Churchill once demanded, “Take this pudding away — it has no theme!” U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle’s new Fighting Instructions presents a similar sort of dish.
In November 2024, I argued in War on the Rocks that successive chiefs of naval operations developed a pattern of issuing strategic guidance that described aspirations but did not consistently impose the concrete direction necessary to guide naval force planning. In a March 2025 Atlantic Council paper evaluating the 2024 Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy, I similarly found that its guidance projected aspiration but did not consistently impose the specificity necessary to prepare the Navy for war.
Caudle’s recently issued Fighting Instructions suggests that this pattern persists. This continuity reflects a deeper institutional problem in how the Navy conceives of and communicates strategy and force planning. Chiefs of naval operations have issued strategic guidance that articulated institutional direction but often did not impose clear prioritization, timelines, or resource commitments required to shape force planning. Because naval force planning occurs over decades rather than within the four-year tenure of any individual service chief, effective strategy must impose continuity and sustained force planning direction across successive leadership transitions.
Caudle has described his 2026 Fighting Instructions as “my strategy for the Navy going forward,” while also referring to it in the document itself as “my detailed plans” and “my strategic vision.” Historically, chiefs of naval operations have used such documents to provide their personal strategic guidance for the Navy’s institutional direction, shaping force planning and resource allocation. Yet the title Fighting Instructions carries a very different meaning, referring to concrete guidance on how fleets would fight in combat. By presenting institutional guidance under a title associated with operational direction — and by simultaneously describing the document as a strategy, a plan, and a vision — Fighting Instructions conflates distinct forms of guidance that serve different purposes. At best, Fighting Instructions is an institutional vision — useful for describing institutional aspiration and inspiring the force, but insufficient for guiding how the Navy will fight or how it will build the force required to win. In subsequent public remarks, Caudle emphasized that sailors should see how they fit within the “fabric” of the document.
The central question is whether Fighting Instructions functions as effective strategic guidance for force planning. If a document is described as a strategy, a plan, and a vision, then it should provide direction specific enough to shape force structure decisions. Absent that specificity, it remains aspirational rather than decision-forcing.
The proper test of strategic guidance is whether it prepares the Navy to fight and win against a defined adversary on the timelines imposed by strategic reality. Effective strategic guidance must confront readiness limitations, direct force planning toward defeating the pacing threat, impose prioritization and tradeoffs, align preparation with threat timelines, and communicate clear strategic direction to the force. When strategic guidance fails to perform them, it does not strengthen war readiness. Measured against this standard, Fighting Instructions does not function as strategic guidance for force planning. It functions as institutional vision. This distinction matters because institutional vision can help align thinking and stimulate innovation, but vision alone cannot substitute for the concrete force planning direction and material decisions required to prepare the Navy for war.
The Seven Flaws
What follows are seven specific deficiencies that illustrate why Fighting Instructions does not function as effective strategic guidance. These flaws are not stylistic quibbles or disagreements over emphasis. They are structural omissions that prevent the document from imposing the prioritization, tradeoffs, and material direction necessary to prepare the Navy for conflict against a defined adversary. Taken together, they reveal a gap between institutional aspiration and strategic execution.
Failure to Confront the Navy’s Immediate Material, Industrial, and Readiness Crisis
The most consequential deficiency of Fighting Instructions is its failure to directly confront the Navy’s immediate material, industrial, and readiness crisis. The Navy today faces structural constraints that directly affect its ability to fight and sustain combat operations. Shipbuilding programs are delayed. Maintenance backlogs reduce the availability of existing platforms. The industrial base lacks the surge capacity required to sustain prolonged conflict. Personnel shortages affect operational readiness and technical proficiency. Logistics infrastructure remains vulnerable to disruption. Budget constraints and procurement inefficiencies further complicate force planning and sustainment.
Yet the document does not present a prioritized corrective action plan to address these deficiencies. It does not establish timelines for restoring readiness or increasing force availability. It does not identify specific structural reforms required to improve shipbuilding throughput or repair capacity. It does not impose binding requirements to strengthen logistics survivability under contested conditions. Instead, it emphasizes future transformation. By describing desired future conditions without mandating corrective measures, Fighting Instructions does not accelerate readiness improvement.
