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The U.S. Navy got some serious nautical miles under its belt during the first year of this administration, with combat operations from the Caribbean to Iran to Nigeria alongside its more regular duties. With no sign of President Donald Trump slowing down on global interventions and a tense geopolitical atmosphere, the United States remains in need of a navy that can fight and win wherever it is called to do so.

The new chief of naval operations, Adm. Daryl Caudle, has now published his response to this challenge: the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions. Woven through the usual jungle of jargon and buzzwords that strategic guidance documents like this tend to become is something rather deeper: an attempt to reshape how the U.S. Navy will organize, deploy, and employ its fleet in an era of fiscal constraints, rapid technological advancement, and great-power adversaries looming on the horizon. In Caudle’s own words, it is the U.S. Navy’s answer to “a simple but daunting question: How do we ensure we can fight and win across the spectrum of conflict under conditions we cannot entirely predict against adversaries who are increasingly capable?”

The instructions are intended to shape naval investments, strategic priorities, and policy decisions that will echo well into the next few decades. While the core tenets are sound and the hedge strategy is apropos for the current moment, the ever-present gap between strategy and reality seems particularly wide — culturally, technologically, and politically. Writing the right words is the first step, but despite its recognition of the risks that abound, the U.S. Navy still needs to navigate the implementation.

Why Change Now?

Good naval strategy recognizes the complex interplay between technological possibilities, threat perceptions, resource availability, and historical experience. Caudle’s Fighting Instructions arise from a recognition that the assumptions that have underpinned American naval dominance since World War II are increasingly untenable. For decades, the U.S. Navy could rely on what Caudle describes as overmatching the opponent “with impunity and winning by mass dominance alone.” This paradigm, rooted in overwhelming technological superiority and numerical advantage, shaped fleet structure decisions, doctrine, and operational concepts.

However, the contemporary security environment presents challenges that have significantly undermined this paradigm. As well as the proliferation of precision-guided munitions and the increasing sophistication of anti-access/area denial capabilities, the availability of relatively inexpensive drones — whether aerial, surface, or subsurface — means that adversaries now pay an ever-lowering cost of entry to challenging great-power forces like the United States. This technological diffusion fundamentally alters the calculus of naval operations, rendering legacy force structures both vulnerable and economically unsustainable.

Simultaneously, the U.S. Navy confronts persistent readiness challenges that constrain its operational flexibility. Delayed maintenance has plagued the fleet for decades. To take just one ship class as an example, recent Congressional Budget Office analysis revealed that Arleigh Burke-class destroyers now spend approximately nine years in maintenance over their service life — more than double the U.S. Navy’s 2012 projections. Given that these destroyers have lifespans of around 35 years, this means individual vessels remain non-operational for roughly a quarter of their existence. Such inefficiencies directly undermine the U.S. Navy’s capacity to generate ready forces when needed.

The Three Pillars

Caudle’s strategic framework rests on three interconnected pillars: foundry, fleet, and fight. This tripartite structure recognizes that effective naval power requires more than capable platforms and skilled personnel — it demands robust industrial capacity, sustainable force generation, and adaptable operational concepts.

The Foundry: Industrial Base and Infrastructure

The foundry pillar addresses the industrial and logistical foundation of naval power. Decades of underinvestment in shore infrastructure have created what the Fighting Instructions characterize as “systemic fragility,” degrading both the quality of work performed on vessels and the quality of life for civilian and military personnel. This deterioration extends beyond mere inconvenience — it fundamentally limits the U.S. Navy’s ability to surge forces when crises demand a rapid response.

The strategy explicitly calls for “a deliberate and sustained investment strategy” to restore this foundational element. Such investment encompasses not only shipyards and maintenance facilities but also the broader defense-industrial base required to produce the modular, scalable systems that underpin Caudle’s vision. The challenge is substantial: American shipbuilding has failed to keep pace with the U.S. Navy’s needs or with its competitors, particularly China’s mass-production approach to fleet expansion. While the U.S. Navy has articulated plans for a 381-ship fleet to meet its requirements, achieving this objective requires revitalizing an industrial capacity that has atrophied over decades.

