SWO Specialization Week

By Mike Fierro

As a SWO, my career included serving as the Surface Commander Detailer and CRUDES Placement Officer. My career included four tours in engineering billets afloat (two as the Engineer Officer in steam ships), and two instructor billets, one at what used to be called Surface Warfare Officers School Command (now Surface Warfare Schools Command) as the Steam Engineering Course Director, and at Tactical Training Group, Pacific (TTGP) as the Surface Warfare Syndicate Lead, responsible for training carrier and amphibious strike groups for operational deployments. Additionally, I served in major staff positions in the Pentagon and overseas. My sea duty included three ships homeported in the Western Pacific and two in San Diego. My wife was also a SWO who served two tours as Engineer Officer, one in a steam ship and one in a gas turbine ship. We were both blessed with command at sea (me in a SPRUANCE-class destroyer and she in a DDG-51, Commodore of a Destroyer Squadron and command of an Expeditionary Strike Group as a flag officer).

While teaching at TTGP, a class of Royal Australian Navy (RAN) Principal Warfare Officers attended a special two-week course there. In my post-Navy career, I have had extensive interaction with the RAN and gained an understanding of their career structure and dynamics among their warfare specialties. As the Surface Operations Officer for a Carrier Strike Group during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, I worked closely with liaison officers from the UK, France, Netherlands, and Italy. My tour at Naval Forces Europe/Naval Forces Africa/SIXTHFLEET provided insight into NATO and allied navies. In my Western Pacific tours, I operated with naval forces from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore. As a civilian contractor, I worked as a Manpower Analyst for the Naval Aviation Resource sponsor (N98) providing insight into the Nuclear Power Manpower structure for carriers and submarines. This experience helps inform my perspective on the issues in the GAO report on SWO specialization.

The GAO report states that the major impetus for conducting it was the tragic collisions that resulted in the deaths of 17 Sailors. It touches on other impacts to surface ship readiness including training, retention, and personal satisfaction and preference. Its purpose is well-established and a necessary step in ensuring corrective measures are taken to avoid recurrence in the future. It covered many issues in good detail. The discourse in Appendix VI: Comments from the Department of the Navy does a good job of addressing dissonance in the report. There are more points, however, that are relevant to the discussion.

Far and away, the most important issue for the surface navy that needs to be addressed here is the strengthening of the training program for officers and enlisted. Changes to surface warfare training 20 years ago weakened the structure of the community, and key among them was the decision to eliminate the division officer course for entry-level officers. Those close to the decision report that this cost-saving measure was justified largely by anecdotal input by junior officers close to decision-makers. The Surface Warfare community has reestablished a robust Division Officer training scheme, which will pay long-term dividends. This deserves to be mentioned because of the amount of attention being placed on the survey of junior officers. Wisdom comes from experience and perspective you only get with the passage of time. Responsible leaders protect subordinates from making decisions based on emotion or incomplete knowledge and lack of experience, often at the risk of being unpopular.

The appeal of specialization to some in the U.S. Navy (USN) is that it would strengthen knowledge, expertise, and self-confidence which often come through experience. The Surface Navy has a robust training program for the employment of combat systems (Aegis and SSDS). The related training in systems and equipment obtained by Combat Systems Officers is likewise robust. The Surface Navy can benefit from a robust training program for Engineer Officers or officers on track to be Engineer Officers with a program similar to the Weapons Tactics Instructor courses that were instituted several years ago. Such a robust training program might provide the technical substance to instill the necessary skill and assuredness to excel as an Engineer Officer, and such a concept appears to be under development.

Will changing the Navy’s current surface warfare construct, one that has been generally successful and is uniquely American in its egalitarian nature, create a better Surface Warfare community and higher warfighting readiness? A common refrain is, “Why can’t the USN be like other navies and specialize; why does it have to be different?” Turning that around, “How can other navies serve as a reasonable model for the U.S. Navy?” Other navies are not organized like the U.S. Navy around warfare communities. Their naval air arms are not like our naval aviation community. They do not have numerous strike groups and operational staffs, much less the major ashore staffs that must be manned with experienced unrestricted line officers.

The size of a navy has major implications for how specialization can affect its manpower management. Beyond not being organized like the USN, they are not of the same scale. For example, the RN and RAN are a fraction of the size of the USN in both ships and manpower. The USN has over 80 CRUDES ships and more than 30 amphibs, and about 350,000 active-duty uniformed personnel, not counting about 100,000 reservists. For major surface combatants, the RN has six DDGs, 12 frigates, five amphibs and eight patrol vessels. It has less than 40,000 uniformed personnel, including reservists. The RAN has three DDGs, eight FFs, three amphibs, and approximately 20,000 uniformed personnel, including reservists. Thankfully despite their small size, these key allies punch above their weight.

Shipboard organization in the RN and RAN is structured around three specialties. Principal Warfare Officers (PWOs) focus on operating the ship and its weapons systems. Weapons Electrical Engineering Officers (WEEOs) maintain and repair topside equipment. Mechanical Engineering Officers (Chief Engineers or “Mechs”) operates and maintains propulsion and platform (hotel) services.

