4. Department of Defense · Minor
Require war games as a prerequisite for Navy career milestones
Printed page 112 4. Department of Defense
“Require that war games be utilized as experiential learning environments for the participants as a prerequisite for achieving career milestones (department heads, commanding officers, and major commanders).”
What has happened
- Not started
No war-gaming prerequisite for any Navy career milestone, on a measured enumeration of the instrument that would carry one. Navy career-milestone requirements are set by NAVADMIN, and the whole 2025-2026 series — 630 NAVADMIN and ALNAV messages indexed by number, subject and date at www.mynavyhr.navy.mil — contains no message on war gaming; the ten messages that do set or announce officer and enlisted milestone gates (department-head and command screening boards, senior enlisted marketplace screening boards, command master chief and command senior chief boards) name none. The 2,099 www.navy.mil press items for the window return one war-gaming hit, a 2025-11-19 story on a bilateral Northwest Pacific wargame with Japan, which is an exercise and not a prerequisite. The nearest in-window action on the ask's object is professional education rather than war gaming: NAVADMIN 017/26 announced the Warfighter Education and Professional Studies (WEPS) program, a new Navy 'talent and warfighter development initiative' that sends selected officers to in-residence graduate education, succeeding the Fleet Scholars program — development, but classroom rather than experiential, and not tied to a career milestone as a gate. Carried forward: the FY2026 NDAA has no war-gaming prerequisite, and the one war-gaming appropriation in the window, sec. 20005(32) of P.L. 119-21, is $10 million for additional *Air Force* war-gaming activities.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
One negative search covered the page 112 Navy headquarters and training asks together, and it was extended on 2026-09-06 by an enumeration of www.navy.mil.
Correction, 2026-09-06. This log used to say “navy.mil 403s” and that no allowlisted host publishes the Navy’s directive library in a machine-readable form. The first half was false: the bare hostname navy.mil does not resolve, and https://www.navy.mil/ can be read. The second half was half true, and the half that is wrong is the half that mattered. The instruction library (SECNAVINST, OPNAVINST) really is unreadable — the DON Issuances site at www.secnav.navy.mil/doni/ serves 996 KB of page code, 2 KB of prose and no instruction numbers, and its data feed refuses connection. But the message library is fully open: MyNavy HR’s NAVADMIN 2026 page and its siblings list every NAVADMIN and ALNAV for 2025 and 2026 by number, subject and date, each linking a fetchable PDF, and NAVADMIN is the instrument the Navy actually uses to announce and change career-milestone gates. The negative above rests on that enumeration instead of on an assumption.
How far it reaches: strong about milestone gates announced to the fleet, which is how they are announced; weak about anything that lives only in an unamended OPNAVINST.
- P.L. 119-21 sec. 20005(32) ($10M, Air Force war-gaming) is still the closest in-window money and is still not this ask; it should not be mistaken for one.
- Action
- other
- Object
- U.S. Navy war game requirement for career milestones
- ID
- 204