The Georgia Bulldogs play between the hedges flanking the hallowed field in Sanford Stadium. The US Navy is about to have hedges of its own. In recent weeks, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Daryl Caudle has taken to teasing a forthcoming family of public directives to the fleet outlining his strategic and operational vision. His “Fighting Instructions” appear to be the next to drop. In his latest “C-NOte” to the sea service—the fourth in the series, titled “The Way We Fight”—Admiral Caudle blows a gust of fresh air through the US maritime enterprise. He wants to dispense with fallacies imprinted on Navy culture after the Cold War.

Bottom line: there is no more assuming Western navies reign supreme on the high seas as though by right.

And not a moment too soon. At the core of Caudle’s vision is a “hedge strategy,” by which he basically means tailoring a naval force to each theater and the mission it is assigned to in order to forestall danger to the overall force. Otherwise commanders tend to thin out the forces available at any given time and place on the map—exacerbating the chances of failure. It may take heavy forces to manage a genuinely menacing theater, but lighter forces can manage relatively low-threat theaters such as the Caribbean Sea. Littoral combat ships could become the platform of choice for the Caribbean, where law enforcement constitutes the chief mission. The Western Pacific poses challenges of a more daunting order.

Designing the tool for the mission may sound like common sense, and it is, but it marks a stark departure from the navy’s traditional one-size-fits-all approach centered on such standard formations as carrier strike groups, amphibious ready groups, and surface action groups.

I am a seafarer of ancient vintage, but let me get all academic-y for a minute. Hedging is a familiar but ill-defined strategy in international affairs. It is no less important for all that. It is what everyone does.

Some observers opine that hedging is for small and middle powers fretful about being caught up in great-power competition. For instance, Southeast Asian powers such as Vietnam are visibly and vocally wary about siding openly with the United States, a would-be benefactor, against an increasingly musclebound and domineering China. That’s because the Vietnamese know that America could come and go from East Asia—a view confirmed by the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which elevates the Western Hemisphere above the Indo-Pacific to top priority among strategic theaters. Southeast Asian states also know that China will reside in their neighborhood forever; that its leadership forgets nothing; and that it avenges perceived slights—such as taking an outsider’s side in a quarrel such as over maritime territory—without remorse or respite. Why gamble if you’re........

© The National Interest