The United States Navy

Accelerating Our Advantages

This past year demonstrated the value of naval forces projecting
decisive, joint power across the globe.
Our Task: continue to accelerate the advantages the U.S. Navy
brings this nation.

This past year was marked by extraordinary accomplishments. It was also a year in which we learned more about who we are and where we're headed. Our Navy's performance in Operations ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF) and IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) demonstrated more than just combat excellence. It proved the value of readiness. It highlighted our ability to exploit the vast maneuver space provided by the sea. It demonstrated the importance of the latest technology in surveillance and attack. Most importantly, it reaffirmed the single greatest advantage we hold over every potential adversary: the genius of our people contributing their utmost to mission accomplishment.

Readiness, advanced technology, the maritime domain, and the genius of our people – these are our asymmetric advantages. We are in a position to continue to build upon and recapitalize these strengths, to innovate and experiment, and to push the envelope of operational art and technological progress. After all, winning organizations never rest — they are always on the move! It is our job as leaders to continuously seek improvements and accelerate our advantages over the coming year. Our ability to project persistent, sovereign combat power to the far corners of the earth now and in the future depends on it.

I. Taking a Fix


Last year, I asked each of you to tackle our Top Five priorities in new ways to "Be Ready;" to protect our nation, bases, ships and Sailors; to achieve the efficiencies needed to buy more ships and aircraft; to accelerate Sea Power 21 capabilities; and to streamline and align the manpower and skills mix. The performance of our Navy was most impressive; success was attained in every one of these areas.

2003 Accomplishments
  • Combat excellence in OEF and OIF
  • Improved surge capability
  • Record recruiting and retention
  • Aligned to Sea Power 21
  • Harvested savings for recapitalization
  • Built more ships and aircraft

Manpower. We are winning the battle for people. Last year we built on our mentoring culture, emphasized our commitment to diversity, and piloted elements of the Sea Warrior structure needed to capitalize on the revolution in training and detailing. The momentum is fantastic. Higher quality recruits, historic retention rates, innovative incentive pay pilots, reduced attrition, competitive reenlistments and detailing, and outstanding deckplate leadership continue to make this the highest quality workforce the Navy has ever seen.

Current Readiness. The Fleet produced the best readiness levels I’ve seen in my career and demonstrated its ability to respond with overwhelming force. The combined power of our forward presence forces and our ability to surge kept enemies on the run. Over the past year, we invested billions of dollars in training, maintenance, spare parts, ordnance, flying hours and steaming days, and it resulted in the combat ready response of more than half the Navy to operations worldwide.

Future Readiness. OEF and OIF demonstrated clearly the enhanced power, protection and freedom afforded by our Sea Power 21 vision. These were the most joint operations in our history and they provided the best possible opportunity to dissect, study and analyze some of the limiting factors and effects of how we fight. While we must continue to challenge the assumptions, our lessons learned to date indicate that the capabilities-based investment strategies, new warfighting concepts and enabling technologies we are pursuing in our Sea Power 21 vision are on the right vector.

Quality of Service. The battle for people includes ensuring an environment where Sailors have confidence in themselves, in each other, in their equipment and weapons, and in the institution they have chosen to serve. This year, we continued the significant advances in compensation, in building the structure to realize the promise of the revolution in training, in transitioning to a secure interoperable network, and in strengthening the balance between safeguarding the environment and protecting national security.

Alignment. We launched numerous initiatives that keep the Fleet at the center of all we do, that allow us to communicate better, and that enable us to be more effective and more efficient.

II. Plotting our Track – Leadership Guidance for 2004

Our 2003 accomplishments are testament to the superb military and civilian leadership throughout our Navy. While we accomplished much, we did not reach all of our stretch goals. There are areas where this winning organization must get better.

For example, we must continue to focus on winning the war on terrorism. We must get a better handle on our manpower requirements, including the requirements for accession, training and placement of the total workforce of active duty, reserves, civilians and contractors. We must improve our use of modeling, develop and improve output metrics to better define our requirements and resource needs, and instill a culture of improved productivity in everything we do.

