Notes to the New CNO Series

By Petty Officer 2nd Class Richard Rodgers

In the U.S. Navy, maritime superiority and the readiness of its warfighters have always been paramount. Admiral Franchetti acknowledges the importance of a culture of innovation and improvement to maintain our warfighting edge in an ever-evolving threat environment. However, it is imperative that the U.S. Navy extends these principles to enlisted Sailors by reinforcing and expanding their educational opportunities. Enlisted Sailors play a critical role in achieving and maintaining maritime superiority, and they must be empowered to become full, active, and informed participants in the U.S. Navy’s mission.

While the U.S. Navy rightly focuses on leadership and problem-solving, enlisted Sailors often feel left behind. Many struggle to complete even a few college classes a year due to underfunded tuition assistance and overworked scheduling. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that officers frequently pursue numerous advanced degrees, only to leave the U.S. Navy and take their knowledge with them. This discrepancy in educational opportunities between officers and enlisted Sailors hinders the overall readiness of the U.S. Navy and diminishes the potential for enlisted personnel to contribute more effectively to the mission.

Education is not just a personal endeavor, it is vital for the U.S. Navy’s success. Enlisted Sailors are on the front lines, operating and maintaining complex equipment, and executing mission-critical tasks. To excel in these roles, they require a deeper understanding of their responsibilities, technical skills, and the broader context in which they operate. Furthermore, they must be able to adapt to new challenges and technologies as the U.S. Navy evolves. Educational opportunities can equip them with the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to do so. To reinforce and expand educational opportunities for enlisted Sailors, the U.S. Navy should consider several key steps.

Increase tuition assistance funding. The U.S. Navy should allocate more resources to tuition assistance programs, ensuring that enlisted Sailors have access to affordable education. By removing financial barriers, the U.S. Navy can encourage more personnel to pursue higher education.

Incorporate more flexible scheduling. Enlisted Sailors often face demanding schedules that make it difficult to attend traditional classes. The U.S. Navy should explore flexible scheduling options, such as online courses or partnerships with local educational institutions, to accommodate the availability of its personnel.

Integrate education with career paths. Educational opportunities should be integrated with the specializations and career progressions of enlisted Sailors. Enlisted Sailors should have clear pathways to earn degrees or certifications that align with their roles and responsibilities, helping them grow professionally and contribute more effectively to the U.S. Navy’s mission.

Improve knowledge retention and exchange. To address the issue of officers leaving the U.S. Navy with advanced degrees, the U.S. Navy could incentivize officers to share their knowledge and mentor enlisted personnel. This can be done through structured mentorship programs and knowledge transfer initiatives.

Reward and recognize educational initiative. The U.S. Navy should recognize and reward enlisted Sailors who invest in their education and demonstrate a commitment to self-improvement. This can include promotions, bonuses, and other incentives to encourage continuous learning.

In the pursuit of maritime superiority, the U.S. Navy must prioritize the education and empowerment of its enlisted Sailors. These dedicated individuals are the backbone of the U.S. Navy, and their success directly contributes to the U.S. Navy’s overall readiness and effectiveness. By reinforcing and expanding educational opportunities for enlisted Sailors, the U.S. Navy can ensure that they become full, active, and informed participants in the mission. This investment in education will not only benefit the enlisted Sailors themselves, but will also strengthen the U.S. Navy as a whole, ensuring its readiness for the challenges of the future.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Richard Rodgers is a mass communication specialist in the U.S. Navy. He is currently stationed at Navy Public Affairs Support Element, the Navy’s premiere expeditionary public affairs command, where he has served as the Creative Director. He previously served as the Communications Director for Carrier Strike Group 10 Public Affairs and as a content developer at Defense Media Activity.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Sept. 24, 2020) Seaman Robert Wilmoth, from Cincinnati, handles the shot line aboard the amphibious dock landing ship USS Germantown (LSD 42) as the ship conducts a replenishment-at-sea.(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Taylor DiMartino)

Notes to the New CNO Series

By John Hanley

I was fortunate to work directly for CNOs Tom Hayward through Jay Johnson during my 17 years with the CNO Strategic Studies Group, where the CNOs tasked us to study challenges that were keeping them up at night or where they saw opportunities to advance the Navy and national security. Three challenges stand out for the current generation of Navy leadership.

First, getting real is a matter of integrity. Striving to do one’s best is imperative. However, it is essential to get real about what resources, including time, are available to accomplish tasks. Tasking more than can be accomplished results in fudging and corrupting the character of individuals and the soul of the Navy.

Second, getting better requires appreciating the complexity of the Navy and its place in the national security ecosystem. Sources of complexity within the Navy and in the ecosystem derive in part from individuals and organizations having incongruent motivations. As Admiral Bill Owens once said as the N8, there must be a god because no one is in control. Accepting limits of control is the beginning of wisdom. Although leaders cannot direct the winds, they can adjust the sails.

Adjusting the sails to stay on course requires campaigns of learning in readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. Actions should derive from more than just routine checklists. They require deliberate reflection on what is to be learned. Whether it is maintenance and administration, training and education, at-sea exercises, engagement with adversaries and partners (e.g., FONOPS), or creating antifragile naval architectures, if the participants are simply box-checking rather than learning, the effort is falling short. The Navy must be more deliberate about being a learning organization and how it structures its campaigns of learning.