In those navies, the WEEOs and Mechs are professional engineering officers. They are not considered warfare officers in our context. They do not ascend to command of a warship as PWOs do. They are not under what we would consider the SWO community. Instead, they belong to the Head of Navy Engineering. A parallel in the USN would be that half to two-thirds of a ship’s line department heads are Engineering Duty Officers and not in what we consider the SWO community. Under the RN/RAN construct, the detailing, manpower control, and budget authority of those officers would not be in the SWO Community. (As a side note, different than EDOs, Surface LDO and Warrant Officers are detailed and funded from PERS-414, which is nested within the SWO Community.)

In the RN/RAN model, the WEEOs and Chief Engineers are qualified professional engineering officers and do not stand TAO watches. What we consider the TAO watch is stood only by PWOs, and their warships are staffed to have three PWOs to stand this watch. Adopting the RN/RAN model in an Aegis ship would require the USN to convert one of the two Combat Systems Department Heads to a WEEO, and since the WEEO and Chief Engineer do not stand TAO, that means that at least one additional department head-level PWO is needed to staff a three section TAO watchbill. In a non-Aegis ship, with only a Combat Systems Officer, Operations Officer, and Engineer Officer, a fourth department head or other specialist officer would be needed to fill the WEEO responsibilities. In this construct, the SWO Community would not fund or control the Engineer Officer and WEEO.

With this specialty structure, these navies do not share a unified identity as a community. Rather, each identifies with their own specialty and wear different insignia, which can sometimes cause friction.

Since the Commanding Officer is a PWO and the WEEO/Chief Engineer are under a different career authority, there is a different command dynamic onboard RN and RAN ships compared to the USN. In those navies, there is more deference by the CO to the Chief Engineer as the COs are generally unfamiliar with propulsion and engineering. While the WEEOs and Chief Engineers are  knowledgeable and competent, the dynamic is shaped more by personality than in the command environment with which the USN is familiar. Since the CO has little engineering experience to fall back on, the CO is completely reliant on the Chief Engineer.

The USN and the U.S. military are vastly different than other navies and militaries. Beyond the size of the fleet and its tactical and operational staffs, the USN has large headquarters and strategic staffs that must be manned. The SWO community contributes a large share of warfare-qualified officers to fill these positions, including former Engineer Officers. Specializing engineering officers in the RN/RAN models will result in fewer warfare-qualified officers for these positions Navy-wide, not just within the SWO Community. This compounds manning issues that have presented themselves as new communities like Information Warfare, Foreign Affairs Officers, and others pull bodies from an already limited pool of manpower. A new engineering community would almost assuredly further complicate staff manning challenges as there will most likely be complicated schooling and career requirements that will need to be managed with filling seats on staffs.

There are over 100 surface combatants in the USN, most with LT/LCDR-level department heads. In the current billet structure, the SWO community billet inventory does not have enough post-DH engineering related, career progressive billets to occupy that many former Engineer Officers year-on-year. The preponderance of O-4 and above engineering billets are in portfolios that the SWO Community either does not own or cannot fully control (either EDOs or Acquisition Professionals (APs). Specializing this community would mean an ill-advised attempt to wrestle these positions away from these other communities. This would not be impossible, but the political will to do so must be strong and sustained, neither of which can be promised as administrations change or as real-world circumstances dictate.

Strictly applying the RN/RAN models to the USN is unsuitable from several standpoints. The USN is an egalitarian Navy vice an elitist one, which is what develops when only one group can grow to be the CO. Beyond that, the USN has traditionally valued the well-rounded knowledge and experience of its COs. A review of historical data will show that among department heads, former Engineer Officers are chosen for command at an impressive rate. If Engineer Officers are removed from competition for command, will the quality of the remaining department head candidates be sufficient to maintain the standard of USN commanding officers? A review of flag officer biographies will show that former Engineer Officers are chosen for admiral positions at an equally impressive rate, which is made even more impressive when including Nuclear Surface Warfare Officers.

There are Engineer Officers that want to compete for command, and they should be able to do so, particularly since they often prove to be very competent COs. Additionally, there are SWOs that want to be engineering specialists, and they should be able to shift to Engineering Duty Officer (EDO).

As a hedge against potential negative outcomes of a decision to specialize SWO engineering, the Navy can consider moving the EDO community into PERS 41 so it mirrors the aviation community, which keeps control of its engineers. As it currently stands, EDOs are managed separately. However, a wholesale shift of the EDO community to the SWO community will likely be widely unpopular. The best course of action would be to address specific concerns of the parties and allow creative detailing to figure out a solution for the good of the Navy as well as for the good of these individuals. This will be challenging, but if officers present specific leadership and/or engineering talent, this is not impossible. However, it will require thinking outside of the box.

The report discussed officers that would be happy to remain in engineering. What would a specialized career track look like for officers who want to do that? What would tour lengths need to be for it to make sense? At what point do officers specialize? The Division Officer level is too soon to specialize in engineering. If the decision is to go completely over to the RN/RAN model and create a WEEO community, there will likely be officers interested in becoming WEEOs so specialization should draw from post-Division Officers with both engineering and combat systems experience.

