In 2017, as a naval officer serving his first tour aboard the destroyer USS Carney, I sailed to the southern coast of England to take part in the Royal Navy’s famed Flag Officer Sea Training, or FOST. One of the most renowned training programs for maritime warfare among NATO Navies, FOST puts ships through a 6-week gauntlet that evaluates their crews’ readiness to wage war. By the time we were done, there was hardly a member of our crew that wasn’t convinced this was the most demanding exercise they had undergone, in any Navy. FOST, through its integrated approach and high standard, taught us valuable lessons about driving and fighting ships. Indeed, the U.S. Navy’s own surface fleet, both in its culture and approach to training, could benefit greatly from the British way of doing business.
FOST is a total evaluation of a crew’s ability to operate alongside other ships in simulated combat scenarios. It has no real equivalent in the U.S. Navy, where training is broken up into months-long phases. Because of the Royal Navy’s reputation for excellence at sea, numerous other navies, including our own, have made it a point to send ships to FOST yearly. This was how the crew of the USS Carney, a destroyer based out of Rota, Spain, found itself off the coast of Plymouth, England, where a veritable army of Royal Navy warrant officers embarked our ship every day.
The Brits’ war games were more intense than anything we had experienced in the year and a half Carney had spent deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. The result was sobering, as Carney rarely managed scores above “satisfactory” during graded exercises. As a surface warfare officer, I spent much of my time on the bridge during these exercises, where the British culture of maritime excellence put our watch teams to the ultimate test.
FOST pushed us to use problem-solving, rather than instructions and checklists, to respond to the “fog of war.” Our assessors taught us that success in combat was impossible through procedure alone; rather naval leaders should apply their knowledge to respond creatively to unknown situations. In the U.S. Navy, logic is too often replaced by procedural compliance to respond to the unpredictable. Our standard training model, designed to test how well we could follow procedures for any single scenario, proved ineffective during the realistic combat scenarios FOST threw at us. As the former head of U.S. Naval Surface Forces Vice Admiral Richard Brown commented in 2019, “compliance doesn’t win wars,” rather “excellence produces winners.”
The Brits also insisted on empowering our sailors and officers. They questioned, for example, the top-down style of leadership they observed on the Carney, where officers were constrained by a dizzying amount of instructions and rarely made decisions without requesting permission from their commanding officer. British surface officers take their craft as mariners very seriously. They are required, for example, to memorize many of the international navigation rules of the road verbatim, while American officers are only asked to pass twenty-question, multiple-choice tests to demonstrate proficiency. Additionally, what takes a team of several officers and sailors in the U.S. Navy to accomplish takes, in the Royal Navy, only one expertly trained navigator.
The Royal Navy’s superior training model and culture of excellence can serve as an exemplar to our own surface warfare community. As the British pushed me to do in 2017, the U.S. Navy should empower its junior officers to be experts in their field and independent thinkers, rather than mere followers of procedures and manuals. That human element could very well make the difference in a modern maritime war.