In October 2016, Houthi militants in Yemen conducted multiple attacks against U.S. Navy ships.1 At the time, these attacks were unique, and they would silently shape the Navy, influencing then–Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson to focus on the Navy’s mental readiness and its culture toward combat at sea.2 The focus on culture and readiness would reemerge in the aftermath of two separate collisions involving the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) and USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) in 2017. Lessons from these events contributed to the development of the Navy’s Warrior Toughness program, which was rolled out in October 2018.3
Now Navy ships find themselves under frequent attack by the same militant group in the same waters. Beginning with the USS Carney’s (DDG-64’s) lauded 19 October 2023 engagement, the surface navy is in the midst of its most prolonged stretch of at-sea combat since the threat of coastal artillery batteries during the Korean War.4 Because of this experience, the Navy now has more technical and tactical watchstanders who have experienced combat at sea than at any time in recent history. The service must learn from these sailors and do what it can to retain them.
Collecting Combat Lessons
The Navy’s Get Real, Get Better program focuses on self-correction and continual learning. The program’s goals imply the Navy must be willing to openly discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of its performance in combat at sea. In the aftermath of the 2016 attacks, there was a call to study the psychological effects of the skirmish on personnel and to inculcate lessons from the study throughout the service.5 It is not publicly known whether such data was collected. But the service must allow itself to learn what went right on the occasion and what went wrong. More important, the Navy must help sailors gain wisdom from the experiences and mistakes of others.
The spirit of Get Real, Get Better requires the Navy to recognize any shortcomings in the ways it has prepared its sailors for the reality of the Navy being challenged at sea. This is the opposite of sharing gleaming photos of sailors receiving medals and ribbons for their performance. Accolades are easy, but any leader knows that while criticism is often the hardest part of the job, failure has more lessons to teach than success.
It is legitimate to be concerned about publicizing when watchstanders might have fallen short of Warrior Toughness standards. Perceptions of weakness can encourage foreign aggression or spark domestic outcry. However, without genuine, relatable, demonstrable instances of human error and failure from these events, Navy leaders are deprived of valuable information. Likewise, sailors lack relatable combat-at-sea scenarios from which they can study their predecessors’ reactions.
A Baseline for Toughness
While much attention has rightly been paid to the trauma affecting the sailors on the Fitzgerald and John S. McCain, the psychological aftermath of the 2016 Red Sea events is not formally discussed. Conversations on the topic are mostly the subject of smoke-deck scuttlebutt, yet it seems many sailors know of someone who was on those ships at that time. The number of ships involved in combat in the Red Sea in 2023 and 2024 is more than double those involved in 2016, and the attacks are much more frequent and intense. If it exists, information on mental health issues, post-traumatic stress, and retention from the 2016 Red Sea warship crews could be used to craft a baseline for Warrior Toughness. The performance of crews today could be reviewed against this standard to inform future training. In particular, it is key that Warrior Toughness training highlights the sailors involved in these events, as other sailors can readily relate to their experiences.
There may be data points that help explain why some sailors perform well while others do not. Are there correlations between combat readiness and qualification level or paygrade? Such information could offer leaders insight into which sailors will react in what ways to combat. Data stemming from prolonged events could show how sailors perform at the start of an engagement versus how they perform over time.
This data could help leaders clarify their concepts of how to lead different sailors in crises, and ultimately inform time management and attention management in life-or-death situations.
Most important, given the many combat events these ships have experienced, would be any data on the leadership styles, approaches, or behaviors that resulted in a sailor’s performance improving. Examples of which leadership tools improve the prospect of a positive outcome could influence the Navy’s leadership curriculum fleet-wide and improve future combat performance.
Retain Combat-Tested Sailors
And what of the futures of the combat-proven sailors themselves? Officers in key positions will almost certainly be detailed to jobs in which they can progress in their careers while meaningfully contributing to the Navy. But what of the enlisted cadre? Anyone who lived through the stress and fatigue of being on board ships involved in combat at sea is now among the Navy’s best candidates for teaching the Warrior Toughness program. This is true even of sailors who were not directly involved with technical or tactical combat actions. These sailors should be directed toward areas of the Navy where their experiences can be translated into growth of the broader force, especially at the deckplate level.
As it did for the Fitzgerald and McCain, the Navy created Navy Enlisted Classifications (NECs) to track the trajectories of these crews.6 This allows the Navy to track important mental-health information, career decisions, and other metrics of potential long-term value in understanding the impact of combat at sea on the modern force. Sailors with demonstrated combat proficiency at their watch stations should be able to use this NEC to their advantage. These sailors should be incentivized to take orders to the schoolhouses, even if it means shortening their sea tours to get them there quickly. Incentives can include special duty pay, guaranteed advancement, or even the opportunity to depart sea duty earlier than their currently projected rotation date.
Last, the Naval Education and Training Command should invite these sailors to participate in the various training and requirements reviews conducted at schoolhouses. Who better to give input toward the requirements—and therefore funding—of a rating’s future than those who have operated the equipment in sustained combat?
The Navy must use every tool possible to retain the right sailors from these combat-experienced crews. Had the Navy applied similar tracking NECs, even retroactively, to the crews involved in the 2016 attacks, the service would have a ready way to know if there is a sailor with two combat action ribbons for combat at sea.
Moreover, their experiences in combat will benefit more than just the next generation of their ratings. If these sailors continue in their careers, they will someday be the first-class petty officers, chief petty officers, chief warrant officers, and limited duty officers who advise the entirety of the officer corps. They will teach at schoolhouses, lead on the deckplates, and pay the Navy dividends across careers spanning decades.
Long-Term Thinking
These service-wide self-critiques and tailored talent management methods are long-term investments toward competence in future conflicts. Since February 2022, conflicts have been raging globally. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue, while Venezuela saber-rattles and China’s rhetoric and actions toward Taiwan accelerate. Sailors today serve during a complex, unstable, and potentially lethal time.
Thus far the Navy’s combat performance in the Red Sea has effectively been a perfect score, a ratio cheekily noted by the Carney crew during the 2023 Army-Navy football game. The Navy should celebrate such wins, while taking advantage of any hard lessons learned along the way to victory. The service knows much tougher opponents might confront it in the near future. The Navy must squeeze every ounce of value it can extract from the Red Sea conflict. It must develop the best methods of disseminating the knowledge learned from it force-wide. The combat that tested these ships and their crews will probably not be the last in this decade.
1. Sam LaGrone, “USS Mason Fired 3 Missiles to Defend From Yemen Cruise Missiles Attack,” USNI News, 12 October 2016.
2. David B. Larter, “CNO to Sailors: We Need to Get Tough,” Navy Times, 15 February 2017.
3. RADM Michael Bernacchi, USN, et al., “Warrior Toughness: Making the Mind, Body, Soul Connection,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 145, no.7 (July 2019).
4. Sam LaGrone, “U.S. Destroyer Used SM-2s to Down 3 Land Attack Missiles Launched from Yemen, Says Pentagon,” USNI News, 19 October 2023.
5. PO1 John C. Minor, USN, “Every Sailor a Damage Controlman,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 145 no. 8 (August 2019).
6. Cameron C. Edy, “Resilience in the Aftermath: Fortune Favors the Brave,” Medium, 4 April 2023.