For the SWO community to achieve benefits of specializing in engineering, the payoff is likely to be longer or repeated tours in engineering departments at sea. What is sustainable? Three-, four- or five- year Engineer Officer tours at sea? Given the make-up of the surface fleet, it is conceivable that repeated Engineer Officer tours in the same ship class will result. Is that lack of apparent upward mobility something the engineering specialist officers and the SWO community would embrace? This could perhaps result in circumstances where the CO and Engineer are near peers in seniority, which would be a major change for sure.

For engineering specialization to be done right and achieve the optimal benefit for the good of the Navy, it will require additional education and professional qualifications, which keep an officer away from SWO business for lengthy periods of time. Determining the benefits of an investment in time away from SWO business will require analysis of the value of that time away. If the SWO community does not have sufficient demand for those skills, or they are in demand in other communities such as the EDO and AP communities, it probably does not bring direct value back to the SWO community. In that case, the community might consider the ancillary benefit of having experienced SWOs in those positions. It would be similar to the logic applied to justifying over-assessing junior officers who laterally transfer because there is a benefit from their SWO experience.

The GAO report touched on Surface Nuclear Officers. That is an important discussion in its own regard and not one to address here. The Surface community reaps such great benefits from its Surface Nuclear officers that care should be taken not to jeopardize that. USN Engineer Officers and nuke SWOs have proven competent to stand TAO watch and serve as topside Department Heads. These officers often go on to successful command tours and some achieve flag rank.

Making changes should be driven by the problems that must be solved. If the Navy believes the issue is improving surface ship readiness and it feels its ship Engineer Officers are the cause of the poor general state of surface ship readiness, then that is like blaming the problems of the national power grid on electricians. There is a large enterprise that supports the Engineer Officer, from the Port Engineer through Regional Maintenance Centers and NAVSEA Codes. The Navy budget has typically underfunded surface ship readiness, frequently at levels of 65% year-on-year, which builds a large backlog of incomplete maintenance. This leads to higher failure rates between maintenance availabilities and higher costs to repair, compounding the impact of underfunding maintenance. If the funding of the maintenance program is not fixed, even perfect Engineer Officers will not make much difference. The material readiness solution needs to be addressed at a systemic level, such as through improved POM-level funding for surface ship readiness. Blaming Engineer Officers is an easy scapegoat and reductive answer to a much larger, much harder problem.

Conclusion

Is the SWO career path perfect? Nothing is so perfect that it cannot be improved. The career path has had adjustments over the years. For example, the community changed the career path by moving Department Heads between departments from their first Department Head (DH) tour to their second. This was a learning experience for the surface community and resulted in the general policy of officers specializing in their two DH tours. The community learned that long, single department head tours were unpopular and hurt officers in the long run in competition with peers who did split tours. The career path also changed with the split tour division officer program, which was popular with junior officers and widely unpopular with COs. However, this kept more junior officers in the community and yielded officers with broader experience. Additionally, XO/CO fleet-up has proven to be more successful than anticipated. The community is capable of learning and adapting. Whatever changes occur, they should protect the concept that the American military is a meritocracy that rewards superior performance and professional excellence with command opportunities.

Mike Fierro is retired career U.S. Navy Captain who served primarily in CRUDES ships, commanded a Spruance-class destroyer, and served as a Surface Operations Officer on a Carrier Strike Group staff during OEF. His shore assignments include commanding Naval Support Activity Annapolis, serving on the Office of the Secretary of Defense staff, serving as a Placement Officer and Detailer in PERS 41, and serving as the Assistant Director for Policy, Resources and Strategy at U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa/COMSIXTHFLT in Naples, Italy. He has taught at SWOS, TacTraGruPac, and the Naval War College. He was a Steam Examiner on the Propulsion Examining Board. After retiring, he worked as a Manpower Requirements Analyst on the OPNAV Staff. He currently serves as the president of BecTech, a woman-owned small business supporting the U.S. Navy, Missile Defense Agency, and partner navies. He and his wife reside in Scarborough, ME.

Featured Image: SUEZ CANAL (Dec. 15, 2025) The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS McFaul (DDG 74) passes under the Mubarak Peace Bridge while transiting the Suez Canal. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass communication specialist 2nd Class Gabriel Fields)

SWO Specialization Week

By Gerry Roncolato

Introduction

“Despite the remarkable developments in military technology, despite the weapons and machines which have vastly expanded our striking power, it is still a basic truth that the only absolute weapon is man. Upon his determination, his stamina, and his skill, rests the issue of victory or defeat in war.”¹ –General Matthew B. Ridgway, U.S. Army

Long periods of peace between great powers generate certain characteristics in their militaries. Most notably, highly technical and mechanistic models of war come to the fore, and as Andrew Gordon brilliantly argues, system specialists take over.² That is the import of the above quote from World War II’s General Mathew Ridgway. Militaries must always be on guard to preserve focus on the human element of war during times of peace, and to avoid slavish devotion to rules and a mechanistic approach to war.³

The U.S. Navy has largely been at peace since 1945. Certainly, elements within the Navy have seen combat, but even then, the Navy writ large fought from the sanctuary of an American-controlled ocean. Over the decades since 1945, the argument for ever-deeper specialization has been a consistent drumbeat. As early as 1946 some naval officers found it necessary to argue against the trend, and repeated efforts to stem the tide can be found up to the present.⁴

Specialization is attractive to bureaucratic organizations. It promises to solve the problems of building individual system knowledge in the face of extraordinary technological advancement. It works well in commercial applications, but its efficacy in military organizations that fight wars, suffer casualties, and adapt to unforeseen and highly dangerous events is at best unproven.⁵ The U.S. Navy is already heavily specialized, and today’s calls are for even more.