At the top of our list is to ensure we are prepared to respond whenever the Commander-in-Chief sees a need for our military forces. Our task is to ensure that we give the President options. We created the Fleet Response Plan last year to maximize our operational availability and create those options. Now, we must continue to examine and refine the Fleet Response Plan’s training and maintenance cycles to make our availability the best it should be. Finally, we must get better at pushing the envelope of operational art in the development of future concepts of operation for our naval forces.

These are difficult tasks. They require sound leadership, an understanding of risks and costs, the willingness to challenge all of our notions, assumptions and equities, and most importantly, a commitment and desire to pursue continuous improvement in our institution.

Sea Power 21 defines the capabilities and processes the 21st Century Navy will deliver. The Top 5 helps us focus our collective efforts on the right actions and objectives. The opportunity to accelerate the advantages that our joint, netted and sea-based force provides is within our reach. To meet that opportunity, we will define and deliver the right capabilities and processes – at the right costs – now, and in the future.

2004 Action Items
  • Deliver the right readiness
  • Expedite Sea Warrior
  • Demonstrate our enhanced FRP surge capability
  • Improve productivity in everything we do
  • Streamline and align total manpower structure
  • Accelerate SP21 capabilities
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Guidance for Leaders:

Manpower. At the heart of everything good in our Navy today is this: we are winning the battle for people. That said, the battle for people is never won and we must continue to wage it every day.

While we recognize that people are our most treasured asset, manpower is never free. We must be committed to building a Navy that can maximize the capability of our people and minimize the total number on the payroll. Sailors have chosen the lifestyle of service to make a difference. Our ability to provide them meaningful, challenging work and the kind of job content that lets them make that difference is part of our covenant with them as leaders. It enhances their growth and development, improves their productivity and eliminates unnecessary billets. As our Navy becomes more high tech, our work force will get smaller and smarter. We will spend whatever it takes to equip and enable our Sailors, but we do not want to spend one extra penny for manpower we do not need.

We will build on the momentum of the last three record-breaking years. We will refine the requirements for our sea and shore structure, and deliver more tools and incentives needed to ensure we are fighting for the right talent, and commit fully to integrating our active, reserve, military and civilian workforce. We will ensure that every Sailor has the opportunity and resources to successfully compete. Our goal remains attracting, developing, and retaining the more highly skilled and educated workforce of warriors that will lead the 21st Century Navy.

Current Readiness. We live in uncertain times. The nation needs a Navy that can provide homeland defense and be both forward and ready to surge forward with overwhelming and decisive combat power. It is our duty to ensure that the Navy the nation has paid for is truly ready to accomplish these missions. As leaders, we must create readiness from the resources given to us and recognize that readiness at any cost is not acceptable.

To sustain the right kind of readiness for our FRP requirements, we must understand and adapt our training and warfare doctrine, and seek greater integration with joint forces. We must refine our training, maintenance, and interdeployment readiness processes to increase our operational availability. But most of all, we must continue to exert leadership at every level to deliver the right readiness and ensure this tremendous force remains a decisive force that will be prepared to fight and win, both now and in the future.

Guidance for Leaders:

Future Readiness. The tremendous improvements made in the battle for people, quality of service, current readiness, and alignment allow us to focus much more intently on the future - and future readiness. If we are to extend our current advantage, we must capitalize on revolutions in information, stealth and precision technologies and develop new warfare concepts that will lead us not just to improved jointness, but true interdependence. Sea Power 21 is our roadmap. This year, we will pursue distributed and networked solutions that could revolutionize our capability. We will focus on the power of Sea Basing and our complementary capability and alignment with the Marine Corps. We will exploit investments made in joint research and development wherever possible. We will enhance our capabilities investments and become a leader in defense modeling and analysis. Finally, we will continue to improve our position for the future by increasing new ship and aircraft procurement in 2004.

Guidance for Leaders:

Quality of Service. Our Sailors are the capital asset that makes our Navy great. If we are to give full meaning to their service and, by extension, give full range to their talents, we must constantly strive to improve the quality of their work and the quality of their lives. We will fund technologies that reduce our manpower costs and make us leaner. We must ensure that every billet enhances combat readiness and that every job makes maximum use of the technology and tools available. We will strengthen our partnership with Navy families. We must deliver the training and education that deepens their contribution to the Navy and the nation, and that their life of service is honorable and rewarding.

