Trump nominates Adm. Caudle to be chief of naval operations

President Donald Trump has tapped Adm. Daryl Caudle to be the next chief of naval operations and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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’s 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 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.