By Robbin Laird

I published an overview piece, “Street to Fleet: How CNATRA Is Working Naval Aviation Training,“ ahead of this interview deliberately. That article was built entirely from public sources: CNATRA’s own releases, Proceedings essays going back to 2002, the “Warrior Ethos” letter to incoming students, DVIDS features on the FITU/HITU instructor pipeline. The point of publishing it first was to show what the record looks like from the outside, before I sat down August 14, 2026 with Rear Admiral Max “Pepper” McCoy, the Chief of Naval Air Training, to hear what it looks like from the inside.

The two pictures coincide, but they are not the same picture. The public record describes the modernization effort: new airframes, mixed-reality trainers, a contract-operated rotary track that could significantly reduce training time. What McCoy described to me is the prioritization shift and necessary triage to stabilize operations and incorporate modernization into the training pipeline. Under his watch, McCoy is finding ways to remodel aviation training, without the luxury of choosing one task before the other.

McCoy and I have a history that predates this conversation. We worked together going back to the F-35 community’s stand-up, and again when he commanded Carrier Strike Group Four. That history matters here because it shapes the kind of conversation this was: not a briefing, but an Admiral thinking out loud with someone who has spent three decades watching militaries try to modernize, about what it actually takes to fix a system from the inside while the requirement to change what comes after it keeps growing.

Breaking the Self-Feeding Cycle

McCoy’s own description of what he is running is blunt: a conveyor belt in a factory. The test of whether it is working is whether it flows smoothly, without pools forming anywhere along the line. Any stagnation, anywhere in the system, is diagnostic. It tells you the machine is not working.

The diagnosis he offered me traces back more than a decade. CNATRA underproduced against Fleet requirements for the better part of ten years, driven in large part by problems with the T-45 in the strike pipeline. Accessions were not adjusted to match, so students kept entering a machine that could not process them at the rate they arrived, and the backlog that resulted is the “pre-NIFE pool” that shows up in the public accounts of this period. In 2022, a production shift strategy was implemented that drove production up to reportedly 105 percent of the requirement by 2024 across every type-model-series, pushing students through to the fleet replacement squadrons in volume.

But the fix at one stage of the pipeline exposed the constraint at the next one. The FRSs are now the ones underproducing, which means a new log-jam is forming just before the point where a winged aviator becomes useful to the Fleet. Because students arrive late to their first Fleet tour, and because career milestones do not move to accommodate that delay, the Navy is not getting a full production tour out of its junior officers before it has to pull them for disassociated sea tours or to fill gaps created by under manning elsewhere in the Fleet. The junior officers who would otherwise be back in the training pipeline as instructors, generating the next cohort, are the ones being diverted. The system, in McCoy’s words, feeds on itself.

This is the reason McCoy frames his goal not as a production percentage but as time-to-train against entitlement. If he can compress the interval between commissioning and Fleet arrival down to what a student is actually entitled to under the syllabus, first-tour JOs complete their sea tours on schedule, roll into full length production tours prior to disassociated sea tours, and the self-feeding cycle that has been starving the training pipeline of its own workforce starts to reverse itself.

The Three-Legged Stool

McCoy’s own framework for the constraint is a production stool with three legs: airplanes, instructors, and students. Right now, he told me, none of the three legs are where they need to be. There are not enough airplanes. There are not enough instructors. And there are, paradoxically, too many students in the pipeline at once, not because CNATRA is over-accessing but because time-to-train has stretched out so far that students are sitting in pools rather than flowing through.

He is the single accountable flag officer for Street to Fleet across the Naval Aviation Enterprise, but his authority is not uniform across the pipeline. NIFE and the schools command sit under the Naval Education and Training Command, not under CNATRA directly, though McCoy works closely with that command to align the underlying math. Everything inside CNATRA itself, he owns. Once a winged aviator reaches the fleet replacement squadron, they belong to a Type Wing commander answering to a Type Commander. McCoy’s job, as he described it to me, is to take the strategic view across the whole enterprise, identify where the system is efficient and where it is not, and decide which levers to pull and in what order to get back to entitlement fastest.

On the airplane side, CNATRA runs entirely on contracted logistics support rather than Sailors and Marines turning wrenches, so a large share of McCoy’s own time goes into aircraft readiness, what the command calls getting to “North Star,” the number of ready-for-training aircraft needed to execute the daily flight schedule or surge production if required, while managing aircraft service life.

