How to strain your fleet: Inside the Navy’s global training exercise

NORFOLK, Va. — Rear Adm. Alexis Walker, commander of carrier strike group 10, was keenly aware that his day could become extremely chaotic on short notice aboard the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush (CVN-77).

The chaos could come in the form of one of his aircraft elevators breaking down, hindering the ship’s all-important sortie generation rates. He might receive news that one of his strike group’s destroyers suffered severe battle damage and is returning to port. Any of the carrier’s key systems for self-defense, offensive operations or navigation could be rendered useless if enemy electronic warfare systems succeeded.

“You go to bed at night and everything is working great. You wake up in the morning and this person has had a casualty. This piece of equipment doesn’t work very well. Some other event in the world has changed something that you intended to do,” he told a group of reporters earlier this month aboard the Bush inside a conference room located just next to his office and stateroom. “How do you respond to all of those things?”

All this chaos could ensue despite the ship being safely docked pier side between other carriers and amphibious warships here in Norfolk, Va. The strike group would be experiencing events generated as part of Large Scale Exercise (LSE) 2025, the third iteration of the US Navy and Marine Corps’ keystone training event designed to stress test the fleet globally and simultaneously.

At a time when the Navy’s fleet is stretched thin — from patrolling the Indo-Pacific, to knocking down missiles in the Red Sea, to assisting the Coast Guard with maritime interdiction near the southern border — this year’s Large Scale Exercise focused on the service’s ability to balance its priorities when it has more missions to accomplish than ships to deploy. Further, the Navy is validating a new way to respond to the global environment through a method spearheaded by its freshly minted chief of naval operations, Adm. Daryl Caudle.

Caudle has dubbed this method the “Global Maritime Response Plan,” and the problem it answers, Vice Adm. John Gumbleton, deputy commander of US Fleet Forces, said, is how does the Navy generate ready forces faster, and how do they do it before a crisis occurs?

“Part of [working towards that goal] was a tabletop exercise we did in January of this year to actually rehearse this before getting to Large Scale Exercise,” he told reporters at US Fleet Forces headquarters, a key hub for planning the biennial event stationed just a few miles from where the Bush was docked. “This is a major output of Large Scale Exercise to validate those assumptions on what authorities we need to lower down to support the echelons to move out, instead of waiting for crisis.”

‘Almost Identical’: How To Simulate A Global Conflict

The key to how the Navy stresses the entire fleet — even when some ships and crews are well out of harm’s way — is through what the Pentagon calls Live, Virtual and Constructive training. LVC, as officials describe it, is akin to augmented reality. LSE’s 880 planners can inject a variety of situations for each crew — those at sea and docked — at any given moment through the training technology, which officials said they are proliferating throughout the fleet. In some cases, the incident may truly be taking place, such as a fighter jet scrambled to simulate “red air” or enemy aircraft. In other cases, the “missile” that a ship’s crew sees incoming may be nothing more than a dot on their screens.

The simulations are “identical, if not almost identical [to a real-life scenario] … everything looks the exact same as when you’re underway, down to the lights being dimmed,” Chief Warrant Officer Greg Cummings, a tactical action officer, told reporters while standing in the Bush’s combat direction center (CDC).

The CDC is the ship’s hub for countering airborne threats, and during an Aug. 1 visit, several crew members were readied at their respective stations. Their screens were “sanitized” — meaning they were turned off or displayed innocuous maps because reporters were present — but officials explained that as Large Scale Exercise unfolded from July 30 to Aug. 8, the ship had to be prepared for anything — which meant sailors standing watch in regular intervals. The exact details of the global scenario were not shared with press, but sailors and officers who spoke to media said that, from their perspective, they were aware they’d participate in the exercise, but not given explicit details on events that would unfold. That’s a feature, not a bug, Walker explained, because giving crews too much information ahead of time would diminish the exercise’s ability to simulate real, sometimes unpredictable deployments.

And the exercise isn’t just for deck plate sailors. Even flag officers must play their part.

Walker explained that if he had been told his aircraft elevators were disabled, the expectation would be for him and his staff to run through nearly every step necessary to bring them back online — just short of sailors actually turning wrenches.

