Three weeks ago, I was very cold, awash in the blue lights of a destroyer’s combat information center (CIC). We were pierside, but CIC was at general quarters. I stood behind the force tactical action officer in my brown suede boots, which identified me as a shore-tour lieutenant and not part of the ship’s crew. My chest thrummed with the usual combination of the effects of black-tar wardroom coffee and the thrill of doing something I loved. The team was finally getting it! My job on board was to mentor and assess the ship’s ability to be the strike group’s air and missile defense commander. It was the final day of a nine-day warfighting scenario, and things were clicking. After this, the ship would head to the composite training unit exercise and then deploy. I could not help but think, however, would these sailors be ready if the next war came on their watch?
To make a single strike group’s fleet synthetic training exercise occur, hundreds of people at tactical training groups work thousands of hours to create a hyperrealistic training environment. No strike group could replicate this type of scenario or training value without shore-based support. But is that something to be celebrated? Would the ships fighting the War of 2026 described in the December 2023 Proceedings even get this training if they had to rapidly sortie to the Seventh Fleet?1 Just how much shore-based training would be left incomplete? Ships will have to train themselves a lot more than they do now—and the results might be tragic.
If initial losses are high in a future conflict with China, every available seaworthy ship in the Navy would have to rapidly deploy to provide the forces necessary for the operations plan. Activating reservists and expediting sailors through their rate training pipelines would enable the Navy to increase its ship manning and replace combat casualties. Ship crews and staffs would not have time to work their way through a typical Fleet Response Training Plan (FRTP). The bulk of the training on board these ships would happen while underway, en route to the war. Combat could last years—years that might be spent in a communications-denied, emission-controlled environment. The ability of crews to continue to hone their own skills, without external intervention, will be essential to win the war. Today’s crews, however, do not have the tools to do so.
The Navy relies too heavily on in-person, shore-based training to prepare its ships for battle. Effective combat training at sea is required.
Training self-sufficiency is nothing new, and in areas such as engineering and damage control, the Navy already has highly effective self-training capabilities on board ships. Good commanding officers (COs) promote watchstanding excellence by using a stopwatch to judge reaction times and randomly removing people on watch teams to mimic casualties. “Reps and sets” develop muscle memory from best practices. However, a close examination of exactly what these repetitions are reinforcing for combat teams will reveal gaps in tactical knowledge.
Ships often train themselves to defeat outdated threats with obsolete tactics, using only a fraction of the capabilities of new combat systems. These are obstacles to effective tactical training self-sufficiency, but they could be fixed by 2026 with a focused effort to create effective, standardized training, update training requirements, and invest in shipboard training systems.
Tactical Self-Training Today
On average, 25 percent of a ship’s crew turns over annually, a training challenge exacerbated by the common practice of placing the most experienced sailors on Basic Phase watch teams to pass certifications with the highest scores possible. These experienced sailors are more likely to be nearing the end of their tours and they often depart the ship prior to deployment. The result is a team left to fight the War of 2026 that did not and will not benefit from shore-based training until they see the next FRTP cycle in a couple of years.
Until then, it is up to the crew to develop lethality themselves—an achievable task, but only with the appropriate resources. The problem is the resources to run an “underway” schoolhouse do not exist, and no one is trained or tasked to create them.
During my past six years teaching integrated air and missile defense (IAMD), I have been on board dozens of ships and seen the same situation over and over. There may be a warfare tactics instructor (WTI) of some specialty on board, but they always have another demanding job such as a department head. The combat systems training team lead, which is a collateral duty, is often armed with briefs downloaded the last time they attended the Aegis Training and Readiness Center—sometimes up to five years ago. Besides source references, these are the only classroom resources they have.
The training team lead attempts to schedule their simple repetitive exercises at the right periodicity so the ship does not lose its warfare qualifications.2 These are items derived from naval tactical tasks (NTAs) reported off-ship once completed, the only method by which ships report tactical proficiency while at sea.3 Classroom training may be held every month, or not—there is no Navy requirement to do so. When held, training is often given by an unqualified officer, who reads directly off slides they were forced to make for professional development.