The Trump administration’s focus on “maritime might” and its recently announced “Golden Fleet” initiative, combined with the billions of dollars allocated through reconciliation for unmanned systems development — the largest such investment in U.S. Navy history — suggest recognition at the highest policy levels that naval strategy cannot outpace industrial capacity. The resources are there, but they need to be transmuted into ships, drones, and dockyards.

The Fleet: Readiness and Maintenance

The fleet pillar focuses on maximizing the operational availability of existing forces while ensuring they possess the training, certification, and material readiness to execute assigned missions. Caudle’s approach acknowledges that future force structure debates, while important, cannot obscure the more immediate challenge of maintaining what the U.S. Navy already possesses.

The Fighting Instructions focus on readiness, which requires addressing the maintenance backlog that currently constrains fleet availability. As the document bluntly observes, “If we cannot satisfactorily execute ship repair and maintenance in peacetime, we cannot do so in wartime.” To operationalize this readiness objective, the U.S. Navy is developing a global maritime response plan that codifies force management and sustainment procedures for surge operations. This plan draws lessons from recent operational experience, particularly the flexible deployment patterns employed during Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. During that campaign, the U.S. Navy demonstrated the ability to rotate individual destroyers in and out of strike groups rather than adhering to rigid deployment timelines. This flexibility, as Caudle has argued, should become standard practice, with “high confidence that they come in at the right level of training, certification mastery and the ability to plug and play.”

The Fight: Operational Concepts and Force Employment

The fight pillar addresses how the U.S. Navy will actually employ forces across the spectrum of conflict. Here, Caudle advances his most significant contribution: the “hedge strategy” and its associated concepts of tailored and offset forces.

Traditional carrier strike groups remain formidable instruments of naval power, but their deployment model presents limitations. A one-size-fits-all reliance on carriers stretches crew tolerance, creates maintenance delays, produces gaps in theater coverage, and necessitates extended deployments that degrade readiness. Moreover, assembling and deploying large, fully capable strike groups requires substantial time — a luxury increasingly scarce in an era where “speed and decision ruthlessly punish delay.”

The hedge strategy represents Caudle’s answer to a fundamental dilemma: how to maintain credible deterrence and warfighting capability across diverse scenarios without building a prohibitively expensive, purpose-built force for every possible contingency. As he articulates it, “What [the] hedge avoids is a brittle single-purpose force that is either overbuilt for high-end fights and then underused day to day, or optimized for low-end crises and then gets overmatched when it counts.”

This approach seeks to accept fiscal, industrial, and operational realities while demanding a U.S. Navy that remains “lethal, agile, responsive and flexible,” balancing cost-effective, scalable, attritable mass with the most advanced multi-mission platforms the U.S. Navy can sustain. Crucially, it represents not an abandonment of high-end capabilities but rather their augmentation through distributed, adaptable force packages.

Caudle notes that the U.S. Navy already applies hedge concepts to special operations forces and strategic submarine operations, meaning the underlying logic is not novel. What distinguishes his approach is the application of hedge thinking across the entire service and within joint force operations. This scaling represents a significant departure from traditional fleet architecture and operational planning.

Central to the hedge strategy are “tailored forces” and “offset forces” — scalable formations combining manned and unmanned platforms, autonomous systems, and logistics nodes. Tailored forces constitute “customized ensembles of general-purpose forces and the composite packaging of tailored offsets certified for specific missions in particular regions.” Rather than deploying a destroyer certified for more than a dozen missions, the U.S. Navy would deploy units optimized for specific operational problems, even if this means accepting increased risk in other mission areas.