Specialization feeds more specialization. Each step seems to solve the immediate problem, but eventually each is insufficient. Specialization sets a navy down the path where the true purpose of that navy can be lost. That purpose is to fight the nation’s wars. A commanding officer who has devoted his or her attention disproportionately to mastering a specialty will find little remaining time and bandwidth to focus on the broader and less technical demands of the position. Consideration of war—particularly its human element—falls prey to deeper study of the specialty’s technical demands. This is how a Navy can lose sight of its purpose and the realities of war

Historical Debates and Evolution

The topic of specialization within the Navy, and specifically in the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) community, reemerges from time to time. This tendency is usually occasioned by a series of mishaps, dramatic changes to the strategic environment, or as Captain Mark Hagerott argues, bureaucratic changes like the emergence of the nuclear power navy in the 1950s.⁶ Now, based on a 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on SWO career paths—incident to several 2017 collisions at sea—further specialization is under consideration.⁷

This debate within the Navy reaches back to the original amalgamation of deck and engineer officer corps in 1899. Then-Lieutenant Commander L. H. Chandler, USN, felt compelled to counter specialist arguments already surfacing in 1906.⁸ He laments the frequent refrain about ever-increasing complexity in naval weapon systems and therefore the assumed inability of an individual to master those systems. Specialization, he warns, will not solve the problem and worse, once embarked upon, will bring ever more specialization. The implication is that once you accept that technology overwhelms a generalist commander, there will be no end to the amount of specialization you will need.

He has been proven right. In the late 19^th century, specialization of line officers existed between the old deck officers and newly forming engineer corps as the development of steam propulsion, steel hulls, and rifled ordnance continued to accelerate. The Navy Personnel Law of 1899 decided against this specialization, and “amalgamated” deck officers and engineers into a single line officer corps.⁹ Ever since its enactment, pressures to specialize line officers have been a consistent backstory to the Navy’s evolution.

First came the aviators and later the submariners. The SWO community itself was a relatively late comer to the game. Originally line officers assigned to surface ships were those who remained generalist, and often they broadened their experience by earning aviator wings or doing time in submarines. This practice largely ended after World War II, and by the mid-1970s specialization into these three main line communities solidified. In the intervening decades, specialization continued to expand, with the SWO community for example being sub-specialized into the AEGIS, non-AEGIS, amphibious, and mine warfare sub-communities. Juxtaposed to these groupings are functional specialties such as combat systems, operations, and engineering (nuclear and non-nuclear). Perhaps these categories are not official, but as many SWO will tell you, they are real just the same.

The key here is the reality that, despite the 1899 amalgamation of the Navy’s line officer corps, the balance between specialization and generalism has been steadily shifting in favor of the former. The 2021 GAO report focuses on SWO career paths, but it also argues for a more specialized approach to officer training and assignment. It includes the results of a survey across all SWO paygrades—from O-1 to O-6—which indicate that 69 percent of those surveyed felt that the current generalist approach is insufficient.

Implied within the report is the increasing complexity of naval warfare—especially surface naval warfare—and the difficulty individuals have in mastering that complexity. Such an environment, the report argues, is prejudicial to SWO retention, which appears to be the lens through which the analysis was conducted. The GAO report includes an extensive appendix that contains the Navy’s response—a response which largely concurs with the report.¹⁰

The GAO report is rigorous and well-written. Its conclusions are based on solid managerial principals. And in one sense, it addresses real concerns within the SWO community. However, the report fails to consider broader issues related to SWO training, career paths, and warfighting excellence.

The Requirements of Command

The core issue is what the Navy expects of its commanding officers. Are they managers and leaders focusing on the efficiency of their organization and the well-being of their crews? Yes, of course. But what gets far less attention is that the commanding officer is above all responsible for fighting the ship. Today, the assumption within the SWO community may be that to do so effectively, the commanding officer must be a master of all the systems on that ship.

If one reads the redacted command investigation into the USS Gettysburg’s friendly fire incident in the Red Sea in December 2024, it is clear that commanding officers face a bewildering amount of information they must master—not only the ship’s systems, but also how the ship fits within the broader and even more complex system of the strike group, and ultimately the Joint Force. What bit of knowledge should the commanding officer not know? Underlying the investigation report is the assumption that he should have known more than he apparently did.¹¹

Yes, a commanding officer must know the ship’s systems, but not only the combat systems. They must also know how the engineering plant works—to be able to visualize the inner workings so that capabilities and limitations become second nature—or the various elements of the ship’s extensive communications capabilities, and even lesser systems such as the various elements of the shipboard supply organization. The commanding officer’s knowledge must also extend beyond the ship’s lifelines to how other elements in the strike group and Joint Force work, what they bring to the table and what are their limitations. And, not least, the commanding officer must know the enemy’s capabilities and limitations—and most important, how the enemy commander thinks and what their role is in their system of war.

