When Caudle takes the helm, he will be the first Senate-confirmed CNO since Trump fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti from that post in February without explanation. Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s vice chief, has been serving as acting CNO since Franchetti was removed.

Caudle told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing last week that he approves of Franchetti’s CNO Navigation Plan, or strategic vision, that was released last year. That plan included Project 33, an effort to accelerate the acquisition and fielding of unmanned systems, AI and “information dominance” capabilities to deter or defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan or other U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.

Caudle told lawmakers that his top priorities for Navy transformation, if confirmed, would be to invest in platforms, sensors and weapons systems that are “modular, scalable and built for rapid upgrade cycles” to stay ahead of emerging threats; boost sailors and warfighters through advanced training, leadership development and talent management; and “accelerate delivery of integrated, networked capabilities across the joint force, including unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and resilient C3 architectures to enable decision advantage and operational dominance in contested environments.”

Adopting cutting-edge tech such as AI, uncrewed platforms, cyber tools and data-driven decision-making could enable the Navy to “outpace adversaries by leveraging faster learning curves and feedback loops from the assessment of existing combat operations,” he wrote in response to senators’ advance policy questions ahead of this confirmation hearing.

Caudle suggested a more aggressive push to adopt robotic platforms might be needed if Navy shipbuilding programs face further budget constraints or cost growth problems.

“Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS), also referred to as Unmanned Systems, are a force multiplier already being employed across a wide range of missions. Prioritizing the integration of RAS at scale, as appropriate, into naval and joint force architecture would be a necessary step [to deal with further fiscal constraints]. Additionally, we could potentially expand and accelerate current RAS systems further across the fleet, in all cases focusing on affordability, training, and interoperability with manned platforms,” he wrote.

The nomination of Caudle — a four-star who has been serving as commander of Fleet Forces Command — for the CNO role wasn’t a controversial pick.

Caudle’s confirmation was approved by voice vote, along with a slew of other military nominations, as the Senate nears its August recess.

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The next-gen aircraft program, known as F/A-XX, has encountered funding shortfalls which are expected to slow down the initiative. The Navy delayed around $1 billion for the project in fiscal 2025 due to spending caps imposed by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act. The Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal 2026 includes just $74 million in R&D funds for the effort — far less than the $454 million the service received in FY’25 and nearly $900 million less than the Navy had previously planned to spend in FY’26, according to budget documents.

As part of advance policy questions submitted to the nominee ahead of his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Caudle was asked how the Navy would be able to maintain air superiority without fielding a next-gen fighter on its original timeline.

“Nothing in the Joint Force projects combat power from the sea as a Carrier Strike Group, which at the heart has a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN). To maintain this striking power, the CVN must have an air wing that is comprised of the most advanced strike fighters. Therefore, the ability to maintain air superiority against peer competitors will be put at risk if the Navy is unable to field a 6th Generation strike fighter on a relevant timeline. Without a replacement for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and E/A-18G Growler, the Navy will be forced to retrofit 4th generation aircraft and increase procurement of 5th generation aircraft to attempt to compete with the new 6th generation aircraft that the threat is already flying,” Caudle wrote in his response.

Defense Department officials are especially concerned about China’s military advancements, which include developing next-gen fighter aircraft that the U.S. Navy might have to go up against someday.

“The Navy’s ongoing efforts to maintain technological superiority will ensure our ability to challenge any adversary. Deterring and denying China will require an ‘All Hands on Deck’ approach from the Joint Force including the massing of lethal fires from the sea, which comes from carrier strike groups with the latest and most capable strike fighters,” Caudle told lawmakers

“The Navy has a validated requirement for carrier-based 6th generation aircraft, and it is critical that we field that capability as quickly as possible to give our warfighters the capabilities they need to win against a myriad of emerging threats,” he wrote.

Last month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told lawmakers that he believes the requirement for a platform like the F/A-XX is “still valid.”

“As we look at the threat picture out in the Pacific, the requirements themselves I think are still valid. I think it comes down to a question that many of the folks on the committee have talked about, and that’s the ability [for industry] to produce at a particular time. And I’ll defer to my civilian leaders on the timing and synchronization [of] that program. But we do need, you know, capability that is mobile, whether it’s F/A-XX or others, that enable us to win on the battlefield to the future,” Caine said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

However, the Pentagon is prioritizing the development of the Air Force’s sixth-gen fighter, the F-47, to the tune of planning to spend $3.5 billion on the program in fiscal 2026. DOD officials have said they’re willing to slow down the Navy program due to concerns about the ability of the defense industrial base to handle two sixth-gen fighter programs simultaneously.

