There is no shortage of problems confronting the U.S. Navy, as salvo after salvo of embarrassing stories attest. The range of problems is spectacularly depressing, addressing almost every facet of the Navy — from the design, production, maintenance, and crewing of its warships to the lack of commercial shipyard capacity, civilian shipbuilders, government drydocks, force structure, recruits, civilian mariners, and an adequate budget.
How the Navy got into this predicament is complex. The lack of consistent strategic guidance between the chiefs of naval operations, however, is a major cause. The chiefs of naval operations’ pursuit of individualistic and inconsistent strategic guidance for the Navy’s forward progress is one of the principal reason for the Navy’s seabag of problems. The Navy cannot get its act together, because each service chief has a different act for the Navy, beginning every four years. Too often chiefs of naval operations have produced strategic documents littered with generalities, aspirational desires, and insubstantial arguments to express their rationale for the Navy’s national defense contribution. Moreover, this parade of different guidance documents from chiefs of naval operations sends a misleading message to Congress and the public that the departing chief of naval operations got it wrong, and now the incoming chief of naval operations will make it right with a new plan. The cumulative result is the Navy acts without strategic intent, neglects strategic planning, focuses on short-term issues, and makes incremental decisions. I blame the chiefs of naval operations.
Over the last 30 years, I have had substantive involvement in the production of national and service-level strategies. From 2011 to 2022, as a member of the senior executive service, I supported successive chiefs of naval operations, serving on their strategy and concepts staff. This experience has taught me the timeless truth, in the words of Hal Brands, that strategic guidance “allows us to act with purpose in a disordered world; it is vital to out-thinking and out-playing our foes.” Indeed, when Adm. James D. Watkins was the chief of naval operations, he had a similar opinion, declaring the famous 1980s Maritime Strategy as the Navy’s “bedrock of planning, programming, and operations throughout today’s Navy.”
During my assignments on the Navy staff, I had no role in producing the strategic guidance I critique below. I wrote this article, however, because the personal strategic guidance produced by the service chiefs no longer adequately serves the purpose cited by Brands and Watkins. I also wrote this for another reason: As the final 2024 report by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy ominously warns, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.” America needs to face unprecedented threats with urgency. And that starts with strategy.
Why the Need for Strategic Consistency Between Chiefs of Naval Operations
Consistency between chiefs of naval operations is a prerequisite to maintain and transform the Navy’s force structure, not in response to, but in anticipation of, technological advancements and changing threats. The Navy’s force mix in terms of capabilities and numbers cannot be changed in less than a decade. Continuity of the Navy’s strategic approach is required. Since the Navy’s forward progress does not occur in a four-year increment reflecting a service chief’s tenure in office, there must be a high degree of consistency across them. Furthermore, the long lead times required to accomplish many forward progress objectives (i.e., building ships, aircraft, and weapon systems) demand a high level of consistency.
The Navy needs each service chief to build upon what has happened before so that it can benefit from continuous unity of effort. The service requires a consistent planning process, not an entirely new version, to accompany the incoming service leader’s new strategy. The challenge is to sustain consensus in a planning and acquisition process that runs a decade or more and is instigated by a chief of naval operations who serves four years. The 1980s Maritime Strategy linked Admirals Thomas B. Hayward, James D. Watkins, and Carlisle A.H. Trost and gave them continuity to their work with a shared understanding and commitment, no matter their personal feelings.
In addition, only the chiefs of naval operations can ensure the Navy staff maintains a strategic focus. They alone can direct the staff to keep its focus on the Navy’s strategic direction, ensuring it drives force planning and the resource allocation process.
The Identity Politics of Being Chief of Naval Operations
Chiefs of naval operations seem to believe that they must differentiate themselves from their predecessors and mimic American presidents with their naval versions of presidential campaign platforms. Using snappy nautical titles, pedestrian alliterative bullets, and lots of the possessive “my,” but falling short on the specifics of “how,” each service chief personally authors a strategic document to describe the actions they want to move the Navy forward during their four-year tenure. Recent examples include: Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert‘s Sailing Directions (2011) with annual Navigation Plans updates, Adm. John M. Richardson’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 1.0 (2016) and 2.0 (2018), Adm. Michael M. Gilday’s Navigation Plans (2021 and 2022), and Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy (2024).
