Notes to New CNO Week

Train to Win Below the Threshold of War

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Notes to the New CNO Series

By Vince Vanterpool

In support of developing a new Navy Deterrence Concept, the U.S. Navy needs to develop and train to new tactics and techniques in how to operate just below the threshold of armed conflict. The PRC and PLAN are very comfortable in this realm under the doctrine of their “Three Warfares” and have only grown bolder in their day-to-day operations in the Pacific. The recent collision between PLAN and CCG vessels provided the world a reminder of how dynamic and volatile the situation has become, but it will not dissuade the PLAN from further attempts to exert sea control and sea denial through non-lethal means.

In recent years, the strategy of Integrated Deterrence has taken the form of increased multilateral partnerships, exercises, and patrols to include ASEAN nations, Japan, Australia, and even European powers such as England and France. Additionally, the Pentagon has implemented VIPER (VI personnel) as a means to better broadcast accurate narratives for incidents and interactions at sea. The services have developed operational concepts for countering future maritime threats through Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), and the Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF). However, these initiatives are falling short of truly deterring the PLAN and are not providing tactical-level personnel with the training necessary to win in situations that remain just below hostile acts of war.

In training events and schoolhouses, students often find themselves stuck between the two extremes of routine peacetime operations and preparing for the high-end fight, neglecting the nuance of what comes between those stages. Commanding Officers, Officers in Charge, and Mission Commanders, as well as the personnel under their command, need to be better prepared to interact with a more aggressive and competent PRC that will exploit the seams in our current policies to either force our hand as the aggressor or erode our influence in peacetime. This preparation can only come from practice, but not always at the console or in the cockpit, but in discussions and forums, guided and mediated by JAGs, warfare commanders, and personnel familiar with PRC coercion tactics. The tactical and operational commanders need to have earnest discussions and wargames or tabletop discussions to experiment and refine policies, processes, and tactics.

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

LT Vince Vanterpool is currently serving as Chief Engineer onboard USS Preble (DDG-88). Vince completed his Division Officer tours onboard USS McCampbell (DDG-85) and USS Shiloh (CG-67), and earned his Master’s in Operations Research from the Naval Postgraduate School during his shore tour.

Featured Image: A Chinese Coast Guard ship, right, uses its water cannons on a Philippine vessel as it approaches Scarborough Shoal in the disputed South China Sea on Dec. 9, 2023. (Philippine Coast Guard photo)

Notes to New CNO Week

Sink the Kill Chain: A Navy Space Guide to Protecting Ships and Sailors

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Notes to the New CNO Series

By Alan Brechbill

Admiral Caudle’s first message to the fleet outlined three priorities: the Foundry; the Fleet and the way we Fight. These priorities cannot be realized without acknowledging the simple fact that the next war at sea will be decided first in space. Ships and Sailors operating inside lethal weapons engagement zones (WEZs) cannot survive against China’s massed, over-the-horizon precision fires unless the Navy treats space operations and Counter-C5ISRT (C-C5ISRT) as foundational, not auxiliary, to naval warfare.

China has already built an architecture designed to hold U.S. carrier strike groups and logistics convoys at risk from thousands of miles away. Their killchains depend on persistent surveillance, tracking and targeting multi-phenomenology satellites, long-range radars, and networked command systems. In other words, they will not win with their missiles, but with their ability to find us. Breaking that killchain is the Navy’s main line of defense.

The uncomfortable truth is that Navy leadership still underappreciates this vulnerability. Too much emphasis remains on adding incremental capability to surface combatants or fielding exquisite, but fragile platforms, while adversaries are scaling cheap, resilient sensor networks in space. A fleet that cannot hide cannot fight.

The prioritization of space must be ruthless. The CNO must make Navy space and C-C5ISRT operations the primary force enablers across the maritime domain, and should do this across five mutually supporting lines of effort. 

1. Space as a Warfighting Domain, Not a Support Function

The Navy cannot outsource its survival to the Space Force. Maritime space operations must be owned, integrated, and exercised by trained Sailors who understand fleet maneuver. Space control must be as natural to a strike group commander as air defense.

2. C-C5ISRT as the Navy’s First Layer of Defense

Before the first missile is fired, the battle is already underway in the electromagnetic spectrum and across all orbital regimes. We must blind, jam, spoof, or destroy red’s kill web faster than it can refresh. This requires investments in offensive space capabilities, maritime EW, and deception tools that are not “nice-to-have,” but existential to survival.

3. The Foundry Must Build for the Dark

New platforms and payloads must be designed to operate when space enablers are degraded, while simultaneously being able to deny space support to the adversary. Resilience is not redundancy, it is deception, mobility, and adaptability baked into the Fleet from day one.