Failure to Provide Concrete Force Planning Guidance
The chief of naval operations operates at the strategic level of war, responsible for force planning, resource prioritization, and capabilities development required for operational success. Historically, “fighting instructions” have described how fleet commanders would employ forces in combat — operational guidance for naval warfare. Under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, operational command resides with combatant commanders, not the service chiefs. A document titled Fighting Instructions therefore cannot be literal in the operational sense. If issued by the Navy’s senior force provider, it should clarify how force planning decisions will prepare the fleet for war. Fighting Instructions does not provide specific force structure objectives, such as the number and type of ships, submarines, aircraft, or weapons systems required within defined timeframes. It does not identify procurement priorities necessary to close capability gaps. It does not establish timelines for expanding shipbuilding capacity, restoring readiness, or strengthening logistics survivability.
Instead, Fighting Instructions operates at the level of conceptual framing rather than material direction. Warfighting capability is generated through decisions about force design, procurement, industrial expansion, and readiness investment. Without force planning direction, institutional alignment does not translate into material capability. Without explicit strategic direction, force planning decisions are made through the Navy’s incremental resource allocation decisions during the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process. This reverses the relationship between strategy and resources. Strategy is intended to drive resource allocation. Resource allocation should not substitute for strategy.
Failure to Make Strategic Tradeoffs
A defining function of strategy is the imposition of prioritization through tradeoffs. Fighting Instructions, however, avoids making the tradeoffs that strategy exists to impose. It does not identify which programs will be reduced or eliminated to free resources for higher-priority warfighting requirements. It does not specify which missions will be deprioritized in order to concentrate effort against the pacing threat. It does not clarify which geographic theaters will receive secondary priority relative to the Indo-Pacific.
The absence of tradeoffs preserves institutional flexibility, but it prevents strategic prioritization. The avoidance of tradeoffs is particularly consequential in the current strategic environment. Preparing for high-end conflict against a peer adversary requires reallocating resources toward survivability, logistics resilience, munitions capacity, and force readiness. In the absence of explicit strategic direction, these decisions do not disappear — they are made implicitly through the Navy’s programming and budgeting process, further reducing the proper relationship between strategy and resources.
It is reasonable to argue that detailed prioritization, force-sizing decisions, and theater-specific net assessments properly reside in classified guidance rather than in a public-facing document. The critique here is not that Fighting Instructions should disclose operationally sensitive data or codify rigid geographic prescriptions. Rather, it is that a document described as “overarching guidance” and “strategy” must visibly impose prioritization and sequencing, even at a conceptual level. Strategy does not require public disclosure of targeting logic: It requires demonstration that choices have been made and risks consciously accepted.
Failure to Confront Industrial Reality as a Decisive Factor in War
Modern naval warfare is ultimately constrained not by concepts, but by industrial capacity. The outcome of sustained conflict between peer adversaries will depend on the ability to build, repair, arm, and sustain combat forces at scale. Fighting Instructions acknowledges these industrial realities in general terms but does not elevate them to their proper status as decisive strategic priorities. It does not impose binding requirements to expand shipbuilding throughput or repair capacity within defined timelines. It does not direct specific actions to ensure logistics survivability under contested conditions. It does not mandate accelerated expansion of munitions production sufficient to sustain high-intensity combat operations. By addressing industrial capacity primarily at the level of institutional aspiration rather than binding strategic requirement, Fighting Instructions understates the central role that industrial strength will play in determining the outcome of future naval conflict. Without that direction, the Navy risks entering conflict lacking the ability to sustain combat operations at the scale required for victory.
Failure to Reflect Wartime Urgency, Identify the Enemy, and Impose Hard Decisions
The absence of war footing urgency in Fighting Instructions is not merely a stylistic issue. It is a strategic deficiency with implications for warfighting readiness. Senior civilian and military leadership have warned that the strategic timeline is compressing and that preparation for conflict must accelerate accordingly. At the January 2026 Surface Navy Association National Symposium, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan delivered an unambiguous warning, describing China as:
our most consequential strategic competitor … [with] ambitions to dominate the Indo-Pacific, reshape the international order, and displace the United States as the world’s leading economic and maritime power.
He concluded with a directive: “We need to behave like we are on a wartime footing — because the timeline is not ours to choose.”
Yet Fighting Instructions makes no reference to wartime footing or accelerated preparation timelines. It does not explicitly identify China as the Navy’s primary warfighting adversary in a manner that anchors force planning, readiness prioritization, and operational preparation. Every consequential strategic decision — force design, logistics posture, industrial scaling, deployment prioritization, and procurement allocation — must be anchored to the operational requirements of defeating a specific adversary. Without a named adversary, priorities remain abstract, tradeoffs remain undefined, and preparation remains unanchored to operational reality.