Individually authored, these documents addressing the Navy’s forward progress are the Navy’s capstone true strategic guidance to define priorities for allocating its resources. They are the strategic documents that matter the most to the chiefs of naval operations. These documents convey to internal and external Navy audiences their most important set of policies for implementation above all other guidance documents, to include the tri-service strategies, such as A Cooperative Strategy for 21st-Century Seapower (2007 and 2015 editions) and the 2020 Advantage at Sea.
These tri-service strategies address the national defense role of an integrated Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard and ostensibly represent the Navy’s apotheosis for strategic guidance. Most chiefs of naval operations, however, do not consider the tri-service strategies as higher-level guidance to methodically follow, beyond offering a complimentary shout-out in their own guidance documents. The tri-service documents have little value for shaping Navy guidance for force planning and conducting resource allocation.
Plans, Not Strategies
The unclassified guidance documents authored by the chiefs of naval operations are aspirational strategic plans, usually containing numerous lists of objectives, priorities, and principles, and not conventional Clausewitzian strategies with clear ends, ways, and means. Their planning guidance frequently lacks comprehensive prioritization, explicit assumptions, risk assessments, clear time schedules, assignment of responsibilities, and metrics of success. Furthermore, their plans lack clear roots to the strategies that they are supposed to implement. Most importantly, these plans lack any effort to describe the necessary level of resources and budgets required, as well as detailed explanations of how they intend to achieve the stated objectives. For example, in her Navigation Plan, Franchetti sets a major goal to “get platforms in and out of maintenance on time … embrace novel approaches to training, manning, modernization, and sustainment,” with no substantive discussion of how to achieve these goals.
The chiefs of naval operations’ planning guidance commonly falls into four overarching priority bins of naval issues — personnel, current readiness, future readiness, and temporal or other. The first three priority bins are timeless, and most issues and goals addressed in their guidance plans fall within these three bins. So, to be fair, there is some consistency. However, the devil is in the details. Each service chief , nevertheless, feels compelled to rename these three enduring bins of priority issues, add more layers of bins called tenets or principles, pioneer novel frameworks for crafting their guidance, introduce new terms, and relabel their predecessor’s nomenclature to reflect his or her personal preferences. They use the fourth “temporal or other” bin for their individual, high-interest issues, such as Richardson’s quest for the Navy to embrace his short-lived high-velocity learning initiative.
Additionally, most chiefs of naval operations give curt treatment to the enduring bin of future readiness, also called the future fleet or force design bin. With one exception, the strategic guidance for designing the future Navy consists mostly of sweeping, unhelpful generalizations such as this from Greenert’s 2011 Sailing Directions that “new and updated weapons, unmanned systems, sensors, and increased power” will make future ships and aircraft more effective. Richardson, in both his 2016 and 2018 guidance documents, omits any force design guidance. Instead, in May 2017 he offered his nine-page guidance, The Future Fleet, which, despite its length, has little substantive utility. Gilday provides the exception with his second Navigation Plan in 2022, which has four pages describing specific numbers and types of ships and aircraft and their six force attributes. In her 2024 Navigation Plan, Franchetti offers no future Navy guidance, makes no reference to any previous guidance, and mentions her commitment to leaving her successor “a thoughtful blueprint for the future Navy.” Table #1 displays the variations and inconsistencies of the chiefs of naval operations’ frameworks and lexicons in their strategic guidance from 2011 to 2024.
Table #1: Chiefs of Naval Operations’ Inconsistent Approaches for Strategic Guidance from 2011 to 2024
Regarding the incorporation of higher-level national guidance — the national security, defense, and military strategies along with the Defense Department’s policies for “jointness” — the chiefs of naval operations, with one notable exception, respond in an uneven manner. Greenert never mentions any national strategy and mechanically cites the term “joint” three times in his 2011 Sailing Directions, and once with a warning that the Navy must “operate independently when necessary.” Likewise, in his 2016 Design, Richardson never names any national strategies and uses the term “joint” only once. Richardson explains the release of his 2018 Design version to ensure the Navy’s “plans were aligned with updated strategic guidance” outlined in the national strategies, and uses the term “joint” in 11 instances.