This is a lot to demand, and it is one reason the Navy chooses its commanding officers very carefully. But that is not to say the commanding officer need be expert in all of those aspects. Indeed, it is impossible for one person to be expert in all things. The commanding officer needs to know the ship, but also how to fight the ship. This extends into the human realm beyond the world of systems.

The drive toward increased specialization has other causes as well. For example, today’s SWOs spend less time at sea than their predecessors. The majority of an officer’s career was spent at sea in the pre-WWII Navy. At the same time, there was much more command opportunity at junior levels than possible today. Famously, as commanding officer, a young Ensign Chester A. Nimitz, USN, ran USS Decatur (DD 5) aground in the Philippines in 1908.¹² Not only did his career not suffer too much, but the example illustrates how junior a commanding officer could be. The biographies of surface officers serving in the 1950s and 1960s show a plethora of command opportunities as well.

We have come a long way since the pre-WWII days when duty in Washington was limited if not openly discouraged. Modern day SWOs not only have to master their primary role as seagoing line officers, but they are also expected to serve significant time on shore staffs, especially in Washington. They are also required to serve in Joint billets and earn a master’s degree. These requirements were not present before WWII and important though they may be, they cut into sea time.

Today’s SWO faces ever increasing system complexity while simultaneously having less time at sea to master that complexity. One gap filler could be the training system. Current computer technology—digital twins, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and immersive simulations—offers the possibility of training at a much faster rate and with much greater knowledge retention. Yet, the Navy (and the military as a whole) continues the century-old practice of instructor-led instruction. Immersive trainers are making their way into the Navy’s training system, but the transition is too slow and much more could be done. One of the key problems more specialization is trying to solve could be addressed by increased training efficiency and effectiveness. This could be done without compromising the more generalist needs of command at all levels.¹³

In facing the potential for future great power war, we must better balance between bureaucratic efficiency and warfighting effectiveness. The former is necessary to maximize the benefits of funds expended, but the latter is essential in war. Trent Hone brilliantly explores this dynamic. At the strategic and high operational level of war in the Pacific in World War II, efficiency was critical to generating the material needed to project power over thousands of miles, but warfighting effectiveness at the point of contact (low operational and tactical levels of war) brought with it a highly inefficient consumption of material.¹⁴ Admiral Paparo, current commander of USINDOPACOM, recently argued for just such a rebalancing.¹⁵ Service (especially SWO) culture in part will determine how effectively we shift focus toward effectiveness. A highly specialized officer corps may not easily recognize the need or the right steps essential for such a shift.

Adjusting the Generalist/Specialist Divide Between Officers and Enlisted

Over the decades since World War II, the surface community expected its officers to delve increasingly into the technical details of its systems. This has had the unintended consequence of reducing the role of senior enlisted technical experts. As SWOs have descended deeper and deeper into minutiae, they have tended to focus less and less on the warfighting aspects of their profession. This trend has continued unchecked because, in part, we have not faced credible enemies at sea for decades, and arguably since 1945.

When this author asked a World War II Navy enlisted veteran about the differing roles of officers and enlisted on his ships during the war, he answered simply: officers fought the ship, the enlisted made it work.¹⁶ Then-Captain William P. Mack, USN, argued in the same vein in 1957. He reasoned that “…there is only one real specialty—command.”¹⁷ Mack went on to argue that the focus of the line officer is to command, and that doing so required a generalist with wide understanding of the various platforms and systems that make up the fleet. What both men were saying is that officers have roles and responsibilities beyond the technical, while enlisted experts are the true specialists in the Navy.

The reemergence of great power competition and possible conflict should once again drive the officer corps to focus more on warfighting than it has in recent decades. As officers spend more time studying and thinking about war and their role in it, senior enlisted technical experts—highly trained as they are today—will grow into the shoes formerly filled by officers. They will exercise their competence as the true system masters. Such a division of labor should never be absolute or rigid, but it does suggest a rebalancing. Moreover, it more fully engages a wider range of a ship’s crew. Both officers and enlisted together will take greater ownership in the ship and its missions.¹⁸

Preparing for the Future Fight

We now face an unknown warfighting future. No one has experienced the kind of high-end fight against a capable maritime enemy that lies on the horizon and about which we should be giving serious thought. In such a situation, the experiences of today’s naval leaders over the course of their careers hold only a limited relevance. How can we prepare for such an unknown? This is what Clausewitz struggled with in his classic On War.¹⁹ His answer – deep and empathetic study of military history. Any military history would suffice because the focus of such study would be on the human element, specifically, the commander. What caused commanders to make the decisions they did or did not make? A similar approach today would help arm future leaders with the tools they will need to deal with the unexpected.²⁰

No one individual can master all of the technologies and systems in use on our ships. A specialized commanding officer is ill-equipped to comprehend the myriad complexities and uncertainties of a future joint fight against a capable maritime opponent. We cannot be masters of every technology or mission area.

