I Blame the Navy’s Strategic Woes on the Chiefs of Naval Operations
Bruce Stubbs
November 13, 2024
There is no shortage of problems confronting the U.S. Navy, as salvo after salvo of embarrassing stories attest. The range of problems is spectacularly depressing, addressing almost every facet of the Navy — from the design, production, maintenance, and crewing of its warships to the lack of commercial shipyard capacity, civilian shipbuilders, government drydocks, force structure, recruits, civilian mariners, and an adequate budget.
How the Navy got into this predicament is complex. The lack of consistent strategic guidance between the chiefs of naval operations, however, is a major cause. The chiefs of naval operations’ pursuit of individualistic and inconsistent strategic guidance for the Navy’s forward progress is one of the principal reason for the Navy’s seabag of problems. The Navy cannot get its act together, because each service chief has a different act for the Navy, beginning every four years. Too often chiefs of naval operations have produced strategic documents littered with generalities, aspirational desires, and insubstantial arguments to express their rationale for the Navy’s national defense contribution. Moreover, this parade of different guidance documents from chiefs of naval operations sends a misleading message to Congress and the public that the departing chief of naval operations got it wrong, and now the incoming chief of naval operations will make it right with a new plan. The cumulative result is the Navy acts without strategic intent, neglects strategic planning, focuses on short-term issues, and makes incremental decisions. I blame the chiefs of naval operations.
Over the last 30 years, I have had substantive involvement in the production of national and service-level strategies. From 2011 to 2022, as a member of the senior executive service, I supported successive chiefs of naval operations, serving on their strategy and concepts staff. This experience has taught me the timeless truth, in the words of Hal Brands, that strategic guidance “allows us to act with purpose in a disordered world; it is vital to out-thinking and out-playing our foes.” Indeed, when Adm. James D. Watkins was the chief of naval operations, he had a similar opinion, declaring the famous 1980s Maritime Strategy as the Navy’s “bedrock of planning, programming, and operations throughout today’s Navy.”
https://warontherocks.com/2024/11/i-blame-the-navys-strategic-woes-on-the-chiefs-of-naval-operations/