This lack of urgency is notable when contrasted with the strategic clarity of the previous chief of naval operations. In her 2024 Navigation Plan, Adm. Lisa Franchetti identified readiness for the possibility of war with China by 2027 as a central strategic objective. The Department of Defense has reinforced that assessment. Its December 2025 report to Congress concluded that the People’s Liberation Army continues to make progress toward its 2027 objectives, including achieving decisive capability against Taiwan.
Underlying this avoidance is a pattern of institutional risk aversion. The document avoids making explicit decisions that would impose disruption on existing programs or challenge entrenched assumptions. It does not identify programs that should be terminated to free resources for higher-priority warfighting requirements. It does not propose structural changes that would significantly alter force design or procurement priorities within compressed timelines. It does not impose directives that would force immediate reallocation of resources toward the capabilities most critical for prevailing in high-end conflict. Strategic guidance requires the acceptance of institutional risk in order to reduce operational risk. War does not reward institutional comfort. It rewards prioritization, adaptation, and the willingness to concentrate resources where they matter most. By avoiding decisions that would disrupt existing institutional arrangements, Fighting Instructions reflects a preference for evolutionary adaptation rather than decisive transformation. Strategic guidance that does not impose corresponding urgency and prioritization risks allowing the gap between required capability and available capability to widen.
Failure to Communicate Strategic Guidance with Operational Clarity
In the foreword to Fighting Instructions, Caudle states, “I understand some of it may seem theoretical or hard to connect to the deckplate.” The purpose of strategic guidance is to reduce ambiguity, not acknowledge it. This admission reveals a communication failure. Strategic guidance must be written in language that connects strategic intent to operational reality. Throughout naval history, effective wartime leaders like Adm. Chester Nimitz and Raymond Spruance communicated strategic guidance with clarity and precision, translating strategic objectives into operationally understandable direction. Clarity is also a form of respect and moral responsibility. Senior naval leaders have an obligation to provide unambiguous guidance and to speak candidly about risks, deficiencies, and requirements facing the force — even when doing so is institutionally or politically uncomfortable. Adm. David L. McDonald, the 17th chief of naval operations, later reflected on his service during the Vietnam era: “Maybe we military men were all weak. Maybe we should have stood up and pounded the table … I was part of it and I’m sort of ashamed of myself too.” History judges senior leaders not only by the strategies they articulate but by the candor they demonstrate in moments of strategic consequence.
Failure to Write in the Language of War
A warfighting strategy should be written in the language of war. Fighting Instructions, however, is written largely in the language of bureaucracy rather than the language of war. Its phrasing is abstract, inflated, and operationally non-specific. The document repeatedly relies on what can fairly be described as word salad language — dense, jargon-filled constructions that create the appearance of sophistication while conveying little operational meaning.
These two sentences on page 32 of this document are prime examples: “Roles aligned to commander’s intent clarify who owns which decisions, under what conditions, and within what boundaries—translating philosophical mission command into a transparent system of accountability.” “This framework ensures that autonomy is not aspirational—it is structured, measurable, scalable, and aligned with the Navy’s overarching strategy to deter and win across all domains.” Both sentences share the same core flaw: they describe the architecture of decision-making in the language of management consulting, when the subject — autonomous forces in a degraded communications environment — demands concrete operational language about what units actually do when the link goes down.
Such language used throughout the document does not specify what must be done differently, what capabilities must be prioritized, or what timelines must be met. The document’s use of the term “differentiated value” reflects the adoption of business terminology that is foreign to the purpose and function of a warfighting organization. But military services are not market actors competing for customers. They are warfighting institutions whose purpose is to generate combat power and defeat adversaries. The Navy’s purpose is not to differentiate itself conceptually, but to ensure it possesses the material readiness, combat capability, and logistical sustainability required to defeat adversaries in war. When strategic guidance relies on abstract, jargon-heavy language, it avoids imposing the discipline required to prepare a force for war.
A Guide to Getting Back on Track
Effective Navy force planning can only occur when force planning has a higher-order strategic guidance to implement, such as the 600 ship program plan implementing the acclaimed 1980s Maritime Strategy. For today’s Navy, these historical documents provide an important lesson: to connect the Navy’s current and future force structures to a strategy to deter and defeat a threat. The Navy requires two distinct and complementary forms of strategic guidance: a naval warfighting strategy (i.e., employment) that defines how the Navy will employ forces to achieve national defense objectives, and a separate force planning document that translates that strategy into concrete force structure, readiness, and resource decisions. Establishing this distinction ensures that force planning is driven by warfighting requirements rather than conceptual aspiration. (See graphic.)
