In the near future, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Michael Gilday will need to follow the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ example and provide a courageous vision and strategy for the fleet. The CNO appears to be taking a fix and making some immediate changes to enable the development of strategy. U.S. competitors are not standing still, however, and only intrepid and truly innovative strategic action will keep the United States in the lead.
For now, guidance to the fleet is focused on current challenges, a temporary placeholder to modify elements of his predecessor’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. Admiral Gilday’s December 2019 guidance based on the Design contains a good approach for developing a future strategy for the fleet, but a much bolder vision must be developed soon and promulgated to meet the challenges before the Navy.
Criteria for Good Strategy
This new shortened guidance (communicated through a “fragmentary order” or “FRAGO”) obviously invites comparison to the guidance released in November by Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, but the documents are different. Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, created a framework to move past the simple Army War College “ends, ways, means” mantra that so many espouse. Rumelt provides and describes the elements of good strategy:
A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work. . . .
A good strategy has at a minimum, three essential components:
- a diagnosis of the situation
- the choice of an overall guiding policy
- and the design of coherent action
In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort. . . . The most critical anticipations are about the behavior of others, especially rivals.
What Does the FRAGO Say?
The CNO’s FRAGO does not serve the same function as the Commandant’s guidance. For one thing, it is relatively short and, as a fragmentary order, is meant to be understood as a minor modification to existing orders. This is analogous to the short message new commanding officers often send out to subordinates: “All existing orders and instructions remain in force with the following exceptions. . . .”
Officers of old when taking the watch would often keep the configuration of the ship’s sails in place for at least an hour, unless something was obviously wrong or conditions had changed dramatically, on the assumption the previous watch officer knew what he was doing. When appropriate, this also ensured the new watch officer had a full appreciation of the situation before changing the sails, as any unnecessary changes would have a disruptive effect on the crew or ongoing evolutions. Sometimes, a ship most needs a steady hand on the helm until a new course can be plotted.
How does the CNO’s recent effort meet the challenges of developing a good strategy? In the opening section of “FRAGO 01/2019: A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” the CNO states: “We will apply time, effort, and resources to grow naval power and think differently to find every competitive advantage.” After that, three pages are devoted to warfighting, two to warfighters, and one and one-half to the future navy. The first two sections mostly focus on addressing current challenges in each area. This is valuable in setting goals for warfighting and warfighters today, but care should be taken so that in the future the message and overall guiding policy are not lost in general statements and instructions for each of the individual elements of the Navy Staff.
The CNO will need a clearer statement of his diagnosis of the problems facing the Navy. The FRAGO only says: “Modern naval operations are in rapid transition,” and he refers to “denied areas,” implicitly accepting his predecessors statements on the characterization of the challenge.
In the near future, we should expect the new CNO’s appraisal of the situation, solutions to the problems, and expectations for how China and other countries are likely to respond. Then, he and his staff must explore how to shape the long-term competition to our advantage. With any luck these questions will be explored in well-designed wargames “for experimentation and the development and testing of alternative concepts. These exercises and experiments will inform doctrine and tactics; future fleet headquarters requirements, capacity, and size; and investments in future platforms and capabilities.”
The CNO appears to be preparing the forge and wetting stone to give form and sharpness to the future strategy. Perhaps the most important element of the FRAGO is contained in the section entitled Master Fleet-Level Warfare—a subsection of Warfighting—where he directs that annual large-scale exercises be restored and tasks fleet commanders to “leverag[e] operational concepts like Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), and Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE).” In this way, we are quietly told these concepts are the future of the fleet, and the fleet commanders must work them out.
In short, there is much to be admired in the FRAGO, and much still to be done to make it effective. Admiral Gilday specified the tools he will use to develop a strategy and turn his vision into reality, specifically in codifying the elements of a cycle of research and integrating with the Marine Corps.
CNO’s FRAGO in Historical Context
In other words, the CNO is reviving a process begun after World War I that greatly contributed to our victory in World War II. A similar approach in the 1980s helped win the Cold War. The task before the Navy today is to implement and adapt the process for competition with China.
The reason for success of prior efforts was an expansion beyond the here-and-now concerns of the fleet. Concepts and technology always outpace immediate concerns. Analytic and wartime success required a willingness to abandon legacy concepts of operations, platforms, and capabilities while embracing new ones. Will future fleet architecture studies, large-scale exercises, and wargames allow evaluation and testing of genuinely alternative force structures and their associated concepts of operations? Long ago, the Navy was willing to sacrifice its own sacred cows (think battleships in War Plan Orange) in wargames and exercises to determine what it needed for the new security environment. The CNO is asking the Navy to show the same courage today.
What to Expect Next
The CNO may be in the process of making an assessment while he sees a need for a fundamental shift in the Navy’s warfighting focus; he wants to plot the right course. It is likely that recent and deadly tragedies have focused his attention on pressing near-term issues with fleet readiness. The Commandant had the advantage of preparing his guidance in advance of a smoother assumption of command than the CNO enjoyed. But the Commandant should be applauded for the boldness with which he articulated a future strategy and provided overall guidance, including where he wants to invest and divest. He identified several Marine Corps sacred cows and offered them up for sacrifice to meet the nation’s needs.
The CNO probably is in the process of developing a new naval strategy. If he is not yet certain about the diagnosis of the future security environment and what to do about it, his plan will assemble the tools necessary to craft one. If he desires to master fleet-level warfare—to develop a hypothesis about what will work against competitors—rebuilding the cycle of research is the best way to go about it. The diagnosis must be matched with overall guiding policy, coherent actions to achieve it, and an assessment of the strategy against the range of actions of our identified rivals in a long-term competitive environment. The last step is to transmit the results to the fleet.
Only a Good Start
The Chief of Naval Operations fragmentary order was a necessary first step, but it is insufficient to meet the nation’s strategic needs. Changing any large organization to meet new challenges is a daunting task, but the CNO’s FRAGO demonstrates there is a steady hand on the Navy’s helm while he plots a new course. The Navy should expect a strategy that contains a diagnosis of the situation, overall guidance (including where to invest and where to divest), a design for coherent action, but most of all an anticipation of how others—particularly competitors—will respond. We cannot afford to get this wrong.