What is a Navy requirement is the required reading log. This log is signed off monthly by everyone on the combat team for every warfare area in which they are qualified once they have read all the references listed. These references are electronic, and sailors need to use one of the few onboard classified computers to access them. This is a near-impossible task for sailors in a high operational tempo. For example, as of December 2024, there were 2,356 total pages of IAMD tactics alone for a Baseline 9 ship. This is about four times the length of an average university textbook, for just one of eight warfare areas.
Depending on the ship class, there may be an embedded training system; however, the scenarios are often based on outdated threat assessments. To train to a realistic threat, each crew must painstakingly create its own scenarios, aircraft by aircraft, ship by ship. Every course change, altitude change, speed change, and missile release must be manually entered. Again, how to create a tactically realistic scenario is not taught by any training command and is done to varying degrees of success on every ship through trial and error—if the effort is made at all. The result is that many ships perform their reps and sets against an outdated, undergunned, irrelevant enemy.
Today’s ships will struggle to prepare for a future war with China. Perhaps even worse, COs might not understand how far their own crews’ tactical skills have deteriorated. Under the current warfare grading criteria, COs are being briefed by their warfare leads that they are “green” when their repetitive exercises are up to date. Getting to green for IAMD involves check-in-the-box training that is easily accomplished with a single, ungraded rudimentary scenario once every three months. Any additional training is conducted solely according to the will of each ship’s leaders. Compare this to a rules-of-the-road test, which is administered monthly and has real consequences if failed—such as removal from the bridge watchbill. Along with improving training quality, frequency, and dissemination, implementing relevant combat-readiness reporting is necessary for fleet commanders to trust their ships are combat ready.
Effective, Standardized, Distributed Training Resources
The surface navy could be better trained for combat if it innovated new ways to distribute shore-based training, facilitated training on board ships, and accurately assessed combat readiness while underway.
First, training commands should establish centralized online curricula in which all lessons currently taught in a ship’s tactical training pipeline are collected, updated, and validated by each responsible command. The searchable website should have tabs for each ship class, combat system baseline, and watch station so sailors could easily find which lessons to study. In addition, a suggested curriculum should be developed for each ship class—a realistic progression of training, by warfare area, for leaders to follow if they do not know where to start.
This system also would help shore commands align their curricula. Current overlaps and gaps in tactical training exist because there are five different training commands teaching each strike group at different times. Because each command has its own website or cloud-based share drive, version control is a weakness to the detriment of the sailors trying to find the right references and training material. The result of centralized curricula would be a streamlined shore-based syllabus and superior knowledge management across the training community.
The Navy also must change the way it delivers lectures and embrace the visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic (VARK) theory—a common teaching model that outlines the four different learning types.4 Typically, Navy instruction uses PowerPoint to deliver lectures. But, according to the VARK theory, reading PowerPoint slides and references only stimulates one half of one quarter of a learning type. To teach sailors more effectively, the Navy should require training commands to offer video or audio recordings of training briefs. This would capture useful whiteboard explanations, communications demonstrations, and examples of “what right looks like.” The technology exists today to make such recordings searchable by words spoken, just like an electronic word document is searchable.
Imagine watching a highly qualified and enthusiastic instructor teach your team how to use all available ship sensors to identify adversary aircraft—while at sea. The lecture could include Aegis video playback, voiceovers of external net reporting, and lesson resources—including a guide to build a scenario to practice the techniques taught. All this data would take up a lot of bandwidth—a valuable commodity at sea. This problem could be solved by issuing an encrypted hard drive with an updated training database to ships for use during the underway portion of their training cycles. Standardizing high-quality lessons and diversifying the medium of combat training would move the Navy into 21st century remote instruction.
