On Leadership

Warfighting Culture: Down to the Deckplates

By RDML Kevin Lenox, USN

My timing when I took command of Carrier Strike Group Three was fortuitous. The ceremony was on a Friday and the following Monday I headed to Fallon for WARCOM, the annual seminar where the Navy’s warfighting leadership gathers to discuss the high-end fight at a fully informed level. It was September 2022, about five years since my last deployment, and I was looking forward to seeing what had changed. The short answer was: pretty much everything.

My previous deployment had been in 2017 onboard USS Nimitz. It was similar, in many ways, to my first deployment in 1994 and all those that followed. We passed quickly through the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean on our way to the Arabian Gulf. Once there, we supported the Air Tasking Order (ATO) and provided sorties to the Combined Force Air Component Commander (CFACC), striking ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria - we dominated in all domains. We kept a closer eye on Iran than in the past but knew we could defeat them if necessary.

Every day I let the crew know how every one of them had contributed to our mission success. We all supported the warfighter. And the warfighter, the one doing the fighting, the one exposed to the dangers of combat, was somewhere else. Onboard the ship we were certainly ready to fight, but it wasn’t imminent. We operated from what was effectively a maritime sanctuary.

That is not the fight we discussed at WARCOM. This new fight is akin to contesting the Soviet Fleet in the 80’s. If a fight in the Pacific kicks off, it will be more like a high tech WWII; a fleet-on-fleet engagement with space-based, AI-enabled ISR and long range precision fires that reach out hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles.

At WARCOM, we talked about the exquisite tactics, concepts, and capabilities we will employ to generate a warfighting advantage, but we need something more. In order to prevail, our forces also need a strong warfighting culture, one that goes all the way down to the deckplates.

If we want to know what that looks like, we can look back to our history. At the Battle off Samar, as detailed in The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, the small destroyer USS Johnston charged into the teeth of a superior Imperial Japanese force. During the opening salvo of the battle, after finding themselves on the wrong side of tactical surprise, they loaded and fired hundreds of 54 pound, 5 inch shells in just 5 minutes, scoring more than 40 hits on a much larger enemy cruiser. They showed incredible courage and skill after a sudden and unexpected transition to combat.

The courage was a reflection of their character and trust in each other, but that skill was a choice. It was a choice they had

made many months earlier, before they deployed, to put in the time, the study, the effort, and the practice to be flawless at their job, even under fire. We must lead our Sailors so that they make that same choice today.

We have spectacular Sailors in the Fleet right now, the best I have seen over my 33-year career. These young Sailors always show up on game day, they run to the fire. When Nimitz arrived in the Gulf in 2017, the heat index on the flight deck reached 154 degrees. The Sailors leaned into the searing heat, with some of my flight deck crew losing 60 pounds over the next three months, but we did not miss any “vul windows” up in the “box” because they refused to let that happen. I have zero doubt about the character and heart of these young Sailors. But on game day, you can only be as good as you have trained to be. That’s doubly true for the complex things we do today like electronic maneuver warfare and distributed maritime operations.

We have to do the work. We must pair our equipment with our Sailors and train until we forge a reliable warfighting capability. To me that is:

We have to do the work. We must pair our equipment with our Sailors and train until we forge a reliable warfighting capability. To me that is:

- Reliable equipment

- A well-trained Sailor ready to operate the equipment

- Reps and sets to ensure flawless execution under stress

- Trained technicians to maintain and repair the equipment

- The necessary spare parts, accessible during the fight

Those things together represent a true warfighting capability and you will only get the commitment needed to build it if you have the proper culture. This is why my number one priority as a commander is: Build a Warfighting Culture All the Way Down to the Deckplates.

We must ensure that our culture meets the moment. As military leaders, we own the culture of our organizations.

Today our culture must ensure that our Sailors understand the nature of the Pacific environment, recognize that every single Sailor is a warfighter, and foster a total commitment to winning in combat, long before the fight begins.

ADM Paparo published the template for how we can set those conditions in his Fleet Orders: Safety, Ready to Fight, Shipshape and Seaworthy, Teamwork, Morale, and Family. As I read them, “Ready to Fight” is the central task. It describes a mindset we must embody on deployment that will facilitate a rapid transition from competition to highend warfighting. The other orders are supporting and describe those aspects of service where we as leaders must set the conditions so that our Sailors can fully commit to being ready to fight. Read together as a whole and viewed through that lens, these orders are an integrated framework for building the needed warfighting culture. It is worth your time to re-read them periodically and to take a bearing on how your team is doing. These orders are a “North Star,” guiding us all to where we need to be as a fighting force.

As we develop committed Sailors who are ready to fight, we must also change the way we think about execution. I’m talking about “crawl, walk, run” vs. “do it right the first time.” The first is a prudent mindset for training but, as a Navy, we have become accustomed to ramping up to the needed high level of performance while operating forward. We have enjoyed that luxury over the last few decades because we have been operating in areas where we possessed all domain dominance. If we didn’t hit a target on a particular mission, we debriefed the mission, identified the problem, and restruck the target during the next ATO. The delay provided no enduring advantage for the enemy because we had persistent dominance in all other areas of the theater during that era.

That is not how things will go in the Pacific. We have not faced a peer competitor at sea in decades. We will be maneuvering in all domains and using our capabilities to generate fleeting opportunities that we must exploit on the first try. And if we miss on that first try, the enemy will shoot back.

While that sounds obvious, it is a change from how we have operated over these last few decades. Every Sailor: in the cockpit, on a console in the combat information center, on the bridge, turning wrenches in the hangar bay and down

in engineering, standing lookout on the fantail; everywhere throughout the ship - all of them are warfighters, exposed to combat risk and critical to our success in this fight. They must train until they always do their job right the first time.

The sustained effort required to do this must come from within each Sailor. Triads, Wardrooms, and CPO Messes around the Fleet must set the conditions and build a culture that fosters this high level of performance and celebrates those who achieve it. That is the central challenge of this moment.

This would be a costly fight on both sides of the fight by any metric: lives, ships, munitions, dollars, infrastructure. By building this warfighting culture, and being ready to use it with confidence and ferocity, we will dissuade our opponent from choosing this fight. Our opponent must understand that, while we do not seek conflict, we are ready to prevail if conflict comes.

As leaders, remember:

• Every Sailor is a warfighter.

• Our culture must enable and encourage every Sailor to commit to winning in combat.

• We must be ready to execute flawlessly on the first try.

• These truths, understood down to the deckplates, will ensure our success if deterrence fails.

Note: The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or its Components.