The U.S. Navy’s Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, led by its flagship aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, left, operates in the Caribbean region on Nov. 13, 2025. (Tajh Payne/U.S. Navy)
SAN DIEGO — The Navy’s top admiral wants the service to take more calculated risks when responding to events around the globe.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle laid out his “U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions” at the keynote address to more than 1,000 service members, defense industry executives and strategic analysts on Tuesday during the West 2026 conference at the San Diego Convention Center.
“It will ensure we are ready,” Caudle said. “Not for the last war, but for the one that is coming.”
Caudle said he believed that, over time, American military options had too often fallen to the Navy’s carrier strike forces.
The rollout of Caudle’s strategy comes amid the Trump administration’s positioning of aircraft carriers and other ships around hot spots.
The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier and strike group was sent late last year to the Caribbean Sea and ultimately supported last month’s operation to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Two weeks ago, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was pulled from the South China Sea, arrived in the Middle East amid a rise in tensions with Iran.
In an interview with The Associated Press prior to Tuesday’s strategy rollout, Caudle said he sees the Navy’s future mission in the Caribbean focused on interdictions and watching merchant shipping. The U.S. military has seized multiple suspicious and falsely flagged tankers connected with Venezuela that were part of a global shadow fleet of merchant vessels that help governments evade sanctions.
“That doesn’t really require a carrier strike group to do that,” Caudle told the AP, adding that he believes the mission could be done with some smaller littoral combat ships, Navy helicopters and close coordination with the Coast Guard.
At the center of the new instructions is a “hedge strategy” to respond to global events with a mix of ships, aircraft and personnel that Caudle said would be “tailored” to each situation.
“Building a fleet to cover every pressing scenario is not only cost- and risk-prohibitive, but a disservice to the taxpayer and, quite frankly, less effective operationally,” Caudle said Tuesday in San Diego. “What a hedge strategy avoids is a brittle, single-purpose force that is either overbuilt for the high-end fight and underused day to day or optimized for low-end crises and overmatched.”
An electronic sign at the San Diego Convention Center advertises Adm. Daryl Caudle’s speech on “Navy Fighting Instructions” at the West 2026 conference on Feb. 10, 2026. (Gary Warner/Stars and Stripes)
Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, speaking at the West 2026 conference in San Diego on Feb. 10, 2026. (Gary Warner/Stars and Stripes)
Warfare has also changed, according to Caudle. He said that, in the past, the Navy could count on simply overmatching an opponent with “impunity and winning by mass dominance alone.”
But relatively inexpensive drones — flying, surface and underwater — show that combatants have an “ever lowering cost of entry” to challenging great power forces, including the United States.
Caudle said that smaller forces sent to emerging hot spots more rapidly can accomplish the goal of projecting American sea power, compared with larger forces that take more time to assemble and deploy.
“We find ourselves operating in an era with other great powers,” he said. “An era in which speed and decision ruthlessly punish delay.”
Caudle said the approach accepts a certain level of risk.
“In the next conflict, that system will be tested under pressure, at speed and under fire,” Caudle said. “Communications will be disrupted. Space and cyber operations will be under attack. The enemy will try to fracture our kill chains, slow our decisions and isolate our forces. In that kind of fight, we can’t afford a Navy that waits for permission.”
America’s changing fiscal, industrial and military strategy depends on the ability to field “effective, scalable, risk-worthy mass with the most advanced multi-mission platforms we can build and sustain,” Caudle said.
Caudle said most of the Navy fleet is involved in deterrence.
“It’s a concept that to work must live continuously in the minds of our adversaries, and in turn, allow us to shape their behavior,” Caudle said.
While uncrewed vessels and aircraft will play a growing role in the mix of Navy forces, Caudle said the service members aboard ship and on shore are the Navy’s top asset.
“At the center of this vision will always be the United States Navy sailor,” he said. “They are our most enduring strategic advantage, our primary weapon system, and the heartbeat of our world-class Navy.”
The full text of the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions can be downloaded at https://www.navy.mil/Leadership/Chief-of-Naval-Operations/
Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, gives a speech during the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy change of office ceremony at the United States Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., Sept. 8, 2025. (William Bennett IV/U.S. Navy)