This concept of deliberate risk acceptance marks another departure from conventional wisdom. The Fighting Instructions explicitly accept risk, redistributing it across the force rather than attempting comprehensive mitigation. This approach enables what Caudle terms “force optimization,” coupling operational problems to forces “in the most sophisticated way possible” using “all the tools I’ve available — from the big decks all the way down to [robotic systems].”

Offset forces would feature prominently in scenarios demanding rapid response. For example, in a Taiwan contingency involving potential amphibious invasion by the People’s Liberation Army, swarms of drones would form the “spine of the hedge force, deterring enemy action until the U.S. has time to assemble follow-on forces.” Such forces might include one-way attack drones, counter-drone interceptors, unmanned undersea attack vehicles, and Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicles equipped with sensors and weapons.

The Drone Revolution: From Niche to Central

The Fighting Instructions reflect broader trends in military innovation by positioning unmanned systems as central rather than peripheral to naval operations. The Trump administration’s enthusiasm for these technologies, combined with unprecedented congressional funding, creates the conditions for transformative change in force composition.

The U.S. Navy now uses the term “robotic and autonomous systems” to encompass the full spectrum of unmanned capabilities. These systems promise to extend the U.S. Navy’s reach, expand its mass, multiply force effectiveness, improve response options, and preserve combat advantage. By deploying lower-cost platforms alongside high-end assets, the U.S. Navy can distribute risk more effectively while presenting adversaries with targeting dilemmas that complicate their tactical and operational planning.

However, unmanned systems introduce doctrinal and procedural challenges that the Fighting Instructions acknowledge need to be resolved. Strategic laydown decisions — where to position forces globally — become more complex when incorporating unmanned elements. Global force management processes developed for crewed vessels may not translate effectively to autonomous systems with different logistical, command and control, and maintenance requirements. The instructions explicitly call for solving these “unmanned dilemmas” through doctrinal development and process refinement.

Challenges and Questions

Caudle’s Fighting Instructions represent a serious attempt to reconcile strategic ambition with operational and resource constraints. By moving away from singular reliance on massive, multi-mission platforms toward more distributed, tailored force packages incorporating unmanned systems, the strategy seeks adaptability in an environment of irreducible uncertainty.

The three pillars of foundry, fleet, and fight provide a coherent framework for thinking about naval power holistically — recognizing that industrial capacity, readiness, and operational concepts are inseparable elements of a functioning whole. The hedge strategy, with its emphasis on scalable, mission-tailored forces and deliberate risk management, offers potential answers to the fundamental questions raised by the current geopolitical environment.

The strategy’s emphasis on ruthless adaptability reflects a broader recognition that the character of warfare is changing faster than traditional planning cycles can accommodate. The increasing prevalence of conflict combining conventional, irregular, and hybrid elements demands forces capable of shifting rapidly between different operational modalities. Caudle’s framework attempts to build this adaptability structurally into force composition and employment rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Moreover, the Fighting Instructions acknowledge an uncomfortable truth that defense planning often obscures: Resource constraints are real and enduring. The U.S. Navy is not in a position where it can simply build its way out of strategic challenges through unlimited procurement. Instead, it needs to make difficult choices about where to accept risk, which capabilities to prioritize, and how to leverage emerging technologies to stretch limited resources. The hedge strategy’s explicit acceptance of risk-taking represents a mature recognition that perfect solutions remain beyond reach — the goal is resilience and adaptability rather than comprehensive coverage.

The distributed nature of Caudle’s vision also aligns with contemporary thinking about survivability in contested environments. Concentrating capability in a small number of high-value platforms creates tempting targets for adversaries equipped with precision weapons. Distributing lethality across numerous platforms — some crewed, some autonomous, some high-end, some attritable — complicates enemy targeting and provides operational flexibility. This distribution extends beyond platforms to include command, with Caudle advocating for mission command frameworks that push decision authority to lower echelons capable of responding rapidly to local conditions.

