Blue & Gold Professional Library – serie

This volume in the esteemed Blue & Gold series serves as a vital resource for Naval Officers, offering comprehensive guidance on the U.S. Navy's structure, operations, leadership principles, career planning, and professional development. It emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, adaptability, ethical leadership, and intellectual curiosity. ​ The book also highlights modern challenges such as strategic competition, information warfare, and diversity, while encouraging officers to engage in writing, thinking, and publishing to contribute to the professional discourse and strengthen the naval profession. With practical tools, recommended readings, and resources for career planning and transition, it equips readers to navigate the complexities of modern naval operations, enhance their leadership capabilities, and make meaningful contributions to the Navy's mission of global maritime superiority. ​

Continuing the tradition of Naval Institute Blue and Gold series classics such as Command at Sea and the Watch Officer's Guide, The Navy Staff Officer's Guide will equip naval leaders for success in the challenging professional environment of a Navy staff. Navy staffs build and equip the Navy, plan its future, and guide its current operations. During a staff tour, a savvy Navy leader can have positive reach beyond the lifelines of a single command, with impact across the fleet and years into the future. Staff duty emphasizes a different set of tools from those typically employed in sea duty billets. It has its own formal and informal expectations and its own opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls. This guide provides and explains those tools -- and marks the shoals that can wreck the unaware -- enabling both new and seasoned staff officers to be prepared for the unique requirements of staff duty. Through extensive use of historical examples and "sea stories," it introduces the reader to why staffs exist, how they impact the Navy, and how they can offer both professional development and meaningful accomplishment.  Recognizing that Navy staffs vary in their purposes and organization, The Navy Staff Officer's Guide synthesizes those differences into meaningful guidance for all staff officers, civilians, and Sailors, whether assigned to a destroyer squadron staff operating from a DDG or to the OPNAV staff in the Pentagon. Effective coordination, clear communication, and an understanding of the commander and their mission are central to staff success and are clearly articulated. In twenty-three chapters covering the many aspects of Navy staff work--including "The Staff Command Triad," "Communicating as a Staff Officer," "Civilian Personnel," "Fleet Commands and the Maritime Operations Centers," and "TYCOMs and SYSCOMs"--Captain Rielage has "covered the waterfront" (in Sailor-speak) with this comprehensive and readable guide.  Staffs may not win the fight, but good staff work creates the conditions for victory before the first shot is fired. This guide is the key to ensuring the success of Navy staffs and all those who serve them.

Fighting the Fleet recognizes that fleets conduct four distinct but interlocking tasks at the operational level of war--striking, screening, scouting, and basing--and that successful operational art is achieved when they are brought to bear in a cohesive, competitive scheme. In explaining these elements and how they are conjoined for advantage, a central theme emerges: despite the utility and importance of jointness among the armed forces, the effective employment of naval power requires a specialized language and understanding of naval concepts that is often diluted or completely lost when too much jointness is introduced.Woven into the fabric of the book are the fundamental principles of three of the most important naval theorists of the twentieth century: Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie, and Captain Wayne Hughes. While Cares and Cowden advocate the reinvigoration of combat theory and the appropriate use of operations research, they avoid over-theorizing and have produced a practical guide that empowers fleet planners to wield naval power appropriately and effectively in meeting today's operational and tactical challenges.

Since the release of the first edition of Career Compass more than two decades ago, the landscape of a Navy officer’s career has transformed significantly, adapting to societal changes while upholding the Navy’s core values of service and excellence. This fully revised second edition offers updated insights into the evolving culture, communication strategies, career opportunities, and management practices, all while reinforcing the enduring importance of exceptional performance.  This new edition includes crucial updates on mentoring, graduate education, sea-shore rotations, Washington duty, fitness reports, and career-planning tools, including strategies for engaging with community detailers. It highlights the principles that will keep every officer—from midshipman to admiral—eligible and competitive for promotion and command while also remaining competent and capable of performing the necessary duties supporting the requirements of naval service. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience mentoring midshipmen and junior officers, author Douglas H. Rau presents this guide as a vital resource for aspiring officers looking to navigate their Navy careers with purpose, foresight, and success.