In January 2026, Admiral Daryl Caudle, the 34th Chief of Naval Operations, publicly announced that his forthcoming U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions, “will be my strategy for the Navy going forward.” In addition, he subsequently referred to his document as a “transformational framework,” his “overarching guidance,” “a conceptual framework for modern warfare”, his “detailed plans,” and his “strategic vision.”
The document’s title carries historical meaning, traditionally reserved for operational instructions that governed how fleets would fight in combat. A title with that pedigree sits uneasily alongside a document its author also calls a strategy, a plan, and a vision — blending forms of guidance that have traditionally served very different functions.
That blending does not invalidate the document, but it raises an immediate question: what is Fighting Instructions actually intended to do?
At its core, Fighting Instructions functions as an institutional framework built on four foundations Caudle identifies as inseparable: Sailors First, Foundry, Fleet, and Fight. There is no Navy without Sailors; Sailors have no platforms without the Foundry; platforms and Sailors are wielded as a Fleet; and that Fleet executes combat power through the Fight. The document articulates direction, modernization intent, and leadership emphasis. It speaks to institutional coherence and future adaptation. It inspires the force and provides language to describe modernization challenges.
Helpfully, in his remarks at the Naval War College releasing the document, Caudle set three metrics by which his guidance should be judged. If the document isn’t clear about the goals of these three areas, Caudle said, then he missed the mark.
The first metric was which investments matter most, which asymmetric capabilities must be forged, how those capabilities should be packaged and certified, the degree to which they must operate autonomously, and the requisite levels of technical mastery required for Sailors to prevail across all time horizons. The second metric was more ambitious: to answer how the Navy ensures it can fight and win across the spectrum of conflict, under conditions it cannot entirely predict, against adversaries who are increasingly capable, innovative, and aggressive at near-parity levels simultaneously in key regions of vital national interest. The third metric — and the one with the most direct consequences for force design — was to determine where to snap the chalk line: how much of each force element is truly enough to make the Hedge Strategy real rather than aspirational.
The problem is that on all three metrics, Fighting Instructions falls short of its own standard.
With respect to the first metric, the document’s performance is mixed. Fighting Instructions clearly identifies investment domains that the Navy must address. It highlights C-C5ISRT, robotic and autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, directed energy, contested logistics, munitions depth, industrial base recapitalization, and resilient shore infrastructure. It emphasizes the need for a high–low force mix and sustained modernization across multiple Future Years Defense Programs. In that sense, it identifies categories of importance and signals strategic awareness of emerging operational challenges.
What the document does not do is impose hierarchy among those categories. It does not identify which investments are decisive and which are enabling. It does not specify which programs accelerate, which slow, which terminate, or which risks are consciously accepted in order to protect more consequential priorities. It introduces Tailored Offsets and Tailored Forces through the embedded Hedge Strategy, describing distributed and scalable capabilities designed to complicate adversary planning. Yet it does not specify which legacy force structures these offsets displace, nor does it articulate the tradeoffs required to resource them. The document therefore identifies direction but does not impose prioritization. In force-planning terms, it signals importance but stops short of decision-forcing guidance.
The second metric—ensuring the Navy can fight and win across the spectrum of conflict under near-parity conditions—is even more consequential. Here, the document attempts to answer through structural coherence rather than prescriptive detail. It integrates Sailors First, Foundry, Fleet, and Fight into a conceptual warfighting system. It introduces the Hedge Strategy as a mechanism to balance operational risk with fiscal and industrial constraints. It emphasizes distributed command, scalable force packages, and adaptability under uncertainty. These elements create a framework for resilience and institutional agility.
However, the document does not define what winning means in geographic, temporal, or political terms. It does not articulate how simultaneous regional demands are prioritized if they cannot all be met at once. It does not provide a net assessment comparing U.S. and adversary strengths and weaknesses in force-sizing terms. It does not specify what level of risk is acceptable in one theater to secure advantage in another. In short, it offers a theory of adaptability under uncertainty, but it does not present a fully articulated theory of victory against a named peer adversary operating at near parity.
Failing To Snap The Chalk Line
The third metric cuts to the operational core of the Hedge Strategy. As Caudle said, “The challenge becomes determining where to snap the chalk line — how much of each force element is truly enough?” It is the right question, and most consequential.
