The Department of Defense (DoD) has allocated aircraft carriers to U.S. Central Command (CentCom) for Iranian deterrence at the expense of strategic competition with China and Russia repeatedly over the past decade. DoD is locked in a cycle that regularly deprives Indo-Pacific Command (IndoPaCom) and European Command of the carriers necessary for strategic competition. Incoherent strategic messaging has resulted from priority misalignment between DoD and CentCom, changing political approaches, and overreliance on carriers for demonstrations of resolve.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/september/stop-sending-carriers-centcom

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The question of how the United States should defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion is a pressing one. Taiwan's position at the heart of the first island chain would make Chinese occupation a pivotal strategic moment. Not only would occupation of Taiwan allow the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) unfettered access to the Pacific, it also would allow China to turn Japan's southern flank and dominate key sea lines of communication—potentially undercutting the U.S.-Japan alliance.1 U.S. planners contemplating Taiwan's defense must contend with an evolving Chinese antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) system that, coupled with the broader modernization of the PLA, threatens to give China local conventional overmatch in any scenario involving Taiwan.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/february/win-urban-war-taiwan

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Several clichéd images come to mind when the words 'Marine Corps leadership' are invoked— drill instructors with campaign hats pulled low, prowling the squad bay like a school of frenzied sharks; a lazy-eyed gunnery sergeant, growling his displeasure at the poor cleanliness of the barracks; a vigorous counseling session at a sergeant major's desk following nonjudicial punishment proceedings. Rarely does it conjure an image of a Marine actually embodying one of the 14 leadership traits or demonstrating one of the 11 principles of Marine Corps leadership.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/may/humility-leadership-trait

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By General Anthony Zinni, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired), Mie Augier, and Major Sean F. X. Barrett, U.S. Marine Corps Today's strategic environment features rapid technological change coupled with the increasing accessibility of cutting-edge technologies to more and more actors. These changes, and the threats they pose to U.S. national security, span presidential administrations and cross party lines. The 2018 National Defense Strategy, for example, notes that maintaining U.S. technological advantage requires significant changes across the 'National Security Innovation Base' and calls on the Department of Defense (DoD) to 'organize for innovation' and 'out-innovate revisionist powers.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/august/innovation-people-are-more-important-technology

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William R. Wells II, a freelance historian and retired Coast Guard master chief petty officer, criticized the state of Coast Guard history in a 2019 essay. Of his many disparaging observations, one was particularly painful: Without knowledge of the past, historical errors continue as operations become lost to organizational memory. . . . as long as the Coast Guard maintains its style of comfortable conformity little will change in the study, research, and writing of forthright Coast Guard history .

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/august/lost-sea-teaching-studying-and-promoting-coast-guard-history

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The Coast Guard does not fight fires. That is the official policy—at least for fires that break out on board vessels that do not fly a Coast Guard ensign. Instead, the service provides 'assistance as available' and serves as 'an important resource' to firefighting organizations through its development of written contingency plans for each major port.'1 Yet Coast Guard boats and cutters respond annually to hundreds of at-sea and waterfront fires involving private, commercial, and public property, so many that such cases rank high among the reasons for search-and-rescue sorties.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/august/coast-guards-firefighting-fiction

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As the loss of the USS Bon­homme Richard (LHD-6) and USS Miami (SSN-755) illustrate, in-port fires are more challenging than at-sea fires. At sea, a ship can muster every sailor within minutes of a fire's ignition. In port, assuming eight-hour workdays and a two-day weekend, the full crew is present only about a quarter of the time (less after deducting crew members who are at schools, trainers, or riding other ships). Since 2008, 11 of 13 major in-port fires (identified by the Naval Safety Center), including those on the Miami and Bon­homme Richard, occurred outside normal working hours.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/august/every-sailor-firefighter

