump administration. He can explain the new way to fight, and the new forces needed to fight it. He can explain how this will counteract the rise of the PLAN.

By articulating a powerful vision statement, the CNO will help unify effort within the Navy and provide insight to the other sea services about how the Navy will conduct its business for the next three years and beyond. This might mean issuing a new maritime strategy, but surely it means using congressional testimony, internal Navy documents, and the CNO’s voice among the other service chiefs to relentlessly explain how the Navy will support the Joint Force in deterring and defeating the pacing threat of China.

Dr. Peter Dombrowski is the William B. Ruger Chair of National Security Economics at the Naval War College. The views expressed are the author’s own and not with any organization with which he is affiliated.

Featured Image: The Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) prepares to moor on Navy Pier onboard White Beach Naval Facility during a scheduled port visit, Aug. 7, 2025. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Zack Guth)

Notes to the New CNO Series

By Chris Rielage

Navy thinkers have already laid the intellectual groundwork for aggressive change. Senior leaders now need to follow through with equally radical actions.

It has been just under two years since the last Call for Notes to the New CNO, written for Admiral Lisa Franchetti – and most of those good ideas still hold true. Four different articles argued for aggressive changes to force design, shifting the fleet towards more, smaller, less manned ships. Three notes focused on the Navy’s personnel policy, arguing in different ways that how we man and train is not setting us up for victory. It should be cause for dismay that pieces written for the last CNO still reflect conversations that officers have in the wardroom and schoolhouse every day.

There is a consensus opinion among junior officers – closest to tactics, closest to sailors, and with the least time being enculturated into the Navy – that what the Navy is doing right now is not working. We all know that the U.S. is lagging the PLA in numbers, industry, and weapons development. We watch our mass expenditure of exquisite missiles in the Red Sea, and Ukraine’s success with drones in the Black Sea, and know that these trends bode ill for the destroyers and carriers the Navy is used to relying on. Instead of personnel policy leading the way to reform, as it did in the 19th century and the interwar period, SWOs are still being told that legacy engineering qualifications are a priority over tactics. It is time for the core model of the U.S. Navy to change.

When today’s lieutenants joined the Navy as midshipmen, they heard then-CNO Admiral Richardson tell us to “Read. Write. Fight.” Junior officers everywhere accepted the challenge, thinking and publishing fiercely about how to dramatically change the Navy. That generation was taught that there was a social contract between junior and senior officers: if junior officers thought and wrote brilliantly, the larger Navy would adopt the best of those ideas. It was clear what implementing aggressive change looked like – exemplified by the Marine Corps’ Force Design and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hick’s Replicator Initiative. In the Marine Corps, it was even possible to draw a straight line from an influential series of articles written by junior officers, to the service-wide concept that Commandant Berger championed.

The Navy has not matched that level of bold action. Administrative leaders in the Navy have a natural – even praiseworthy – instinct towards caution when dealing with billions of dollars and sailors’ careers. Caution has, however, gone too far. Today’s wardrooms know our promotion milestones, but not how we will win a war with China. A desire to mitigate bureaucratic risk has created battlefield risk. It is past time to change this. The fleet is hungry for radical changes – just look at the voracious demand for WTIs, one of the best of the Navy’s recent reforms, in every corner of the fleet.

The ideas we need to implement already exist. They exist in other services; in the battlefield experience of Ukraine, Israel, and the Red Sea; and especially in the thousands of pages of ink spilled thoughtfully over the last decade. The problem is not charting what the new Navy should look like. The problem is acting on it. This is the moment to be radical – for Admiral Caudle to lean fully into the “C-Notes” and make once-in-a-generation changes to how the Navy thinks and works. It is time for the CNO to steer us to the boldest course, despite the risks – we cannot afford anything else right now.

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: An F/A-18E Super Hornet from the “Kestrels” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 137 launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) in the Philippine Sea, April 23, 2025. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Emma Burgess)

By Dmitry Filipoff

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

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

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

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

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