In his 2021 guidance, Gilday does not refer to any national strategy and mentions “joint” nine times. Gilday, however, attributes the advent of the classified Joint Warfighting Concept and the 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasizing “long-term competition with China and sustain military advantage against Russia” as two of his three major reasons for publishing the 2022 edition of his guidance. Franchetti is the exception. Her 2024 guidance differs drastically with its full-throated embrace of jointness, using the term “joint” 36 times. To achieve her two strategic ends, she defines two strategic ways, one of which is “Expanding the Navy’s contribution to the Joint warfighting ecosystem.” Franchetti devotes cumulatively almost three pages to expressing her commitment to jointness but does not quote by name any national strategy.
The widespread differences in the chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance are not an existential threat to the Navy. These variations, however, undermine the requirements for unity of effort and continuity amongst the chiefs in appearance and fact. Furthermore, inadequately written guidance documents lead to ineffective planning and occasionally uneven results. These differences between chiefs of naval operations weaken these prerequisites. To paraphrase Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the only test for chief of naval operations leadership is success, and in one vital matter — growing the Navy — the service’s leaders have little success. In 2002, the Navy had 292 battle force ships, and in 2024, the number was 296 ships with an official requirement for 381 crewed ships. There are numerous factors, many beyond the chiefs of naval operations’ control, for this outcome; nonetheless, inadequate strategic planning undoubtedly plays a role.
Lastly, some information omitted from the chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance results in an insidious consequence. By avoiding the hard up-front thinking to provide guidance on strategic assumptions, risk, the “how,”, and requisite resources, the chief of naval operations defer their determination to deliberations in the Navy’s four-phased annual Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, which has become the Navy’s principal tool for setting priorities and allocating resources. The result is that budgeteers and programmers, who oversee and manage this resource allocation process, simultaneously develop the Navy’s strategic guidance during their platform and capabilities trade-off negotiations, and not the Navy’s strategists. The effect is incremental decision-making and incremental acquisition of ships, aircraft, and weapon systems, not the production of an integrated, connected warfighting machine of ships, aircraft, and weapon systems crewed by well-trained sailors to deliver unmatched air, surface, and sub-surface lethality now and in the future.
An Illusion of Strategic Consistency
Franchetti became the chief of naval operations on Nov. 2, 2023. She released her 2024 Navigation Plan on Sept. 18, 2024. In the intervening 10 months, she conducted Project 33, named after herself as the 33rd chief of naval operations, to assess the Navy’s near-term readiness for a possible war with China in 2027.
Franchetti’s 2024 plan makes wholesale changes to Gilday’s 2022 Navigation Plan with his 18 “coordinating objectives” distributed into his four overarching priority bins. She eliminates two of Gilday’s bins (Capabilities and Capacity) and retitles his other two: Sailors become Warfighters, and Readiness becomes Warfighting. She also adds a new priority bin titled Foundation, an indecipherable title for catch-all objectives. Franchetti subsumes five of Gilday’s 18 objectives into five of her seven “targets” from Project 33. Next, she either renames or eliminates Gilday’s objectives, or adds new objectives for a revised total of 20 versus Gilday’s original 18.
She also stops using Gilday’s adjective-laden substitute term for sea power — Integrated All Domain Naval Power, which Gilday identifies as the Navy’s ultimate objective to deliver. Franchetti reverts to the plain vanilla term “naval power” as the ultimate objective to deliver and introduces a new trendy term, “Joint warfighting ecosystem,” to describe the joint force as “a system in which the layered capabilities of each … military Service[s] enable and are enabled by each other.” Her use of the term “naval power” contradicts the authoritative guidance in the capstone 2020 Naval Doctrine Publication 1, Naval Warfare, to use the traditional term of “sea power.” Table #2 displays her wholesale changes to Gilday’s plan. Note that the seven highlighted objectives depicted on table #2 are Franchetti’s seven “Targets” from her Project 33.