In 2026, the likely equivalent of the 1980s Maritime Strategy is the January 2026 classified Navy Warfighting Concept, tied inextricably to the Joint Warfighting Concept. Caudle stated that his Navy Warfighting Concept is:
the Navy’s overarching warfighting approach. It tells commanders how we intend to fight, where we will accept risk, and where we will not. It conveys a proactive approach that uses the global maritime maneuver space to gain and exploit sea control while imposing sea denial.
The Navy has yet to release a public version of this document, so its utility as strategic guidance for force planning remains unknown.
Despite its flaws, Fighting Instructions document serves as roughly the de facto equivalent of the 1980s 600 ship program plan. For Fighting Instructions to provide meaningful strategic guidance for force planning, and not an aspirational strategic vision, the document requires substantive corrections. The seven failures catalogued above are not incidental. They reflect a document that treats strategic aspiration as a substitute for strategic planning — one that mistakes rhetorical urgency for analytical rigor. Correcting the Fighting Instructions requires more than revision at the margins. The document must be rebuilt around five concrete requirements.
First, force structure timelines must be specified. The Fighting Instructions must define the force structure the Navy requires — not aspirationally, but by platform, by capability, and by timeline. How many ships, submarines, and aircraft are needed, and by what year, to execute the strategy the document claims to support? Without these numbers, the document cannot be evaluated, resourced, or held accountable.
Second, industrial base targets must be established. Shipbuilding capacity is not a background condition — it is a strategic variable. The Fighting Instructions must identify the production rates, workforce levels, and infrastructure investments required to sustain a wartime fleet. A strategy that ignores the forge that builds the sword is not a strategy.
Third, readiness recovery milestones must be defined. The current readiness deficit is not a matter of dispute. The document must state explicitly what readiness levels are required for the force it envisions, identify the gap between current and required posture, and establish the milestones by which that gap will be closed. Urgency without a timeline is theater.
Fourth, resource reallocation priorities must be made explicit. Strategy without tradeoffs is a wish list. The Fighting Instructions must identify what the Navy will deprioritize — which programs, which commitments, which legacy structures — to fund the capabilities the document demands. Every resource allocation decision is also a decision about what does not get resourced. The document must own both sides of that ledger.
Finally, the adversary and the theater must be named. The People’s Republic of China is the pacing threat. The Western Pacific is the likely theater of decision. A document of this consequence that declines to name them — that retreats into the passive voice of “near-peer competitors” and “contested environments” — is not serious planning guidance. It is institutional caution dressed as strategic guidance. Operators and planners deserve better.
Beyond these five requirements, the document must do something harder: It must explain itself. A serious planning instrument does not merely assert priorities — it exposes the assumptions that underlie them, the risks that attend them, and the conditions under which they would need to change. What threat assessments drive the force structure choices? What wargame results or net assessments inform the readiness requirements? What happens to the strategic guidance if Congress does not fund the shipbuilding plan? A document that cannot answer these questions has not made strategic choices — it has avoided them.
The standard is not theoretical. The 1980s Maritime Strategy and its companion 600 ship program plan demonstrated that the Navy knows how to produce serious strategic guidance — documents built on net assessments, campaign analysis, geographic specificity, and explicit resource logic. The Maritime Strategy clearly stated the U.S. Navy would “destroy the Soviet Navy.” It named the Norwegian Sea and the Pacific as the priority theaters. The Maritime Strategy showed its work. The Fighting Instructions, as written, does none of this. It is a document that gestures at urgency while declining to do the analytical work that urgency demands.
The Navy does not lack for strategic ambition. What the Fighting Instructions lacks is the analytical discipline to translate that ambition into a plan that operators can execute, planners can resource, and adversaries must reckon with. That discipline is not optional. In the current strategic environment, it is the minimum requirement for a document that bears the weight of the Navy’s warfighting future.
Bruce Stubbs had assignments on the staffs of the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations from 2009 to 2022 as a member of the U.S. Senior Executive Service. He was a former director of Strategy and Strategic Concepts in the N3N5 and N7 directorates. As a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, he had a posting as the assistant commandant for capability (current title) in Headquarters, served on the staff of the National Security Council, taught at the Naval War College, commanded a major cutter, and served a combat tour with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive.
Image: Petty Officer 2nd Class Terrin Hartman via Wikimedia Commons