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As many as ten littoral combat ships (LCSs) may be in the market for retirement jobs soon.1 The ships have a few great points to put on their resumes for a new employer: They are representative of a class that is still in service (and will be for years to come). They have good aviation facilities. They can move equipment into and out of the water. They are compact but still have some open space in the hull. Here are a few jobs for the Navy to consider: OCS/ODS Familiarization Officer Candidate School (OCS) trains unrestricted line officers, who will go on to operate ships, aircraft, and submarines.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/september/retirement-jobs-lcs

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Flying, I think for anybody, has to be exhilarating, when you can go straight up or flip on your back, go straight down, or pull all kinds of Gs. You're in a constant mode of competing and challenging yourself. You seldom run into an aviator who doesn't like what he's doing.1 So the late Chief of Naval Operations and carrier naval aviator Admiral Thomas B. Hayward described life as a lieutenant test pilot at Naval Air Test Center Patuxent River in 1954. The Naval Institute has been covering carrier aviation since its early days, capturing the developments, the exhilaration, and all the ups and downs (literal and figurative) in Proceedings, Naval History, oral histories, and books from the Naval Institute Press.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/september/century-carrier-aviation-pages-proceedings

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The submarine force devalues the experience of shipyard junior officers whose mission has been returning warships to fighting shape. These junior officers spend their days in shipyards laboring over work controls and complex maintenance procedures to the detriment of their navigation and tactical prowess. They are at a disadvantage because they spend less time at sea honing their skills on the tip of the Navy's lethal spear. A Shipyard Problem While assigned to a submarine undergoing major overhaul in a shipyard, junior officers often view the best part of their tour as the qualification ride on another deployed boat executing a demanding and rewarding mission, instead of their time in the shipyard managing the work on their parent submarine.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/take-jos-out-shipyards

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In the summer of 1985, as a second-class midshipman, I spent four days underway on a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine. It was an awesome experience that left me with a deep appreciation for the men (and now women) of the submarine force. The complexity and responsibility of operating a 400-plus-foot-long ship, hundreds of feet beneath the waves, with a crew of 120, powered by a nuclear reactor, armed with 16 ballistic missiles possessing more than the combined firepower of all the munitions expended in World War II was a bit beyond my 20-year-old brain's ability to grasp.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/submarines-and-undersea-warfare

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On 7 December 1941, the concentrated striking power of the Imperial Japanese Navy's mobile force—six carriers and more than 350 planes—shattered the heart of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet. The Pearl Harbor raid destroyed the U.S. battle line, shredded Admiral Husband E. Kimmel's plans for offensive action in the central Pacific, and freed the Japanese to advance southward through the Philippines and Netherlands East Indies. The physical toll was devastating, but the mental one was arguably worse.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/intellectual-readiness-vital-sea-power

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One of U.S. Southern Command's (SouthCom's) primary missions is detecting and monitoring illegal narcotics flowing from South America. Because Navy warships have higher priorities in other regions, Coast Guard cutters often provide the majority of surface forces to SouthCom, through Joint Interagency Task Force–South (JIATF-S). With the 2020 counternarcotics surge, however, a number of Navy ships deployed to the SouthCom operating area. This surge came with an unsung hero: the oiler. Regular deployment of fleet replenishment ships to SouthCom would not only improve the effectiveness of available ships by increasing their time on station, but also enable the Coast Guard to build skills critical to any operation in the western Pacific.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/southcom-needs-oiler

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There is no bigger undertaking in information warfare (IW) than the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative. JADC2 is both the present and future of the communication and information battlespace, providing 'an approach for developing the warfighting capability to sense, make sense, and act at all levels and phases of war, across all domains, and with partners, to deliver information advantage at the speed of relevance.' 1 Underneath this umbrella of capabilities sits a complex web of physical networks, data sets, artificial intelligence tools, electronic warfare capabilities, and cyber weapons and defenses.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/navy-information-warfare-needs-requirements-officers

