CIMSEC – Despite enlistment bonuses, recruiter rodeos, a renewed focus on influencers, and modest policy changes from PERS, the U.S. Navy continuously fails to keep Sailors from walking out the door and to convince would-be recruits from stepping in. This problem has gotten so severe that the Navy is on target to miss recruiting goals by over 7,000 personnel for FY23, and gapped billets at-sea continue to exceed 750. This shortage will continue as overworked enlisted Sailors leave, refusing the possibility of being sent TAD on additional deployments, and officers resign, rejecting uncertain billet assignments.

CIMSEC – The Get Real Get Better initiative has been a near-term effort to increase the effectiveness of how Sailors do things, to include problem-solving – which could be described as the science of warfighting. To holistically improve Sailors, the “Navy-wide culture renovation” must also inculcate learning strategies – the art of warfighting. A supplement or revision to NDP-1, tentatively entitled Naval Warfighting, would accomplish this by integrating the art and science of warfighting into an enduring doctrine on learning strategies.

CIMSEC – The U.S. Navy is now at a force design and readiness crisis point not seen since Admiral Elmo Zumwalt took the helm in 1970. Admiral Lisa Franchetti should take the initiative to develop a comprehensive, operational level of war maritime strategy that will determine fleet missions, which will subsequently inform a specific fleet size and force design.

War Zone – The SEWIP Block III alters the Arleigh Burke destroyer’s appearance fairly dramatically via huge new extensions onto its superstructure.

Defense News – Four unmanned ships are now operating out of Japan for the first time, as part of the U.S. Navy’s Integrated Battle Problem 23.2 exercise aimed at folding these unmanned vessels into routine fleet operations.

CIMSEC – If used unwisely, without a solid understanding of what decisions machine learning (ML) will support, the joint force may be playing a rigged game against a peer adversary. ML-enabled capabilities can absorb large amounts of data, process and organize it, and generate insights for humans who work at a relative snail’s pace. However, these nascent tools cannot reason and interpret words or events as a competent military professional can. As strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Russian-Ukraine war, and other geopolitical issues, American political and military leaders must develop a better understanding of when and how to use ML to support joint force planning, execution, and assessment in combat, lest U.S. service members pay an ungodly sum of the butcher’s bill.

CIMSEC – The robotic age of warfare enables a much closer relationship between international partners using smaller, more numerous systems for maritime security and creating a lethal warfighting advantage by increasing surveillance, targeting, and weapon capacity in critical regions.¹³ Leveraging this relationship is the basis for a maritime strategy to maintain integrated forces with partners forward, while retaining major elements of the traditional fleet to preserve sea control along the ocean’s logistics lines. It can become the maritime component of a maritime nation’s national strategy, executed through a well-planned and worldwide integrated naval campaign.