While Caudle’s strategic vision offers a compelling response to contemporary challenges, its implementation path will be strewn with significant obstacles. First among these is the cultural dimension. The U.S. Navy possesses deep institutional commitments to particular platforms, operational concepts, and organizational structures. Shifting from carrier-centric deployment models to distributed, tailored force packages will require not merely new hardware but new mindsets — a transformation that tends to prove difficult for large, hierarchical organizations like a military. Given that American naval circles have been discussing various iterations of distributed lethality for decades, and yet U.S. Navy operations remain largely the same, some healthy skepticism is warranted about whether Caudle’s new version of this vision can make any more impact than prior iterations.

Second, the strategy’s success depends heavily on technological maturation and investment. Unmanned systems need to demonstrate reliability, survivability, and effectiveness under contested conditions. Questions of autonomy — what decisions machines can make without human intervention — remain unresolved both technically and ethically. The U.S. Navy needs to develop a swathe of doctrine, tactics, and command arrangements for human-machine teaming across domains, a challenge without clear historical precedent. The American defense-industrial base also needs to actually deliver the platforms and systems the strategy envisions. Congressional appropriations are providing the resources, but transforming those resources into operational capabilities requires time, sustained management attention, and successful execution by defense contractors. The U.S. Navy’s acquisition record suggests, to put it mildly, that these things should not be assumed.

Third, there is a conceptual tension that sits uncomfortably underneath the document: Caudle wants distributed lethality and attritable mass, while Trump and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan want their Golden Fleet, centered around a new class of battleship. It is notable that the Fighting Instructions do not mention the Golden Fleet, although Caudle does make reference to it in his various public remarks around the publication of the document. While the Golden Fleet concept’s parts on building new smaller surface ships and investing in shipyards fit in well, constructing a new class of large capital ships runs directly against Caudle’s strategic vision: A battleship is precisely the kind of high-value platform that he wishes to move away from. Given that the U.S. Navy has neither the time nor the resources to waste, there is a significant risk that Trump and Phelan’s focus on an expensive and unproven battleship concept will substantially undermine Caudle’s efforts to reshape the fleet.

Strategy to Reality

Whether this vision translates into practice depends on factors both within and beyond the U.S. Navy’s control: sustained political will, adequate resources, technological success, institutional adaptation, and the actions of adversaries — who will not be passive observers. What is clear is that maintaining the status quo — relying on legacy force structures and deployment patterns designed for a different strategic era — is not viable. The convergence of peer competitor capabilities, fiscal pressures, technological change, and evolving threat patterns creates imperatives for adaptation that transcend any individual leader’s preferences. In that sense, the Fighting Instructions represent not merely one admiral’s vision but a necessary conversation about the future of American naval power in a time of transformation and uncertainty.

However, the document runs the serious risk of being simply another iteration of the same conversation that has been going on for many years, without actually changing how the U.S. Navy operates. Much of the content is not new, but rather lays out what still needs to be done despite having been bandied about for quite some time. This is useful if it actually leads to action, but significant follow-through will be needed to achieve that. The most novel concept in the Fighting Instructions, the hedge strategy, could be a strong contribution to naval operations — but, again, only if it is actually put into practice. If it is relegated to branding rather than action, the hedge strategy may well become yet another in the long list of concepts that naval academics can point to as never making it off the page.

The ultimate measure of the Fighting Instructions’ success will not be the eloquence of the strategy document but the U.S. Navy’s performance when theory meets the unforgiving test of operational reality. This will happen not in documents but in shipyards, classrooms, crews, and — should deterrence fail — in combat. The Fighting Instructions provide a framework and a direction, but documents do not build ships, train sailors, or win battles, nor do they ensure that their concepts make the transition from page to reality. The hard work of implementation lies ahead, requiring sustained leadership, institutional courage, and the ability to adapt as initial assumptions encounter reality’s complications.

Emma Salisbury, Ph.D., is a non-resident senior fellow in the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an associate fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre.

Image: Midjourney