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In late 2021, U.S. Cyber Command's Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) deployed to Ukraine its largest hunt-forward operation (HFO) to date. Like a traditional reconnaissance element, these U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard defensive cyber operators and intelligence analysts hunted and gained insight into Russian malicious cyber activity as tanks massed along Ukraine's border. 1 They worked in-country, side by side with senior Ukrainian officials, for nearly 70 days to assist in the cyber defense of multiple critical networks.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/defensive-cyber-warfare-lessons-inside-ukraine

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In the long peace since the end of World War II, the Indo-Pacific has experienced remarkable prosperity, underpinned by the security of stable alliances and the good order of U.S.-led global governance. The Indo-Pacific now stands as a strategic and economic center of gravity, comprising eight of the ten most populous nations on earth, seven of the ten largest militaries, and 12 members of the G20, all connected to each other and the rest of the world through some of the busiest international sea lanes.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/may/maritime-trade-essential-indo-pacific

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This month, Proceedings is dabbling in visual artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The information warfare issue is always difficult to illustrate—sailor at computer; Marine over shoulder of sailor at computer; 0s and 1s overlaid on a picture of a ship; and so on. A member of our editorial board suggested there might be no better way to visualize information warfare than to let AI do it—or at least help. The result is on the cover. A query that included the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) resulted in one image of a person who vaguely resembles the ship's namesake alongside three approximations of a carrier.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/see-verify

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Battleship Commander: The Life of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr., authored by Paul Stillwell and published by the Naval Institute Press, has been awarded the John Lyman Book Award in the category of 'Naval and Maritime Biography and Autobiography.' Presented each year by the North American Society for Oceanic History, the John Lyman Book Awards recognize excellence in the publication of books that make significant contributions to the study and understanding of maritime and naval history. Battlefield Commander, which was excerpted in Naval History (April, pp.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/october/stillwell-wins-lyman-book-award-battleship-commander

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Leading up to my first day in officer training, I was given a copy of A Sense of Honor by James Webb. The book describes the lives of midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy during the Vietnam War. Webb grapples with the idea of the Academy changing from a place that trains 'warriors' to one focused on creating technically and academically proficient officers. One scene stood out for me: Photos of the men killed in Vietnam, some who had graduated less than a year before, were placed in the Rotunda, a central, sacred place midshipmen walk through on the way to their rooms or classes.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/september/what-did-you-sign

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Manpower is sea power—and right now, the difficulty generating manpower severely limits the capacity to create sea power. Weak recruiting coupled with troubling long-run labor force trends make correcting this problem both challenging and necessary. Solutions and options exist, but enacting them starts with correctly assessing the present state of recruiting and the roots of the problems in the all-volunteer force (AVF).    The recruiting challenges confronting the Sea Services are not unique. The Army flat out missed its fiscal year (FY) 2022 targets, and the Air Force and Navy achieved their FY22 objectives largely by accelerating FY23 accessions.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/august/avf-crossroad

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In 2019, the Proceedings team decided to dedicate the April issue to expeditionary warfare. Given the rapid force modernization and development of related operational concepts in the Marine Corps, we knew there was plenty to publish, but expeditionary warfare is more than just the Marine Corps. Last year we had a rare article on Naval Special Warfare (NSW) by Navy SEAL Rear Admiral H. Wyman Howard. It has been too long since we have received any submissions from the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) community—SeaBees, port security, explosive ordnance disposal, diving, and salvage—but we are working to rectify that.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/april/expeditionary-warfare-issue

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The U.S. military's greatest strategic challenge will be aiding in the defense of Taiwan against the vast capabilities and capacity of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the event of an invasion. China enjoys self-evident geographic advantages in a potential conflict: Its forces will always be concentrated in East Asia, whereas only a fraction of U.S. forces are comparably situated. Given some degree of strategic surprise, the PLA could aim to swiftly seize Taiwan and achieve a fait accompli before the United States and Taiwan could effectively respond.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/february/defend-taiwan-naval-mines

