The U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) should evaluate France’s Ecole Navale (EN) training program in order to modernize its professional development curriculum. Each semester, midshipmen at EN complete a wide range of graded evolutions in preparation for a two-week underway, a week-long field exercise, and various evaluations that factor into their class ranking. USNA’s current general curriculum does not require individual graded assessments in areas like ship handling, infantry skills, or damage control.[1]
The distributed lethality concept outlined in the 2017 Surface Force Strategy articulates the need to send more ships further, faster, and more frequently into contested environments.[2] Employing potentially smaller assets like a guided missile frigate—the FFG(X)—across a “wide expanse of geography” will require an updated tool kit for the next generation of naval officers to deal with gray-zone threats while operating farther from specialized surface action group or amphibious ready group assets.[3] This will be crucial in countering maritime insurgencies in the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf, where sea control increasingly depends on “whose laws are followed” on a day to day basis more so than occasional freedom of navigation operations and carrier strike group deployments.[4]
With the world’s second largest exclusive economic zone to protect, the widely dispersed French fleet must act as a Swiss army knife of capabilities in vast overseas territories.[5] Familiarization with a range of mission sets not only gives EN midshipmen a head start in their service-specific training after graduation, it also ensures a general appreciation for how the various services operate and interact. Midshipmen are prepared to add immediate value to their units upon graduation through evaluated competence in:
- Briefing wardrooms on complex evolutions with little notice
- Visit, board, search and, seizure exercises
- VHF communication in critical languages
- Fleet-standard proficiency in damage control, man overboard, and casualty drills
- Amphibious operations
- Extensive weapons and combat training
As mentioned in a series of Proceedings articles by recent USNA graduates, the resources, motivation, and imperative for more warfighting training are present at the Academy.[6] Although many valued training opportunities already exists at Annapolis, they predominantly take the form of voluntary summer trainings and specialized, small-scale extracurricular activities. Even evaluated, service-specific training—like the Marine Corps’ Leatherneck program—is only available to midshipmen for one month in their four-year education. This is to the detriment of the standard level of training the Brigade receives and allows for a drift from a warfighting mentality and culture.
Some argue that the primary advantage to attending USNA is exposure to its peer-based leadership laboratory aspect, which theoretically allows midshipmen to observe and try various leadership styles. However, a competence-based approach to leadership would only serve to supplement this. In evaluating the EN approach, USNA should consider:
- Replacing the current intramural participation requirement during our sports period with practical instruction like the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, ship handling, land navigation, ground school, and maritime critical language instruction.
- Instituting Saturday morning trainings for all classes—modeled after those of the U.S. Air Force Academy and U.S. Military Academy West Point—for longer, graded evolutions based on the sports period trainings.
- Rewriting the Military Order of Merit Commandant Instruction to reflect performance in these graded evolutions instead of popularity with one’s peers and participation in Varsity or Club athletics.
Introducing such measures would serve to legitimize an opaque Military Order of Merit system to the benefit of service-selection boards, warfare schools, and a surface warfare officer’s first ship. At the same time, it could improve long-standing issues surrounding class distinction by introducing a level of discipline and hierarchy necessary for success in training evolutions without leaning on increasingly degraded class rates and traditions.
The Naval Academy should prepare now for what the fleet will need tomorrow. Each of these measures would further the lethality, capability, and diversity of resources in the fleet, as recommended in the Surface Force Strategy[7] Big-Navy constantly evaluates and borrows from foreign training exercises such as the Royal Navy’s Flag Officer Sea Training.[8] By following this example with EN, USNA could increase the fleet’s return on its Annapolis investment.
Endnotes
[1] Department of the Navy, Naval Service Training Command, Midshipman Summer Training Manual, NSTC M-1533.5C ed. (Great Lakes, IL: 2015).
[2] U.S. Navy, Commander of the Naval Surface Forces, Surface Force Strategy: Return to Sea Control, Admiral Thomas Rowdan, USN (Washington, DC: 2017), 9–10.
[3] Lyle J. Morris, Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Stephanie Pezard, Anika Binnendijk, and Marta Kepe, Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression Below the Threshold of Major War (RAND Corporation, 2019), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2942.html.
[4] Hunter Stires, “The South China Sea Needs a ‘COIN’ Toss,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 26, 2019, www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/may/south-china-sea-needs-coin-toss.
[5] Ministère Des Armées Français, Marine Nationale, Cols Bleus, Veille Sur Nos Espaces Maritimes, (Paris, 2017).
[6] ENS Michael McKinney, USN, “Warfighting First? Not So Much,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 7, 2019, www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/may/warfighting-first-not-so-much;
ENS Noah Johnston, USN, “Improve SWO Culture at the Naval Academy,” U.S. Naval Institute May 30, 2019. Accessed July 03, 2019. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/june/improve-swo-culture-naval-academy.
[7] U.S. Navy, Surface Force Strategy.
[8] LCDR Gerry Mauer III, USN, “Train with the Royal Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 24, 2019, www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/july/train-royal-navy.