As strategists think about how the Navy must change to meet growing techno-strategic threats in the western Pacific, one of the Navy’s greatest strengths is becoming one of its greatest challenges. The Navy maintains personnel, programmatic, and operational pipelines spanning decades, but lacks the institutional mechanisms and organizational culture to do more than monitor evolutionary changes in the size and capabilities of the fleet.
To undertake the transformational efforts in the timeframe reflected in current planning, Navy leaders would have to embrace a consistent Navy strategy to change personnel systems and material programs. Past innovations involving carrier aviation, for instance, unfolded over 30 years—the integration of autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, or hypersonic weapons will take several decades before they become a fixture in force structure and operations. Shaping the Navy’s future capabilities will take a consistent force-design vision and a steady hand on the tiller that controls the Navy’s personnel systems and acquisition programs.
The Once Distant Future
Senior officers understand that the development of a consistent Navy strategy begins with them because they are the source of the corporate buy-in needed to create and sustain a strategy over decades. This corporate consensus is crucial because the effort to reach the goals of the Navy’s current shipbuilding plan depends on initiatives that must be undertaken today. Because the Navy’s procurement and personnel pipelines extend for decades, small adjustments in personnel accessions and procurement priorities can produce significant results 25 years hence. An increase in autonomous aviation assets, for instance, might call for a reduction in current accessions of pilots or the creation of career paths for the operators and maintainers that will soon be involved with all sorts of autonomous systems and platforms. Changes set to appear in the distant future can drive today’s resource allocation decisions, an effect that only accelerates as the Navy approaches that once distant future.
The Navy’s capstone document, Force Design 2045, could signify the beginning of the consistent Navy strategy needed to transform the fleet. Its transformational element is the shift toward large, unmanned surface and subsurface platforms currently intended to serve as sensors and auxiliary magazines for traditional combatants. Integrating these new unmanned platforms into the force cannot occur overnight and will require significant innovation across the entire Navy.
However, Force Design 2045 will not succeed unless it establishes an ongoing strategy process and a larger shift in Navy organizational culture. Any effort to produce a consistent Navy strategy will fail if it is set in stone; it will be important to adjust the strategy to meet new threats, available technology, and an evolving political landscape. Nevertheless, a consistent Navy strategy is key in tracking progress toward the Navy’s transformation goals to monitor and account for any deviations in the trajectory toward its increasingly autonomous future. Plans change and benchmarks shift, but this corporate strategy can still be implemented over the long term even when modified to account for changing circumstances. A consistent Navy strategy would be a living document, but it would always reflect a fully vetted corporate consensus about the future Navy.
The New CNO
The appointment of a new Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) might constitute the first major test for the concept of a consistent Navy strategy and the future of Force Design 2045. This is where a clash between Navy culture and consistency, between personality and corporate consensus, could easily manifest. Will the new CNO break with the tradition of issuing a new capstone document—or several capstone documents—designed to leave her mark on Navy strategy? Or will she embrace the new role in building the corporate consensus behind Force Design 2045 and the emerging consistent Navy strategy? While some might suggest this an abdication of responsibility for a critical Navy function, it reflects the notion that the CNO is best positioned to build the corporate consensus that would form the essence of a consistent Navy strategy. The CNO also could empower staff to convene the array of Navy components needed to build that consensus. In this regard, one is reminded of Richard Neustadt’s observation that the essence of presidential power is the power to persuade; when it comes to crafting a consistent Navy strategy, the CNO’s ultimate power also is the ability to persuade fellow officers of the importance of reaching a corporate consensus and the need to honor that consensus as the source of future programmatic guidance.1
One can only hope that the new CNO will be willing to break with the traditional approaches to long-range Navy planning that have been embraced by past chiefs. Instead of devoting effort to creating new capstone documents, the CNO should begin to raise corporate awareness about the need for a consistent Navy strategy and the need to institutionalize that strategy so that it can guide the Navy toward its stated objectives well into the future. Of course, things would be easier if there were a consensus, corporate strategy, and a process to support and monitor the implementation of that strategy. Nevertheless, a consistent Navy strategy is a process, not an end state. It is an ongoing effort to build a Navy for a future that will always be over the strategic horizon.
1. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership (New York: Wiley, 1960), 22–58.
