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)