Guidance for Leaders:

Alignment. Our goal is to enhance our mission accomplishment and deliver a combat-credible Navy now and in the future. That means focusing warfighting commanders on warfighting and improving our joint partnerships. It means development of a requirements process that recognizes the power of joint solutions and integration. It demands enterprise-wide approaches and innovation to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency in afloat and ashore operations, readiness and infrastructure. At its most fundamental level, alignment ensures that we share a common understanding of the mission and objectives, and that we speak one message with many voices across the entire organization. We will continue to pursue organizational and operational alignment to ensure that our Navy is consistent and credible.

Guidance for Leaders:

Leadership/management follow-up: To assist me in tracking the progress of these efforts, all executive agents listed above are to provide updated status reports on each assigned task to the Director, Navy Staff by the final business day of each quarter.

III. Steering the Course – On Leadership

The U.S. Navy has an unmatched history of success. While we must be informed by, and take endless pride in that history, we cannot consider all of our past practices to be the key to our future. Our greatest legacy after all is our legacy for innovation. From nuclear power to the then unlikely prospect of flying aircraft from ships, our willingness to improve our position, to adopt transformational technologies, and to develop new operating concepts is at the very core of our combat success. To continue our legacy is to continue to reevaluate our position and to challenge all of our assumptions. We will adapt to the changing world around us by getting out in front of it, by leading change, and embracing the innovations and improvements needed to guarantee our future success.

We are a winning organization. We have instituted and paid for a great many improvements over the past three years, and you have embraced them and made them better. Because of you, talented American warriors are bringing combat power to bear on the enemies of our country, wherever they may be hiding. We are winning the battle for people in a marketplace full of opportunity. And, we are winning the fight to remake our great institution, to innovate and improve for the dangerous decades ahead.

Our strategic objectives are straightforward. For us, winning the Global War on Terrorism is our number one objective. Victory is the only acceptable outcome and through our collective efforts, it will be achieved.

We will deliver enhanced warfighting capability to the joint force, using the extended reach of naval weapons and sensors to reach farther and more precisely with striking power, to deliver broader defensive protection for joint forces ashore and to leverage our command of the largest maneuver space on earth: the sea.

We will continue to improve upon the operational availability of fleet units, providing forward deployed forces for enhanced regional deterrence and contingency response, while at the same time, retaining the ability to rapidly surge decisive joint combat power in times of crisis. We are creating a culture of readiness. However, readiness at any cost is not acceptable. We do not live in a risk free world. Our leaders will assess risk and determine how to create a balance between risk to mission accomplishment and excessive readiness costs.

We will understand and attack costs at every level of our Navy. We will seek innovative means to improve productivity, leverage joint solutions and achieve the improvements necessary to ensure both our combat readiness and our capability now, and in the future.

We will create an environment that attracts, retains and relies upon bold, creative, effective and competitive people. We will foster a culture that cherishes these attributes and rewards them accordingly. We will invest in the tools, the information technology and the training that delivers more meaningful job content to them because it is they who offer us our greatest advantage. It is they who will continue to generate our legacy for years to come.

The business of the Navy is combat. Our obligation to succeed in combat stretches beyond the here and now, we must help guarantee combat success to the Navy of the future. That’s why the decisions we all make on a day-to-day basis are so important. I could not be more pleased with your effort and your accomplishments this past year. You have taken aboard the idea that warfighting effectiveness and resourcefulness is the key to mission accomplishment and have produced the finest Navy the nation has ever seen. It is our job as leaders to accelerate the advantages we bring this nation over the coming year.

Strategic Objectives
  • Win the Global War on Terrorism
  • Improve readiness for global response
  • Integrate Sea Strike, Sea Shield, and Sea Basing into the Joint Force
  • Capture Sea Enterprise improvements to build a 375-ship Navy
  • Develop the 21st century warrior force
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For further assistance, contact CNO's Public Affairs office at 703-692-5304

Effective date: 4 January 2004

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