4. The Fleet Must Train to Disappear

Fleet exercises must not assume persistent U.S. space superiority. Ships must practice emissions control, deception operations, and distributed maneuver under the assumption that they are being hunted from orbit. Only by learning to vanish can they fight to win.

5. Manpower as a Warfighting Weapon

The Navy cannot fight a space war with borrowed manpower and leased expertise. Space dominance demands Sailors who are trained and certified in the lethal art of disrupting red killchains. This is not an auxiliary skillset, but a warfighting specialty. If the Fleet expects to survive, it must invest in dedicated Navy Space operators with the same rigor given to aviators and submariners. Anything less will cost ships and lives.

Conclusion

The Navy’s heritage is about giving Sailors a fighting chance to prevail. In the age of great power competition, saving ships and Sailors’ lives means breaking the enemy’s killchain. Admiral Caudle’s vision will succeed only if the Navy ruthlessly prioritizes space dominance and C-C5ISRT as the bedrock of how we Fight. The Fleet’s survival depends on it.

Captain Alan Brechbill, a Maritime Space Officer, is the Director of Navy Space Command. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the United States Navy or the U.S. government.

Featured Image: The guided-missile destroyer USS Oscar Austin (DDG 79) transits the Atlantic Ocean Sept. 14, 2017. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ryan Utah Kledzik)

Notes to New CNO Week

Accelerate Human-Machine Teaming in the Maritime Operations Center

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Notes to the New CNO Series

By Michael Posey

To maintain maritime superiority in this era of trans-regional, multi-domain warfare, the Navy must accelerate human-machine teaming within Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs). Our adversaries, including our pacing challenge, China, invest heavily in adopting AI technology, a consequential technology for command and control. MOCs serve as the decision hubs of numbered fleets, responsible for executing campaigns at sea and managing maritime task forces. As our Navy fights from the seabed to space and through the electromagnetic spectrum, the volume of data demands our watchstanders employ data-enhancing tools that augment, not replace, human judgment.

The Fleet: Command and Control at Scale

Numbered fleets are our Navy’s primary warfighting formations, and MOCs serve as the command and control hubs. NTTP 3-32.1 reminds us that MOCs must integrate intelligence, operations, and logistics at scale. AI offers a force-multiplying capability by enabling rapid data synthesis, which enhances the Fleet Commanders’ situational awareness and supports watchstanders under pressure. When properly integrated, AI can relieve watchstanders and their task forces of burdensome tasks, allowing them to communicate the most salient information to Fleet Commanders so they may focus on high-consequence decisions. For centuries, our watchstanders have been ready for the fight. Given the rapidly evolving character of war, especially with the advent of AI tools, we must optimize how we train and equip our Sailors.

The Fight: Maneuver and Fires Across Domains

In combat, human-machine teaming becomes even more critical. The Navy is transitioning to hybrid fleet operations, employing assets across multiple domains with expanding maneuver and converging fires. AI can assist warfighters in the MOC with threat detection, targeting, and resource allocation, but only if operators trust its outputs. Building that trust requires transparency, reliability, and comprehensive training.

The Foundry: Building the Future Force

The most important pillar, sir, is the Foundry—how we build our future force through education and training. AI is not a panacea. Bias, contextual failures, and misinterpretation remain as AI’s Achilles’ Heels. Watchstanders should employ AI while recognizing these limitations. Furthermore, our Navy must initiate the challenging task of standardizing data collection across commands to prevent silos and enable data-informed decisions. Watchstanders must arrive as AI-literate warfighters, prepared to operate in a vast, volatile, contested maritime domain that demands machine teaming. The Pentagon is already investing in digital learning platforms and executive education to build this literacy across the force. Let’s lead the way with education and training at Naval Postgraduate School, Maritime Warfighting Courses, and  Fleet Tactical Training Groups.

Human-machine teaming in MOCs is not merely aspirational but an immediate imperative. The Navy must invest in AI education in our Foundry to empower the Fleet for the coming Fight. By doing so, our Sailors will be ready when they stand the watch with the decision-making tools they need to prevail in tomorrow’s maritime fight.

CDR Michael Posey is a U.S. Naval Flight Officer assigned as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the United States Navy or U.S. government.

Featured Image: Sailors stand watch in U.S. Naval Forces Central Command’s (NAVCENT) maritime operations center in Manama, Bahrain, Jan. 29, 2024. (U.S. Navy Photo)

Notes to New CNO Week

Change the Navy’s Narrative: The Future Fight and the Hybrid Fleet

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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)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.