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A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the development of the Navy's new fast-attack submarine identifies aspects of the program's development that highlight the risk of repeating the mistakes of several recent shipbuilding programs. (For more on prospective challenges to the submarine's development, see 'Designing SSN(X) Will Require Modern Digital Modeling.') According to the 30 August report by CRS Navy expert Ronald O'Rourke (no relation), the Navy would like SSN(X) to be an 'apex predator.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/ssnx-risks-repeating-shipbuilding-mistakes

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The USS Constitution, one of the Navy's original six frigates as well as its oldest commissioned warship—will celebrate the 225th anniversary of her launching on 21 October. Of those original six ships that marked the birth of the U.S. Navy—the United States, Constellation, Constitution, Congress, Chesapeake, and President—the Constitution, aka 'America's Ship of State,' is the sole survivor. Their construction was authorized in the legislation entitled 'An Act to Provide a Naval Armament.' How 'Old Ironsides' got her nickname: the Constitution vs.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/october/happy-birthday-old-ironsides-uss-constitution-turning

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Historical anomalies, by definition, do not last forever. At some point, history rediscovers its baseline. Today's Navy has seen a nearly eight-decade abnormality, during which no two great powers have clashed at sea—but something closer to normalcy may not be far off. In East Asia's littorals, the first island chain is the maritime frontier of the Sino-U.S. strategic rivalry. The littorals flanking China's coast present the United States its toughest maritime problem: It is where China's fleet can fight from its feet.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/february/make-it-home-game-lessons-littoral-campaigns

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U.S. Marine Corps veteran Hershel W. 'Woody' Williams, the last living Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, died on 29 June. He was 98. A native of West Virginia, Williams garnered the nation's highest military honor 'for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as demolition sergeant serving with the 21st Marines, 3d Marine Division, in action against enemy Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, 23 February 1945,' according to his Medal of Honor citation.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/october/farewell-woody-williams-last-living-wwii-medal-honor

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Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. A version of this Latin phrase has been used by many military giants, and it was the personal philosophy of Admiral Hyman Rickover: 'The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.' That ethos underscores the process of earning a submarine warfare qualification. Three other reflections from Rickover highlight top priorities on the path to dolphins. • When doing a job—any job—one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/tips-getting-your-fish

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In 1996, Scottie Pippin, Dennis Rodman, and Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to an 87–75 victory over the Seattle SuperSonics, winning the NBA Championship. It was not actually a great game for Jordan, who averaged just 26.3 percent from the field compared to his career average of nearly 50 percent, but the Bulls were able to capitalize on nearly a decade of team building among long-time members such as Jordan and Pippin, as well as among newcomers Rodman, James Edwards, and John Salley, who joined the team that year but who previously had played together for many years with the Detroit Pistons.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/ai-team-sport

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By When I separated from the active-duty Coast Guard as an enlisted person, the service had no formal process to find out why I was leaving. This was eye-opening. In the recently implemented Coast Guard Data Strategy, then–Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz noted, 'In an era where data generates more revenue than oil, it is crucial that the Coast Guard modernizes its data management to help build and sustain its future force.' If this is the case, why has the Coast Guard never attempted to collect comprehensive data from members separating from the service? Without formal exit interviews, the Coast Guard does not have the full picture as to why its people leave, making it difficult to develop effective recruiting and retention strategies.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/coast-guard-should-do-exit-interviews

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The Proceedings team both looks forward to and dreads the information warfare (IW) issue each year. We look forward to it because IW is a rapidly evolving topic that affects every other warfare domain. We dread it, however, because illustrating information warfare is tough. There are only so many pictures of sailors and Marines staring at computer screens can we look at before feeling like our brains have been eaten by malware. At our most recent editorial board meeting, Navy Captain Tom Clarity suggested we use an AI [artificial intelligence] tool to design the cover.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/information-warfare-staring-us-face

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