Table #2: Franchetti’s Reconfiguration of Gilday’s Four Overarching Priority Bins and 18 Objectives
Franchetti shares with Gilday an item of strategic consistency regarding the Navy’s enduring bins of priorities but with a confusing twist. Gilday’s 2021 Navigation Plan states his four priorities as “readiness, capabilities, capacity, and our Sailors.” In his Jan. 12, 2021, media availability to discuss this strategic guidance, Gilday states that readiness “continues to be my number one priority” followed by capabilities and capacity. In her January 2024 two-page white paper, America’s Warfighting Navy, Franchetti announces her new priorities as “Warfighting, Warfighters, and the Foundation that supports them.” In an October 2024 forum at the Atlantic Council, however, Franchetti states that her “big picture” priorities are “first Columbia, our number one acquisition priority” and “after that, readiness, capability, and then capacity.” She concludes, “I’m really focused on readiness.”
In her statement, Franchetti uses Gilday’s construct for the Navy priorities — readiness, capabilities, and capacity — and not her construct of warfighting, warfighters, and foundation. Why? Gilday’s priorities do not require interpretation and are easily understandable, especially to non-military persons, and apparently even to Franchetti. This is what happens when chiefs of naval operations want to needlessly differentiate themselves from their predecessors. Congress and the American public can readily comprehend terms like readiness, capabilities, and capacity, whereas Franchetti’s “warfighting” as a substitute term for both readiness and capabilities obscures the Navy’s message. Moreover, her “Foundation” priority term is too abstract to comprehend. This is not a trivial, inconsequential subject to highlight. Her Navigation Plan should provide the common thread that integrates and synchronizes the planning activities and operations of the Navy as a whole and serves as the basis for the Navy’s strategic communications to express its arguments for funding.
In a positive action, Franchetti expresses in the clearest terms a strategic end for her 2024 guidance. The previous guidance by her predecessors uses multiple high-level, generalized terms for strategic ends. Paraphrased examples of these lofty ends are to strengthen the Navy’s warfighting advantage or deliver a Navy for sea control. Franchetti instead writes a very arresting strategic end: “readiness for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027.”
Such clarity to express a key strategic objective is a welcomed change from the previous documents, and reminiscent of the lucidity in the Navy’s famous 1980s Maritime Strategy. Unfortunately, the continuity between these two documents stops there. The 1980s Maritime Strategy provides a vivid, detailed description of a naval war with the Soviet Union. Franchetti’s “How We Fight” section in her guidance has no detailed description of a war with China and how the Navy prevails over the Chinese navy, despite declaring a possible 2027 war with as a strategic end. With no useful explanation of “how,” she simply states, “We establish deterrence and prevail in war when we work as part of a Joint and Combined force” and “The Navy fights in a warfighting ecosystem.” Her anodyne description of naval warfare is simplistic, abstract, and broad, and lacks any real intellectual substance or planning value.
In summary, Franchetti continues this malpractice to incorporate little to no strategic consistency. With her 2024 document, the strategic continuity between chiefs of naval operations remains tenuous.
Not an Empty-Headed Plea
This call for chiefs of naval operations’ strategic guidance consistency is not a mindless requirement for an unbroken set of unchanging goals and priorities from one chief of naval operations to the next. Given the dynamic nature of security threats and technological, political, and fiscal environments, all strategic guidance documents require semi-continuous adjustment to remain relevant and valid. What the Navy does not need, however, is wholesale change every four years for the sake of change. The issue for the Navy is to maintain unremitting momentum of strategic intent, conduct consistent strategic messaging, focus on a continuous set of those Navy issues that extend beyond the tenure of a single individual, and reduce the staff churn from sweeping changes to guidance. As Franchetti stated in her 2024 Navigation Plan, “Right sizing the fleet will be a generational project for the Navy, Congress, and industry.” Generational projects require a high degree of consistency for success as well as necessary adjustments as environmental factors change, but not across-the-board changes every four years, which is what the Navy presently gets. In short, this is a plea for the Navy to have a dedicated process and means to develop its capstone strategic guidance versus its current ad hoc and inconsistent practices. The bottom line is the Navy needs corporate strategic guidance, not an individualistic strategic guidance.