The answer is contained in the history of the debate over specialization. The commanding officer must be the conductor of their ship and its systems, not the putative expert in a narrow technical or specialty field. As the Navy looks to high-end conflict at sea in the future, officer responsibility will shift to fighting the ship, accomplishing the mission, and to the degree possible, bringing ship and crew back home. That is a heavy burden, one we have not had to bear for a very long time. It demands a more generalist officer corps, increased ownership by enlisted technicians, greater warfighting focus, and in a world of rapidly changing technology, a training system that can pace those changes.

Today as in the past, specialization promises more than it can deliver. It is attractive to those who do not know the past, because they are free to zero in on technical challenges—as if warfighting capability rests solely on that foundation. Increasing specialization does nothing to answer the challenges of future war at the tactical, vice procedural level, nor does it answer the challenges of combat leadership in command—at any level. Andrew Gordon warned us about this in his book The Rules of the Game.²¹ Trent Hone offered an alternative approach in his excellent work Learning War.²² And numerous article authors over the past century and a half have argued that specialization is an alluring but dangerous path.

The U.S. Navy has not fought against a peer adversary since 1945. No one on active duty today, and almost no one alive today, knows about the kind of war we fought in the Pacific in the 1940s. A future great power war will more closely resemble World War II than any of the conflicts since its end in 1945. Since that time, the Navy and its SWO community have increasingly come to see the role of the officer as being the technical expert. It was not always so. What has been lost is the concept of the generalist who is well versed in all aspects of naval and joint warfighting. In 1946, Lieutenant Commander Preston Lincoln, USNR, wrote about specialization in the Navy. He wrote from the perspective of a just-finished war where the Navy had grown to an immense size, where technology had leapfrogged far beyond where it was at the start of the war, and, consequently, where no combat officer had the time to become a true expert in any one area. A lawyer since World War I and a veteran of World War II, Lincoln succinctly stated the role of the naval officer: “The primary function of a U.S. Naval officer is to be a director and coordinator of specialists and technicians rather than one himself.”²³

Today’s Navy would do well to consider this wisdom and ask itself if the current path of increasing specialization will serve the Navy and nation into a future of great power conflict. Specialization is not the solution, but even if we slow its long creep in our military, we will still face significant challenges as we prepare for an unknowable kind of maritime war in the future. Meeting that challenge requires honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses against the backdrop of a deeper understanding of war and swift action to change course. This is where the focus must be.

Captain Gerard D. Roncolato, USN (Ret.), is a retired surface warfare officer with extensive experience in policy and strategy work. He commanded the guided-missile destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) and Destroyer Squadron 26 at sea.

References

[1] Attributed to General Matthew B. Ridgway, USA. Quoted in Captain William P. Mack, USN, “The Exercise of Broad Command: Still the Navy’s Top Specialty,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1957. VADM Mack went on to be Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and a naval fiction author.

[2] Andrew Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000). In particular, the twenty-eight “Syndromes of Peacetime Navies,” pp. 579-601.

[3] David Kohnen, “Charting a New Course: The Knox-Pye-King Board and Naval Professional Education, 1919-1923,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 71: No. 3, Article 8, Summer 2018.

[4] See, for example, Lieutenant Commander Preston S. Lincoln, USNR, “Specialization and the Post War Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1946.

[5] This too was an argument in the earliest days of the “generalist” Navy after the 1899 Line-Engineer amalgamation. See Lieutenant Commander L. H. Chandler, USN, “An Answer to Criticism of ‘Is Amalgamation a Failure’”, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1906.

[6] Mark Hagerott, CAPT, USN (Ret.), “Commanding Minds: Naval Leadership in the Age of AI,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 2025

[7] General Accounting Office (GAO), “Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Evaluate and Improve Surface Warfare Career Officer Career Path,” June 2021. Report #GAO-21-168.

[8] Chandler, “An Answer to Criticism of ‘Is Amalgamation a Failure’”.

[9] See Lieutenant Edward L. Beach, USN, “The Results of the Navy Personnel Law of March 3, 1899,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1902. He discusses the details of the law (including and beyond the deck-engineer corps amalgamation provisions) and assesses its impact three years after the fact.

[10] GAO, “Navy Readiness,” Appendix VI, pp. 151 ff.

[11] U.S. Central Command, Memorandum for Commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), “Second Endorsement of Command Investigation into the Facts and Circumstances Surrounding the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG) Friendly Fire Incident and Class A Aviation Flight Mishap on 22 December, 2024,” dtd 23 April 2025. Redacted.

[12] Christopher P. Michael, “Making the Most of Failure,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 2006.

[13] See Captain Gerard D. Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “Effective and Affordable Trainers Are Possible,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2017. See also the same author’s article on building a warfighting culture: “A Warfighting Imperative: Back to Basics for the Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2022.

[14] Trent Hone, “From Mobile Fleet to Mobile Force: The Evolution of U.S. Navy

Logistics in the Central Pacific During World War II,” Journal of Military

History, 87:2 (April 2023), pp. 367-403.