“What does that mean for our ability to launch sorties? There’s a diminished [generation] rate there, or depending on which elevator goes down, might even render our flight deck inoperable,” he said. “So now I need to communicate that risk to my higher headquarters because they’re expecting capability out of us … We have to work through logistics for what’s our estimate for how long it’s going to take [to fix]. Do we have the parts on board? Do we need tech assist to come out and help?”

Navy officials here in Norfolk argued they are leading the Pentagon in the use of LVC training. And there may be some reason to take them at their word. Just last year, the Navy stood up the “Hefti Global LVC Operations Center,” named after Capt. John “Bag” Hefti, a late officer who championed the technology. During a tour of the facility, the center’s staff said it’s the largest of its kind in the fleet and is capable of perpetuating LVC training anywhere in the world around the clock. (The center’s capabilities are so in demand, the officials said, both Air Force and Army agencies have sought discussions about using it for their own purposes.)

Scott Swift, a retired admiral, joined more than a dozen other retired US military officers to help the Navy replicate inputs from non-Navy sources, such as the combatant commanders, Joint Staff and other services, during the exercise.

Due to LSE’s global nature, ships and crews were occasionally required to abandon objectives presented by planners in lieu of real-world operational tasking. Swift said those incidents are “baked into” LSE by using a ship’s absence as part of the broader scenario. What might truly interrupt other contained, regional exercises the military participates in throughout the year in many ways plays into the broader purpose of Large Scale Exercise.

What this all amounts to for Navy brass and LSE’s planners is watching in real time how each simulated event in a given part of the world impacts operations thousands of miles away. In that moment, if a “missile” started flying or an “enemy jet” was scrambled, the larger question everyone is asking is less about an individual crew’s ability to react, and more about how do the actions of the Bush and its strike group impact other crews around the world.

For example, munitions stockpiles have become a pervasive topic for Navy brass since operations in the Red Sea began in October 2023. The goal of every combatant commander is to reduce the risk in their respective areas of responsibility, which results in requests for ships, crews and ordnance from Navy leadership. But supplies are finite. Every missile fired by one ship is a missile not available for another.

“As part of Large Scale Exercise, that’s a friction that, with malice and forethought, that is actually put into the game to stimulate the conversation,” said Gumbleton, the deputy commander at Fleet Forces.

A New Chief, A New Plan, A Very Old Problem

Caudle, previously commander of US Fleet Forces Command, was confirmed by the Senate in a late-night vote to become the 34th chief of naval operations just hours before reporters arrived on the Navy’s installation Aug. 1. But, during his tour here in Norfolk, he began crafting the “Global Maritime Response Plan.”

Given the delicacy of the confirmation process, the admiral did not talk to directly to press before or during Large Scale Exercise 2025. But he has previously described GMRP as a new construct for rapidly getting the Navy on a wartime footing.

The Optimized Fleet Response Plan “was not built to generate combat ready ships and air wings to meet the demand signal against peer adversaries,” Caudle said in 2024, referring to the service’s historical method for generating forces during peacetime. “The Global Maritime Response Plan is being designed to give the CNO a way to shift the Navy from peacetime to wartime.”

The basis of GMRP, Caudle said, is to establish a wartime set of rules for deployments, manning and maintenance to generate more forces in the lead up to conflict, USNI News reported.

Rear Adm. Kenneth Blackmon and Capt. Chris Narducci, both officers at Fleet Forces who have been intimately involved in LSE’s planning, told reporters that Fleet Forces has been implementing aspects of GMRP over time, but LSE presents an opportunity to test its tenets in the broader fleet. And the LVC-oriented nature of the exercise gives its planners plenty of space to be creative in how they do as much.

“When we want to project [the] force in a time of crisis, it takes so much more than just starting a ship and going,” said Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Thomas Armas, deputy commander of Fleet Marine Forces Command. “There are administrative issues that have to take place. There are recalls that have to take place. All that has to be exercised. You can’t just show up and do it. … It truly takes an exercise like this to show us where our gaps and our seams are.”