Information warfare is central to the war in Ukraine and would be pivotal in any future conflict with China. Victory in the modern battlespace depends on countering and overcoming enemy C5ISRT (command, control, computing, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting). The U.S. Navy currently uses a “best of breed” approach and a short training pipeline to select and prepare its information warfare commanders. This is no longer good enough.
Technology has made it cheap and easy to pair high-quality, commercially available targeting data and unmanned systems—a deadly combination. These small, numerous, and highly distributed weapons are challenging traditional measures and means of naval power. The Navy’s Information Warfare Community (IWC) is pivotal to the effort to adapt to such emerging threats, which is why the information warfare commander should change from a job to a dedicated career vocation.
Information Warfare Commander Concept Change
The Navy needs a reliable process to continually develop outstanding information warfare commanders. The current arrangement treats the position as one of many jobs an officer may undertake on his or her route to flag. Information warfare is not treated as a calling around which to build a career. IWC captains (O-6s) who are outstanding within their specific intelligence community are selected as information warfare commanders and provided some education and training. While the quality of this training has improved, it is not comprehensive enough to create specialized C5ISRT and command-and-control warfare (C2W) professionals. Even a selectee with an electromagnetic warfare background and significant time at sea likely lacks a detailed understanding of the Navy’s air defense systems and their use during complex combat operations. Information warfare commanders arrive on staff with less warfighting legitimacy than other composite warfare commanders, having specialized in a specific support function that does not involve leadership in combat. The IWC must develop a pathway that professionalizes the information warfare commander position and builds it into a career.
The information warfare commander concept and doctrine have evolved since the position’s inception in 2016. However, as warfare in the Black Sea shows, the Navy needs more than iterative changes. The growing capabilities of automated and unmanned systems make it more important than ever.
The path to training a professional information warfare commander should begin at the end of the officer’s O-4 milestone tour. Qualified post-milestone officers could compete for a slot in the career information warfare commander track, and officers who select this career should have a specialized 18xx officer designator to distinguish their specialization.
Allowing IWC lieutenant commanders to choose this vocation would guarantee these officers the time needed to specialize in C5ISRT and C2W campaigning. Their career path would include operational touch points at the fleet level as deputy information warfare commander for a carrier strike group (CSG) and as information warfare commander for an Amphibious Ready Group. The pinnacle operational tour would be as information warfare commander for a CSG, Theater Component Command, or Unified Combatant Command.
The career path would begin with specialized education mixed with at-sea experiences to understand adversaries’ traditional and asymmetric reconnaissance-to-strike complexes and C5I systems. Being expert in U.S. and NATO air- and missile-defense sensors, weapons, platforms, and tactics would require information warfare commanders to attend the same courses as air- and missile-defense officers, such as the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense courses.
Specific education would be further required for these officers to grasp the complexity of cyber and space operations. Information operations and deception permeate these two domains. One of the most complicated elements of information operations is comprehending the myriad overlapping authorities required to use deception tactics.
It Is All About Legitimacy
In 2024, an All Navy message reclassified IWC officers from restricted to “line officers performing information warfare duties.” Vice Admiral Michael Vernazza, commander of Naval Information Forces, clarified that the change “opens the door for command at sea for Information Warfare officers, but that those officers will not be competing with (unrestricted line) officers.” So the legal authority for IWC officers to command is no longer an issue—but one could argue it never was. The issue was always one of experience and legitimacy, of allowing an information warfare commander to earn command and speak with authority.
Developing and managing a CSG’s C5ISRT and C2W plans requires a team effort, which means it requires a supporting staff. An at-sea command structure under the information warfare commander could use the destroyer squadron (DesRon) commander’s staff as a framework.
The DesRon manages a kill chain that defends the CSG from antiship cruise-missile attacks by enemy submarines and surface ships. The information warfare commander manages a kill chain for the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC, usually the strike-group flag officer) to defend the CSG from being targeted and attacked by various lethal and non-lethal threats. In general, warfare commanders “collect and disseminate information” and can be delegated authority to deploy weapons and sensors “regardless of the commander exercising tactical control of the unit.”1 Only one commander may exercise tactical control of a ship’s movement and maneuver, but more than one can control the sensors and the weapons, which requires cooperation across the warfare commanders’ staffs and watches.
Like the DesRon commander, the information warfare commander should lead a discrete command under the CSG commander—the OTC. The information warfare commander’s staff must include subject-matter experts able to coordinate C5ISRT, C2W, integrated fires, cyber defense/offense, and information operations; support multiple battle-rhythm events; oversee current and future operations, as well as readiness and training efforts; and have enough manpower to man at least a three-section battlespace-awareness watch. The staff could be around 40 people.
Some efficiencies already in place simplify the task of assembling this staff. The deputy should be a career information warfare command-track officer in charge of the electronic-warfare battlespace-awareness watch, manned by CSG cryptologic warfare personnel specifically assigned to the information warfare commander’s staff.
CSG intelligence, information technology, cryptology, and meteorology/oceanography officers could be dual-hatted to the information warfare commander for planning cells and boards—this already does take place: The N6 and the information warfare commander’s C5 section coordinate policy and execution of assured command and control. The N2’s intelligence enterprise provides intelligence, as it does to all warfare commanders, and integrates the information warfare commander’s electronic-warfare battlespace-awareness watch into its maritime-domain awareness indications-and-warning cell.
‘King Maker’ Path?
Ideally, the pinnacle of a career dedicated to command in information warfare would be a legitimate command within the strike group’s composite warfare structure at sea; indeed, it would be a step on the path to possible command of a CSG. The Navy does not offer that ideal. It is a heavy lift for any IWC officer to outcompete traditional platform-centric line officers for CSG command. Further possibilities for an information warfare commander flag-officer path might lead to a fleet Maritime Operations Center, or an information warfare task force such as the Fleet Information Warfare Command Pacific or Naval Information Warfare Center.
Currently, most IWC flag billets are joint force ones. They are rotational across the services or subject to competition, selecting the officer with the pedigree and skills required for a particular joint force mission. The Navy cannot select a new flag officer without a secured billet for them.
The desired information-warfare skills and background for flag selection are articulated in the convening order. Of the 14 O-7 IWC billets available during the last seven boards, four required cyber specialization; two, meteorology/oceanographic specializations; and two, information-related capabilities experience. The remaining six billets used catch-all language describing an IWC officer “capable of leading and integrating Information Warfare” in joint commands, the joint staff, and the Navy, often as a “J2 or Director of Intelligence.”
The point is that performance in the O-6 command position matters only to make you eligible for O-7. But other factors, such as administrative screening boards, timing, and interservice and interagency friction, count more than performance in selecting for an IWC flag position.2 The career information warfare commander might have an inside track on some flag positions, but not others. Future selection statistics would probably show these officers with the same flag selection rate as any IWC officer. Further, IWC community managers and the Navy likely would change the convening orders to mitigate any undesirable advantages for an information warfare commander, or for the IWC community as a whole.
The Navy and the IWC need to be deliberate about crafting a career path for information warfare commanders. This officer corps would provide legitimate C5ISRT and C2W professionals that the other warfare commanders trust during the most crucial operations.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, or the National Defense University.
1. General Charles Q. Brown, USAF, Joint Maritime Operations (JP 3-32), JP Doctrine 3–32 (Washington D.C.: JCS, 2023), 51.
2. Kimberly Jackson et al., Raising the Flag: Implications of U.S. Military Approaches to General and Flag Officer Development, RR4347 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 2020), 111.