[15] Sam LaGrone, “PACFLEET CO Paparo Talks Combat Logistics,

Chinese Coercion,” U.S. Naval Institute News, 14 February 2023. See also Gerard Roncolato, CAPT USN (Ret.), “The Navy Needs a Lot More Logistics, or a Different Strategy, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2024.

[16] A 2013 discussion with my father, a signalman first class, 1943-1946.

[17] Captain Mack, “The Exercise of Broad Command.”

[18] This is not to ignore programs like the Propulsion Examining Board or the Planned Maintenance System (PMS). Both were necessary at the time they were implemented. However, while they improved ship material readiness, they had the side effect of diminishing the role of the Chief and enlisted technicians. The challenge is to stimulate enlisted ownership of their systems, especially adherence to engineering standards, while freeing officers to focus on that which only they can execute: fighting the ship. Hagerott suggests that the nuclear power community under Admiral Rickover’s leadership pushed the Navy down this road. The SWO community copied much of the nuclear power community’s philosophy and techno-centric culture. One could argue that the Surface PEB and PMS programs flow logically from this post-W.W.II trend. See Hagerott, op. cit.

[19] Jon Tetsuro Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War, (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2008), p. 3 and pp. 99-101. See also Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. & trans. by Michael Howard and

Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976),

[20] This is a core piece of Hagerott’s argument in preparing for the emergence of AI in war. “Commanding Minds”, op. cit.

[21] Andrew Gordon, Rules of the Game, op. cit.

[22] Trent Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945, (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2018).

[23] Lincoln, “Specialization and the Post War Navy.”

Featured Image: PANAMA CITY, Fla. (November 13, 2025) — The Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Pierre (LCS 38) is moored at the Port of Panama City ahead of its commissioning ceremony. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kassandra Alanis)

SWO Specialization Week

By Chris Rielage

SWO specialization was a good idea for the last generation of officers, but time is now too short. Implementing it in 2026, with the possibility of great power war looming, would be self-destructive.

It was more than five years ago – August 2020 to October 2020 – when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted its well-known survey about SWO specialization. This was a moment when, in the wake of the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, there was deep frustration with the existing personnel and training system across the surface fleet. There was also enough time to make major change a reality. The Chinese were a near-peer threat with alarming growth trends, not a regionally dominant superpower. The previous year, the PLA had just displayed the first versions of many of the weapons that it now produces en masse. The PLAN only boasted two aircraft carriers – Shandong had commissioned the year before – and only one Renhai (Type 055) cruiser was in service. Admiral Davidson had not yet made discussion of a near-term China threat mainstream. The surface navy had a stable window when it could afford to make changes, even dramatic ones, to its officer career path. 

The world is not the same place it was in 2020 – and SWO specialization is no longer a good idea. 2027 – less than a year away – is the benchmark the fleet has set for readiness for a war with China. We are being told to prepare for high-end combat operations – soon. We have no room to work through the major disruption that dividing the SWO community into specialties would bring. Instead, the surface Navy should drive the existing officer career path to be more tactical anywhere it can.

Bureaucratic Change in Theory and Practice

Calls to divide the SWO community into subspecialties have been common since 2017, in the aftermath of the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain collisions in Seventh Fleet. They came up short due to bureaucratic inertia – and the recognition that there was an easier path to the same end. Often framed as a negative, bureaucratic inertia is a fact of life. Simply put, it is a succinct way of capturing how it takes a dramatic investment of time, energy, and resources for any bureaucracy to establish its current system and to enculturate every member with the same goals and expectations. For a bureaucracy to change in the face of this sunk cost, political economist Anthony Down describes three forces that must, in some combination, motivate individuals.

Self-aggrandizement is the natural desire for ambitious leaders to act in ways that distinguish them from the crowd. While not every naval officer is perfectly selfless, there is no indication that today’s officers are any more or less self-aggrandizing than previous generations, making this a constant. Instead, Downs suggests two other forces that are more relevant for driving particular change in the Navy.

Mission success is the altruistic desire to see the bureaucracy succeed at its core goal – which drives change when there is a performance gap between the stated goal and what the bureaucracy actually does. 

Finally, self-defense is the tendency of bureaucrats – even less ambitious ones – to defend their role and resources when their relevance is questioned.

The 2017 surface ship collisions boosted the power of both of these latter forces. By starkly revealing a gap between the surface fleet’s goal – operating professionally at sea – and the surface fleet’s actual performance, those tragedies provided a powerful shock to officers motivated by mission success. Clearly, if the surface navy was going to serve the nation properly, something needed to change. Even less altruistic officers were spurred into action by a sense of self-defense, the third force that Downs describes. As embarrassing articles and reports appeared in the press, the surface navy’s reputation sank. Senior leaders had to defend the fleet in front of congress. For the surface navy to maintain access to resources and avoid outside interference, it had to improve. 

Advocates, including the authors of the GAO report cited in the introduction, suggested that dividing the surface community into three subspecialties – engineering officers, deck and navigation officers, and combat-focused officers – would prevent more collisions by giving each specialty deeper focus in one area. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear there was a window for these reforms: the surface fleet’s most pressing “fight tonight” mission was power projection ashore in the Middle East, with only rare opposition. 