The chalk line is the force design threshold — the precise dividing point between what the main battle force must provide and what Tailored Forces and Tailored Offsets are expected to cover. Get it wrong in one direction and you waste scarce resources on expensive traditional platforms the Hedge Strategy was designed to supplement. Get it wrong in the other and the main battle force is left dangerously thin, with tailored formations asked to compensate for structural deficiencies they were never designed to carry.
Unfortunately, Fighting Instructions does not snap the chalk line. It does not specify the minimum acceptable main battle force in platform numbers, capability thresholds, or readiness levels. It does not define what quantity or type of Tailored Offsets constitutes sufficient risk mitigation in the domains where the main battle force is thin. Caudle acknowledged as much in the same breath, describing the chalk line as what the Hedge Strategy “aims to do” — a statement of aspiration, not resolution.
What the Fighting Instructions does not acknowledge — and should — is why the chalk line cannot be drawn where the Navy’s own requirements say it should be. The Navy’s own Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement Report concluded the nation needs 381 crewed ships. The current fleet sits at roughly 295. No plausible appropriations trajectory, no shipyard capacity, and no industrial base workforce closes that gap within any strategically relevant timeline.
The Hedge Strategy is not primarily a warfighting innovation. It is an affordability strategy — a Plan B compelled by the nation’s sustained unwillingness to fund the Navy its own planning documents say it needs. Fighting Instructions, a document of strategic consequence, declines to say so plainly — and in doing so is not exercising appropriate discretion. It is, in Gen. Matthew Ridgway’s precise formulation, making “a deliberate effort to soothe and lull” — conveying a false impression about the alignment between what the Navy requires and what the nation has chosen to provide.
Sailors, planners, Congress, and the American public deserve a document that names that gap honestly, explains its consequences, and assigns responsibility for the choices that created it. Fighting Instructions does none of that. It offers transformation language where accountability language is required.
A document that claims simultaneously to be strategy, plan, vision, and overarching guidance carries an obligation to provide direction concrete enough to shape actual force-planning decisions. Strategy, in the strict sense, requires prioritization, tradeoffs, and the conscious acceptance of risk. A strategic document intended to guide force development should therefore enable senior leaders and staff officers to understand which programs must accelerate, which should slow or terminate, which industrial investments must be protected, and where operational risk can be accepted. Fighting Instructions clearly identifies modernization problem sets and investment domains, but it does not impose hierarchy among them or articulate the tradeoffs necessary to translate those priorities into force-planning decisions.
Classified guidance is the appropriate home for operationally sensitive force-sizing details and theater-specific net assessments — that is not the critique here. The critique is that a document described as “overarching guidance” and “strategy” must demonstrate, even at a conceptual level, that choices have been made and risks consciously accepted.
When explicit prioritization is absent from the strategic document itself, it does not disappear — it migrates. It will emerge in the CNO’s classified budget guidance documents used for the internal mechanics of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, or within the informal power structure of the resource sponsors. In such circumstances, programming becomes the arena where priorities are truly determined. The publicly articulated strategy describes direction, but the budget establishes the operative hierarchy of decisions.
This outcome is not unique to Caudle. Successive chiefs of naval operations have issued strategic guidance that articulated institutional aspiration and modernization intent but often did not impose the durable prioritization required to shape multi-decade force development. Because naval force planning extends well beyond the tenure of any individual CNO, effective strategic guidance must provide continuity, sequencing, and tradeoff decisions that endure across leadership transitions. Without that specificity, such documents function primarily as leadership agendas rather than binding strategic blueprints.
Fighting Instructions set its own test and did not pass it. That is the definition of a failed document — not a malicious one, not an unintelligent one, but one that promised more than it delivered on the terms it chose for itself.
On the first metric, it identifies investment priorities without imposing hierarchy among them. On the second, it offers a theory of adaptability without a theory of victory. On the third — the one with the most direct consequences for force design — it frames the chalk line without snapping it, and declines to say why. The answer to that third metric is not a classified secret. It is a fiscal and industrial reality the document’s own planning reports have quantified: the Nation will not fund the Navy it needs, so the Hedge Strategy becomes Plan B dressed as transformation.
A document of strategic consequence that will not say so plainly fails the standard General Ridgway set for senior military professionals — the obligation to put the honest assessment in writing, over your signature, so that responsibility rests where it actually belongs. Fighting Instructions does not meet that standard.
The Navy’s Sailors — in the words of the Foreword to Fighting Instructions — deserve fighting instructions that do.
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.