The Benefits of Consistency
Without a doubt, the benefits of strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations would be enormous. There would be assured continuity of strategic direction over the fielding of major platforms and weapon systems and no requirement for an incoming chief of naval operations to craft from whole cloth a “new” Navy strategic direction. In addition, the chiefs of naval operations would have increased unity of effort on the Navy’s way ahead, as well as the basis for a consistent Navy message for strategic communications. Finally, there would be a welcomed reduction in false starts and nonproductive efforts.
The first benefit has significant consequences for the Navy in terms of its credibility with Congress and the Defense Department. From February 2008 to June 2023, the Navy could not consistently state how many crewed ships it required; the range of numbers went from a low of 313 to a high of 450, and back to today’s 381. Strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations would have reduced this litany of constantly changing crewed ship numbers. (Obviously, the Navy must adjust the size and composition of its fleet to reflect major changes in threats, operations, and budgets.)
The final benefit also has notable repercussions. The vast expenditure of man-hours pursuing ill-thought initiatives is a colossal waste of resources and talent, not to mention its soul-draining effect on the Navy staff. Service chiefs do themselves and the Navy no favors, causing incredible political and staff churn that no one wants to report to the chiefs of naval operations, when each has a “new” vision, plan, or strategy or some management fad to push. Examples abound, such as the infamous 1980s Total Quality Leadership initiative or the extraordinary implementation effort, and eventual quiet death, of the “Line of Effort Purple: Expand and Strengthen Our Network of Partners” in both versions of Richardson’s A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.
A collateral benefit derives from conducting the hard up-front thinking to provide guidance on strategic assumptions, risk, how, and requisite resources in lieu of the present practice to defer their determination to Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution deliberations. Up-front development of comprehensive guidance would ensure the resource allocation process serves the strategic guidance, not vice versa. All strategic guidance is shaped and informed by available resources. That, however, is not the Navy’s norm. The Navy needs to avoid the development of strategic guidance by its programming and budgeting process.
How to Achieve Consistency
To achieve strategic consistency between incumbents, the chiefs of naval operations need to carry out the three painless steps listed below. The resources are readily available; it is simply a matter of resetting priorities for what is more important. And what could be more important than Franchetti’s statement about the possibility of the U.S. Navy fighting a global war with China in 2027? Her statement should concentrate the minds of all Navy leaders as if they were facing an imminent hanging, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. If Navy leaders sincerely subscribe to her strategic end, then they and the entire Navy should start thinking and acting like the Navy did in the 1930s when it prepared to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy.
A Dedicated Strategic Planning Staff
Franchetti should stop the ad hoc production of Navy capstone strategic guidance by one-off project groups such as her honorific Project 33, kitchen cabinets, or transition teams. She should do what most chief executive officers in the corporate world do: stand up a dedicated strategic planning staff to produce, implement, monitor, measure, and update — on a continuous basis — Navy capstone strategic guidance, reporting directly to the chief of naval operations. The key is to centralize the production, implementation, and monitoring of all Navy capstone documents addressing the overarching direction for the Navy to plan, program, and budget the readiness of current and future forces to support national strategy.
Franchetti has a readily available source for establishing a strategic planning staff. She needs to repurpose her existing commander’s action group and place it under the leadership of a post-command carrier strike group rear admiral with a civilian senior executive service member as the deputy along with a much-increased staff. By reducing the large number of commander’s action groups scattered across the offices of Navy three-star admirals, Franchetti has a large pool of talented officers for the increased manpower that the new strategic planning staff requires. These three-star commander’s actions groups act are not nearly as important to the Navy’s future as the strategic planning staff.
The Process
Franchetti should establish a deliberate strategic planning process to generate strategic consistency between the service chiefs. There are numerous models from the military, industry, and academia to draw upon. It is critical that this process include periodic “big tent” three-star review of strategic planning activities and products, as well as the solicitation of input by deputy chiefs of naval operations, fleet commanders, and force and systems commanders, and something similar for periodic “small tent” review at the four-star level. One of the participants at these two events will surely be the next chief of naval operations. And it would be prudent for that individual to be prepared to hit the ground running with an update plan in hand on the first day as chief of operations and not wait for 10 months to do so, as experienced by Franchetti.