Dealing with complexity requires careful reflection on how strategies are framed, and considering uncomfortable alternatives. It requires balancing theoretical constructs with practical intuition and experience, and a willingness to challenge theory. Rather than OODA loops, complexity requires Act-Sense-Decide-Adapt loops. Passive observation does not reveal what needs to be known without stimulating the system to learn, and change requires adaptation. It requires using strategies to achieve increasing returns, such as where small investments are made in specific high-risk ventures to learn a lot while still protecting core capabilities.

Finally, it requires rethinking the defense analysis paradigms that have constrained Navy thinking and development since McNamara instituted them in 1962. N81’s focus on campaign modeling rather than Navy wholeness, as formulated by CNO Admiral Jon Greenert, is a misdirected approach. Campaign models are wholly theoretical and produce only conjecture regarding system performance at sea. Similarly, wargames produce only conjecture about decisions and outcomes. But when used well, the experience of conducting critical analysis in anticipated scenarios helps prepare future commanders for real contingencies, as wargames and exercises did before WWII.

The way ahead involves campaigns of learning focused on pressing operational problems. These campaigns would be orchestrated by a General Board-type entity, involving close interactions among OPNAV, the Naval War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Systems Commands, and the fleet. These campaigns would focus the attention of the fleet, and enhance its competitive advantage by virtue of being a superior learning organization.

Dr. Hanley served with the first eighteen Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Groups as an analyst, program director, and deputy director. He earned his doctorate in operations research and management science at Yale University. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer and fleet exercise analyst, and author of The US Navy and the National Security Establishment: A Critical Assessment.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 26, 2023) An F/A-18F Super Hornet from the “Fighting Redcocks” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 22 prepares to launch from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class David Rowe)

Notes to the New CNO Series

By Anthony Cowden

My recommendations to the next Chief of Naval Operations are based on the difference between the kind of navy we have today and the kind of navy our nation needs. Today we have a forward-based navy, not an expeditionary navy. This distinction is important for remaining competitive against modern threats and guiding force design.

Due to the unique geographical position of the U.S., the Navy has the luxury of defending the nation’s interests “over there.” Since World War II, it developed and maintained a navy that was able to project power overseas; to reconstitute its combat power while still at sea or at least far from national shores; and continuously maintain proximity to competitors. This expeditionary character minimized the dependence of the fleet on shore-based and homeland-based infrastructure to sustain operations, allowing the fleet to be more logistically self-sufficient at sea.

However, late in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy started to diminish its expeditionary capability, and became more reliant on allied and friendly bases. A key development was subtle but consequential – the vertical launch system (VLS) for the surface fleet’s primary anti-air, anti-submarine, and land-attack weapons. While a very capable system, reloading VLS at sea was problematic and soon abandoned. While an aircraft carrier can be rearmed at sea, surface warships cannot, which constrains the ability of carrier strike groups to sustain forward operations without taking frequent trips back to fixed infrastructure. The Navy is revisiting the issue of reloading VLS at sea, and those efforts should be reinforced.

The next step the Navy took away from an expeditionary capability was in the 1990s, when it decommissioned most of the submarine tenders (AS), all of the repair ships (AR), and destroyer tenders (AD), and moved away from Sailor-manned Shore Intermediate Maintenance Centers (SIMA). Not only did this eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance “over there,” but it destroyed the progression of apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master technician that made the U.S. Navy Sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the military world. Combat search and rescue, salvage, and battle damage repair are other areas in which the U.S. Navy no longer has sufficient capability for sustaining expeditionary operations.

The Navy needs a new strategy that highlights the kind of fleet the nation needs. This strategy would argue the Navy needs to be able to use the sea when needed, to deny it to the nation’s enemies, and to project force ashore when required. To accomplish this, the Navy would maintain a tempo of operations using the necessary multi-domain forces, wherever in the world they are required. The Navy’s operations and force posture should always be based on the logic that naval operations will principally be conducted “over there,” far from the nation’s borders, and with a minimum of dependence on shore-based infrastructure.

The Navy also needs a different overall force structure to return to a more balanced and expeditionary force. The modern fleet is top-heavy in large surface combatants, light in smaller combatants, and insufficient in auxiliary ships. In summary, a new force structure calls for:

• • 11 Aircraft carriers
  • 10 LHA/LHDs
  • 21 Amphibious warfare ships
  • 71 Large surface combatants
  • 78 Small surface combatants
  • 66 Attack submarines
  • 12 Ballistic missile submarines
  • 34 Combat logistics forces
  • 48 Support vessels

This overall battle force of 351 ships is a more balanced and affordable force structure than what is currently under consideration.

The top thing the next CNO can do to affordably improve the U.S. Navy as a fighting force is to reduce operational tempo. Returning to predictable six-month-long deployments would improve force material readiness, morale, and retention. The tempo necessarily increased after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, but those efforts are largely over and the Navy needs to return to a rational and sustainable level of effort. The Navy will be able to make numerous and far-reaching changes to its warfighting readiness and expeditionary capability if it can manage to create a stable foundation of predictable deployment cycles.

Anthony Cowden is the Managing Director of Stari Consulting Services, co-author of Fighting the Fleet: Operational Art and Modern Fleet Combat,  author of The Naval Institute Almanac of the U.S. Navy,  and was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy for 37 years.

Featured Image: INDIAN OCEAN (July 11, 2023) Sailors aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Rafael Peralta (DDG 115) prepare to conduct a replenishment-at-sea with the Military Sealift Command fleet replenishment oiler USNS Rappahannock (T-AO 204). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Colby A. Mothershead)