Op-Ed: The Navy’s Next Top Officer Needs to be Radical
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[By LT\u00a0Chris Rielage]<\/em><\/p>\n Navy thinkers have already laid the intellectual groundwork for aggressive change. Senior leaders now need to follow through with equally radical actions.<\/p>\n It has been just under two years since the last\u00a0Call for Notes to the New CNO<\/a>, written for Admiral Lisa Franchetti \u2013 and most of those good ideas still hold true.\u00a0Four\u00a0different\u00a0articles\u00a0argued\u00a0for aggressive changes to force design, shifting the fleet towards more, smaller, less manned ships.\u00a0Three\u00a0notes\u00a0focused\u00a0on the Navy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There is a consensus opinion among junior officers \u2013 closest to tactics, closest to sailors, and with the least time being enculturated into the Navy \u2013 that what the Navy is doing right now is not working. We all know that the U.S. is lagging the PLA in\u00a0numbers,\u00a0industry, and\u00a0weapons development. We watch our mass expenditure of exquisite missiles\u00a0in the Red Sea, and Ukraine\u2019s\u00a0success with drones\u00a0in 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\u00a0the 19th century\u00a0and\u00a0the interwar period, SWOs are\u00a0still\u00a0being\u00a0told\u00a0that legacy engineering qualifications are a priority over tactics. It is time for the core model of the U.S. Navy to change.<\/p>\n When today\u2019s lieutenants joined the Navy as midshipmen, they heard then-CNO Admiral Richardson tell us to \u201cRead. Write. Fight.\u201d 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 \u2013 exemplified by the Marine Corps\u2019\u00a0Force Design\u00a0and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hick\u2019s\u00a0Replicator Initiative. In the Marine Corps, it was even possible to draw a straight line from\u00a0an influential series of articles\u00a0written by junior officers, to the service-wide concept that Commandant Berger championed.<\/p>\n The Navy has not matched that level of bold action. Administrative leaders in the Navy have a natural \u2013 even praiseworthy \u2013 instinct towards caution when dealing with billions of dollars and sailors\u2019 careers. Caution has, however, gone too far. Today\u2019s 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 \u2013 just look at\u00a0the voracious demand for WTIs, one of the best of the Navy\u2019s recent reforms, in every corner of the fleet.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 for Admiral Caudle to lean fully into the \u201cC-Notes\u201d 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 \u2013 we cannot afford anything else right now.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \t
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