Trump in March announced the award of the prime contract for the F-47 to Boeing, but the prime contractor for F/A-XX still hasn’t been selected.

Navy officials have said the F/A-XX is expected to be extra stealthy, have significantly longer range than the fighter jets that are currently in the fleet, and incorporate AI capabilities.

Caudle noted that the service also plans to develop highly autonomous drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) to complement sixth-gen fighters and other Naval aviation platforms. He suggested the drones would be “multi-role capable.”

“It is too early to predict the exact mix of manned and unmanned aircraft. However, as autonomous systems demonstrate increasing capability and warfighting effectiveness, we intend to iterate to deploy the most effective combination of manned and unmanned aircraft to maximize the lethality, combat effectiveness, and range of the naval aviation combat power,” Caudle told lawmakers.

Trump nominated Caudle for the CNO role last month. In February, the president fired then-CNO Adm. Lisa Franchetti without explanation. Adm. James Kilby has been serving as acting chief of naval operations.

Caudle, who is currently serving as commander of Fleet Forces Command, wasn’t a controversial pick for the top job and his nomination is expected to be confirmed by the Senate.

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In February, Trump fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti as CNO and the administration has been looking for a permanent replacement. Adm. James Kilby has been serving as acting CNO since Franchetti was removed.

On June 17, the commander-in-chief submitted Caudle’s nomination for the role to the Senate and it was referred to the Armed Services Committee for consideration, according to a notice posted on Congress.gov.

Caudle is currently serving as commander of Fleet Forces Command, Naval Forces Northern Command and Naval Forces Strategic Command.

The admiral comes from the Navy’s submarine community. He previously served as commander of Submarine Forces, Submarine Force Atlantic, Allied Submarine Command and Submarine Forces, Pacific Fleet. He was also commanding officer of the USS Jefferson City (SSN 759), USS Topeka (SSN 754) and USS Helena (SSN 725), and commanded Submarine Squadron 3, among other assignments.

At the Pentagon, he served on the Joint Staff as vice director for strategy, plans, and policy, J-5, and assistant deputy director for information and cyberspace policy, J-5, according to his Navy bio.

If confirmed as CNO, Caudle would be in a position to shape the fate of high-tech initiatives such as Project 33, which aims to accelerate the fielding of robotic platforms and AI enablers to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

“The right way, in my opinion, to think about robotic autonomous systems, uncrewed, unmanned systems, is how we package them to solve our problems and where they are best-suited,” Caudle said in January at the annual Surface Navy Association symposium. “They can be best-suited where the acceptable level of risk of loss of life is too high, the depth of water too shallow, the air domain too complicated, [or] the mission is just not worth a manned combatant.”

He added: “We are still nascent in figuring out those … robotic autonomous system force packages … The way we fight in the Navy is through units of force that are packaged to make them lethal packages, OK. We build together a composite system knowing the how we’re going to be countered and knowing what we need to actually win against that hypothetical scenario. That’s the work that’s ongoing right now is how we build out those force packages.”

He’s also advocated for accelerating the fielding of new weapons to shoot down one-way attack drones instead of expending expensive munitions for that task.

At the SNA symposium, Caudle said the Navy should be “embarrassed” that it hasn’t fielded directed energy systems, such as high-energy lasers, faster.

During a meeting with reporters in March, Caudle laid out some military use cases for artificial intelligence.

“I kind of put these into kind of three-plus-three bins of capability of exploiting AI. In the first part … think about the ability for a sensor to see a thing and actually, you know, understand what that thing is. The second one is enhanced data search, sort and processing in a large-scale way against where no analyst can look at that amount of data … And then the last one that’s becoming more is the generative AI piece. So having AI do things for me in which I would have to spend time doing but I can have the artificial intelligence kind of go after that,” he said, according to a video posted by TV news station WTKR.

AI capabilities could aid personnel readiness, materiel readiness and warfighting readiness, including decision-making, he noted.

The technology could even have a role in the U.S. military’s nuclear deterrence mission, Caudle said, including by presenting “optimizing response options.”

“We have, you know, [ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles] that are alert, we’ve got ballistic missile submarines that are alert, and we have the capability to generate and place bombers on alert. Like any warfare area, there are targets and there are weapons that have to be matched to those targets, and even in the nuclear parlance, that’s true. U.S. Strategic Command is responsible for making those options to the president. So that optimization of our current number of missiles, the warhead on board, the destructive capability, the actual placement, the height in which detonation occurs — all of that complexity for a given optimized response option to the president can be enhanced by artificial intelligence. The speed in which I need to generate an order to a firing unit could be a generative AI process. Once I make a decision, then I turn on a machine and that order with high degree of accuracy is given to a potential firing unit. So AI has a role there,” Caudle said.