She also should eliminate the practice of the three-star type commanders publishing their own visions for the Navy’s aircraft, ships, and submarines — Navy Aviation Vision 2030–2035 for aircraft, Surface Warfare: The Competitive Edge for surface ships, and Commander’s Intent 4.0 for submarines. There should only be one vision for the Navy’s forces, and that is the vision approved by the chief of naval operations in a single document drafted by the new strategic planning staff.
Lastly, Franchetti should invite the secretary of the Navy jointly sign all chief of naval operations–originated strategic guidance documents to foster a comprehensive whole-of-Navy approach to force planning between the Navy staff and the Secretariat. Admiral Hayward and Watkins could not, on their own, employ this whole-of-Navy approach on the naval acquisition system, especially to the Naval Systems Commands, as they did not have the authority to do so. The prevalent Navy staff attitude that the responsibilities for acquisition and requirements are clearly divided between the secretary and the chief of naval operations is incorrect and artificial. The secretary can legally be involved in strategy development and force planning. Furthermore, Navy uniformed leaders should not forget that while the chief of naval operations owns the development of the Navy’s budget, it is the secretary of the Navy who owns the budget’s execution and approves any budget reprogramming requested by the chief of naval operations. A stronger relationship between the secretary and the chief of naval operations would promote a whole-of-Navy approach to force planning by using one common set of strategic guidance documents for unity of effort from the fleet to the naval systems commands, and not the current bifurcated approach with Franchetti’s Navigation Plan and the Secretary’s separate plan.
Leadership
Franchetti and all subsequent chiefs of naval operations should keep the strategic planning staff in place. They need to make it work as envisioned. If a chief of naval operations is unhappy with its products, then she or he should bring a different person to run the show, but the organization itself needs to retain its role rather than being shoved aside and replaced with a new, favorite staff group. The key is for the service chiefs to select their director and have confidence in their staff. The chiefs of naval operations ought to keep the staff focused on its overarching mission. No matter how tempting, the chiefs of naval operations should not employ this staff as “firefighters” to extinguish the daily “helmet fires” and corrupt its purpose. The chiefs of naval operations should not convert the strategic planning staff into their special projects office. Moreover, the chiefs of naval operations cannot control this staff so tightly that it becomes identified exclusively and personally with him or her because the principal’s eventual departure may terminate the staff’s usefulness and influence to the incoming chief of naval operations. The strategic planning staff requires continuity and longevity for mission success, avoiding the “cult of four-star personality.” On a more minor note, if the moniker “Navigation Plan” sticks for all subsequent chiefs of naval operations after Franchetti, they should stop calling it the Chief of Naval Operations’ Navigation Plan. It’s not. It is the Navy’s Navigation Plan. And in the same vein, the chiefs of naval operations should stop using the possessive “my” and use “our” instead.
Conclusion
In 1988, respected Congressional Research Service defense analyst Ronald O’Rourke wrote a compelling essay in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine for the Navy to maintain strategic consistency between chiefs of naval operations. As the Cold War’s end approached, he recommended that the Navy not arbitrarily discard its powerful and successful organizing concept — the 1980s Maritime Strategy. He suggested, instead, that the Navy build upon its 1980s achievements by identifying “the key organizing concepts and arguments behind those achievements” and examining whether they could be refined and applied for the 1990s. He did not propose the Navy rest on its laurels, as circumstances always change. O’Rourke, however, noted that the Navy “cannot afford to discard powerful concepts arbitrarily, simply because they are not new, particularly if they might be applicable, with refinements, to emerging circumstances.” His 1988 advice for strategic consistency still rings true for the Navy in 2024. I continue to blame the chiefs.
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. The author drew upon his forthcoming publication, Cold Iron: The Demise of Navy Strategy Development and Force Planning, to compose portions of this commentary.
Image: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons.
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