Instead, the surface community reworked its educational model, creating two large shiphandling schools for all new SWOs and smaller simulator facilities scattered across each fleet concentration area. Officers began logging watchstanding hours more fastidiously, and were forced to go through more shiphandling tests throughout their career. With less overall impact to the community than specialization would have had, the surface navy was able to course correct and avoid further collisions. 

Costs of Specialization

If the surface navy had chosen to instead pursue the specialization route, it would have reckoned with serious disruptions. Most discussions around specialization do not dive into the vital details of implementation. Before the SWO community specializes, it would have to work through the following questions:

• How would specialist communities market themselves to potential officers at OCS, NROTC units, and the Naval Academy? How would midshipman cruises change?
• What requirements would each specialist community have for entry? Would they have tests, like the aviation community, required college degrees, or interviews?
• At what point would career tracks diverge? Would SWOs start with a generalist tour and specialize later, for example, or would they be locked into a specialization immediately?
• Would lateral transfer between specialties be a viable option?
• What initial schools would newly-selected specialist officers attend? What schools would they attend between each tour? Do those schools already exist, or would they need to be created?
• What criteria would each specialist community use to sort and select talent? What promotion milestones would each require?
• Would current officers become specialists midway through their career? If so, how would they be sorted into each specialty?
• Would the members of each specialist community still be able to take command of a warship? If not, what would their equivalent senior jobs be?
• Would different specialist communities still report to the same overall TYCOM? Would they have the same resource sponsor in OPNAV?

These questions hint at just how drastic of a change SWO specialization would be. The last bullet point hints at an unintended – and concerning – bureaucratic consequence: each specialist community could become an advocate for a certain way of war. If the surface navy creates engineering and deck specialist communities, for example, will those communities come to advocate against unmanned adoption? A surface combat systems specialist is unthreatened by an increased proportion of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the fleet – but officers who define their professional selves by running engineering plants or navigating a ship will find little to do on an unmanned vessel. The Navy is already hampered by three large communities – surface ships, aviation, and submarines – who have different incentives, assumptions, and bureaucratic motives. The fleet cannot afford to add even more advocacy blocs.

Make Smaller Changes – Now

In 2026, the motivation to change is even more serious than it was six years ago. The PLA threat is growing in size and lethality, threatening U.S. allies and partners across the Pacific. Using Anthony Downs’ framework again, the rise of China touches on the same two motivations for change that the surface Navy faced in 2017 – a desire for mission success, and a sense of bureaucratic self-defense. Not only do surface leaders want to deter China and be able win a war in the Pacific from a sense of patriotism, they want to avoid another institution – naval aviation, for example, or the special operations community – from arguing that they can better meet the PLA threat by taking resources and prestige from the SWO community. Between these two incentives, the surface navy is on track for reforms.

The timeline is, however, far too short for specialization to be the answer. The surface fleet cannot, with less than a year left until 2027, afford to work through all of the disruption and unanswered questions that SWO specialization would entail. Changes to the personnel system are measured in years or decades. The timeline before 2027 does not even allow time for a full eighteen-month Command at Sea tour to pass. Even if the Navy switches to a specialist model today, the Commanding Officers taking command now will still be the ones in the seat in 2027. Much time and energy will have been invested in a process that will not yet have borne any fruit, and will have distracted from the more urgent work of reforming the fleet within the 2027 timeline.

Instead of specializing the SWO community, the surface navy should emulate the successful reforms of 2017 – with an eye towards tactics instead of shiphandling. There is an urgent need for better tactical proficiency: the Houthis – a small non-state actor – sorely pressed the surface fleet over the last two years, and China will be able to field much worse. The surface navy’s most senior leaders, though, should not be the only ones driving reforms. Commanders at all levels should creatively insert more emphasis on tactics throughout the SWO community – anywhere their authority allows them. The leaders at Surface Warfare Officer Schools Command (SWOS), particularly the curriculum designers behind OOD Phase I and OOD Phase II, could bring tactics into shiphandling simulators. The Naval War College or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) could make sure every ship is stocked with tactical training aides: flashcards, wargames, books, and other creative tools for conveying tactical lessons to the fleet. PERS 41 could remove the detailing point incentive for the EOOW qualification, replacing it with point bonuses for tactical qualifications that matter to the challenge we face next year, not in a decade. These ideas do not rely on the intervention of the surface navy’s most senior leaders, who have limited time and bandwidth. Most can be approved by O-6s or O-7s, and could become reality in months, not years.

SWO specialization was a compelling idea for a peacetime navy – and if we can stabilize the short-term threat to Taiwan, we should return to sharpen the fleet’s long-term competitiveness. Time is just too short for it to be the right answer today. In 2026, the only path forward is to roll up our sleeves – at every level of seniority – and drive the existing framework of the SWO community to be more ready for war. 

LT Chris Rielage is a SWO and ASW/SUW WTI on 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: SAN PEDRO, California (May 19, 2025) – Sailors man the rails aboard guided missile destroyer USS Carl M. Levin (DDG 120), as the ship pulls into San Pedro, California, May 20, 2025, in preparation for Los Angeles Fleet Week 2025. (U.S. Navy photo by Personnel Specialist First Class R. Eugene Haggard)