However, decisions about whether to launch a nuclear attack aren’t expected to be left to AI systems, he noted.

“There is no desire for that. This is a human decision. At the end, when you’re using strategic-level weapons, the president is owed a fulsome discussion between his most subject matter expert combatant commanders and their teams to advise him on the use of nuclear weapons because of their size, scale and scope and destruction capability. So this is going to be a human decision. This is not going to be any type of automated decision using an algorithm. But can that decision be enhanced by AI technologies? Certainly,” he said.

Caudle’s nomination to be the next CNO must be confirmed by the Senate.

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The next iteration of the biennial event, slated for Aug. 9-18, will span 22 time zones in a live virtual, constructive (LVC) environment. It will loop in nine maritime operations centers, six carrier strike groups, three amphibious ready groups, 25 ships and submarines, more than 50 “virtual” ships, and 25,000 sailors and Marines.

LVC training constructs connect deployed personnel and platforms with virtual trainers and computer-generated entities.

The aim of the exercise is to “assess the Fleet’s ability to synchronize global naval operations at the operational-to-tactical level of war against strategic competitors,” according to the Navy.

During a meeting with reporters on Monday, officials said they were limited in what they could disclose publicly about the event. But they offered an outline of what it will entail.

“What I can say about this scenario, and this is what we’re trying to do is, is have [a combatant command] area of responsibility that has a very aggressive percolating event that will eventually turn into kinetic warfare. Simultaneously with that area of responsibility where that event is happening, there will be opportunistic second and third parties that are taking advantage of that, you know, with the hope that the United States has got its eye off the ball a bit and doesn’t have the capacity to deter those other opportunistic events going on. So that’s the general construct and how we lay this down globally, to make sure all of the commands throughout these 22 time zones are fairly challenged in theirs. And that’s what tensions, the resources that we have and making sure we’re getting the allocation correct,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of Fleet Forces Command, told reporters.

“The event does, as you can imagine, have what we call a kind of a road to war … where we’re getting intelligence injected into the scenario,” he continued. “So, we’ll go kinetic, there will be plenty of opportunity to deter aggression in other areas of responsibility. And there could be things that we do that are flexible response options and flexible deterrence options and dynamic employment of our forces that try to actually dissuade opportunistic adversaries from taking advantage of the thing that’s going on in another part of the world.”

New technologies are expected to be integrated into Large Scale Exercise 23 including autonomous and unmanned capabilities and communication systems, as the Navy tests its ability to conduct contested logistics operations and targeting and to develop a common operating picture.

That will include Project Overmatch networking tools, which Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday has said will be the bedrock for the future joint tactical network.

“Any of the participants that have Overmatch Capability installed on their ship, like communications as a service, will be tested as part of this event. And the reason I can say that with such confidence is the Overmatch capability set by its very nature is tested anytime we command and control units with that capability. So yes, that will be part of Large Scale Exercise to further Overmatch to get more feedback. And in fact, we’re bringing that to bear in this live, virtual, constructive manner, [which] allows us to try to test some Overmatch capabilities that we maybe couldn’t do in the real world just because the situation wouldn’t necessarily lend itself to that during an actual deployment,” Caudle told DefenseScoop during the meeting with reporters.

He declined to provide details about the specific capabilities that will be tested using virtual and constructive elements, citing classification issues.

“I can say that again, as communication as a service allows Project Overmatch units — and eventually all ships will have this capability, including submarines — the ability to be able to have command and control [and] communications back with their headquarters, through every type of circuit that’s basically on those ships. And so that technology makes it extremely robust and hard to defeat in a contested environment, because of the ability for us to be able to command and control those ships across all those different circuits seamlessly to the sailor,” he said.

The Navy has been experimenting with Project Overmatch capabilities in the Pacific with the Carl Vinson carrier strike group. The plan is to roll those out more broadly to units in the region and then more broadly across the globe. The Large Scale Exercise will be another opportunity for the sea services to put them through their paces before deciding on next steps.

Lt. Gen. Brian Cavanaugh, commander of Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic, Marine Forces Command, and Marine Forces Northern Command, noted that the exercise will involve demonstrating C2 capabilities at the tactical level, not just the global and operational levels. The results will inform future investment decisions and program objective memorandums.

“We’re going to learn a lot from this. And there’ll be some successes, there’ll be some failures. We will learn from the failure. And we will inform future decisions for POM cycles and things that we’re going to buy. That’s a way to demonstrate what we have and what we can do,” he said.

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