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)