To make these resources more accessible, the surface warfare community could replicate an innovation whose effectiveness the helicopter maritime strike (HSM) community already has demonstrated on shore and at sea: classified tablet devices. Classified references are uploaded onto Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-disabled tablets, which are then kept in a safe and checked out to aircrew to study while at work. They alleviate the need for users to occupy a valuable classified computer workstation for the sole purpose of reviewing tactics. The tablets are managed by the publications officer, whose duty is to ensure relevant guidance is downloaded regularly.
A tablet program could be easily instituted for ships’ crews, allowing sailors to access the references and training resources downloaded from the hard drive. These would be even more useful on ships that do not have access to their network share drive at their combat watch station.
Update Training Requirements
Training for the War of 2026 should be driven by expected unit tasking, and there should be a shift in how at-sea tactical readiness is reported. To make training requirements more relevant, task force commanders should be permitted to choose from a menu of NTAs and available ship tactics to provide their unit’s monthly training guidance, including required training frequency and measures of success. Off-ship reporting on the completion of this training would replace the generic repetitive-exercise reporting that exists today.
Task force commanders could use this requirement to drive improvement in certain aspects of unit performance while underway. Documented continuous improvement in warfare areas could lead to trust that a unit commander can conduct missions without careful overwatch, and such trust is essential to decentralized command and winning the War of 2026.5
Invest in Shipboard Training Systems
The final recommendation is to update shipboard training systems. Along with a scenario library update to include new threats, training leads deserve more guidance so crews can get the most out of each scenario. The timeline that comes with each scenario should start with the NTAs and tactics that could be trained to during its completion. Then, embedded in the timeline would be WTI recommendations for key training points. This could include recommendations for simulated external communications to watchstanders and preferred reactions.
Two longer-term innovations for shipboard training systems could increase training value even more, but they would require significant effort to achieve by 2026. First, the Navy should introduce an organic replay capability on every ship. Today, scenario replay is only possible with external recording equipment operated by contracted shipriders. The ability for a team to watch a replay (video and internal/external audio) of their performance is highly effective in the plan, brief, execute, and debrief process, and every ship should have that capability organic to its combat systems suite.
Second, embedding additional artificial intelligence into the training system would allow sailors to fight an enemy that reacts to their actions, challenging the crew with an evolving scenario problem. The only chance a crew gets to experience this type of adaptive enemy is during the training phase, in which live aircraft or extensive shore support is required to fly or drive adversary units realistically. Embedded training systems deserve more funding to field these solutions. Ships would be able to use their own training systems to keep honing their edge in an emissions-controlled, communication-denied environment.
Demand Training Command Cooperation
The technology exists now to ensure every ship does not have to independently discover how to become a lethal warfighting machine. The instructors exist, the knowledge exists, and the conversations are happening. The efficacy of training commands simply is not what it could be. The answer? Work together and innovate. Create a singular training website. Align curricula. Publish outstanding multimedia training. Provide lesson plans. Aid scenario development and execution. Facilitate access to these resources at sea. Make training requirements relevant to the war the Navy is preparing to win. Finally, invest in training systems to foster creativity in battle.
As American philosopher Will Durant paraphrased Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” Winning the next war will require every ship’s combat team to be devoted students of their craft, using the training tools available to them at all times. The Navy must embrace change and invest in the tools its sailors need to learn—their lives depend on it.
1. CDR Paul Giarra and CAPTs Bill Hamblet and Gerry Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “The War of 2026: Phase III Scenario,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 12 (December 2023).
2. Commander, Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Commander Naval Surface Force Atlantic, Instruction 3502.7A: Surface Force Training and Readiness Manual (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 9 January 2020).
3. Chief of Naval Operations, Instruction 3500.38C, Universal Naval Task List (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 25 April 2022).
4. N. D. Fleming and C. Mills,” Helping Students Understand How They Learn,” The Teaching Professor 7, no. 4 (1992).
5. ADM Scott Swift, USN, (Ret.), “Wartime Command & Control,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 140, no. 1 (January 2024).