The instructor leg is where the shortage is most acute, and where the workaround has required the most improvisation. McCoy’s active-duty instructor cadre is built from first sea tour rollers, supplemented by permanent flight instructors who have gone off the normal command track to stay in production full time. Beneath that sits a reserve component split between selected reservists and full-time TARs, Marine Corps instructors supplied through the Marine Corps Training Command, and, in some cases, Coast Guard personnel. Layered on top of that structure is a tool McCoy is using more heavily than in the past: what the command calls “SERGRADs,” selectively retained graduate wingers, high performers held in a limited capacity instructor role while they wait for an FRS seat to open. McCoy currently has 15 Marine SERGRADs flying jet training at Kingsville and Meridian, which frees his more experienced instructors to fly the advanced phases, air-to-surface and air-to-air, that SERGRADs are not yet qualified to lead. And then there are the contract instructor pilots, former Navy and Marine Corps jet aviators who McCoy is now looking to expand into the primary phase of training.

What ties all of this together is a deliberate reallocation strategy rather than a single fix: pull the levers available inside CNATRA so that instructor manning at the FRSs, where CNATRA has less flexibility, can be prioritized. CNATRA has more variety in where it can source instructors from; the FRSs need first-tour rollers with specific type-model-series experience, a much narrower pool.

Standards Instead of a Number

The part of the conversation that McCoy came back to more than any other was standards, and it is here that his framing departs most clearly from the production-percentage logic of the previous decade.

McCoy’s response is to institute faster triggers to attrition, so struggling students reach a review board sooner and leadership makes the call earlier rather than later. Attrition in advanced training will still happen, he told me, but at meaningfully lower rates than in the past, because the students reaching that stage will already have cleared a higher bar.

McCoy is candid that he came into this job as, in his words, a TOPGUN graduate, NAWDC commander, and CSG-4 commander with a laser focus on upholding training standardization. The way he described his obligation to students is a reciprocal contract. He owes them, first, the best training environment he can provide with the resources available, and second, clarity about what is expected of them. What they owe him in return is not perfection but full effort every day: showing up ready, learning in the debrief, correcting deficiencies, and making new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. McCoy stated that he is always looking to take a firm, fair, and consistent approach. And he was explicit about why the standard matters as much as it does: the expectations placed on a winged aviator escalate sharply and quickly the moment they reach the Fleet, and the training pipeline’s job is to condition students for that jump before it happens, not after.

He offered a detail that captures how far this commitment goes in practice. When asked how CNATRA is producing at 105 percent of requirement without enough airplanes or instructors, his answer is that the instructor cadre is flying seven days a week. He called being a CNATRA instructor one of the hardest jobs in naval aviation: training the least experienced aviators in the Navy, transmitting culture as much as stick-and-rudder skills, with no finish line and no offseason.

McCoy described his own method, one he said he has applied at every command he has held, as reverse engineering: starting from what a first-tour junior officer in a given type-model-series actually needs to be capable of doing in the Fleet, and working backward through the FRS, then advanced, then primary, so that each stage builds the specific habits and skill sets the next stage requires, rather than each stage optimizing in isolation.

Live Virtual Constructive as Constant Learning, Not a Substitute for Flight Hours

We spent time on Live Virtual Constructive training. McCoy described LVC as complementary to flight time rather than a replacement for it: using ground-based systems to build habits and get students to a “right training, right cost” starting point, so that when they climb into an aircraft they achieve first-pass yield rather than needing to re-fly events they were not ready for. He was careful to distinguish this from an add-on. His view is that LVC only delivers its real value when it is woven into the curriculum, not treated as a separate module bolted onto an otherwise unchanged syllabus.

That distinction matters because of what McCoy called the age of urgency: a security environment with no clean line between crisis and peacetime, where a training system built on the assumption that there will be time to catch up later is no longer viable. What the Fleet needs, in his words, is a dynamic training system, not a custodial one. He was explicit that fixing CNATRA’s current production shortfall is a necessary precondition, not a substitute, for that shift; you cannot build a dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture on top of a pipeline that is still struggling to produce enough aviators to fill Fleet seats.

A Culture the Navy Will Not Outsource

McCoy was equally direct about where he draws a line. He does not want to outsource large parts of the training enterprise more than necessary. Naval aviation, in his framing, is not a normal air force: flying from ships, operating inside a carrier strike group, and supporting amphibious groups all impose requirements that a generic training model does not capture, and he sees it as his job to protect that distinctiveness even as he pulls in outside capacity to solve near-term shortfalls.

The Contract Operated Primary Training-Rotary program is his clearest example of how he squares that circle. Students who go through COPT-R are supervised by an active-duty O-5 who verifies compliance, and CNATRA sends personnel through at elevated frequency to ensure that students see people in Navy and Marine Corps flight suits who can reinforce the cultural content the syllabus alone will not carry. He was clear this is a deliberate, bounded use of outside capacity to relieve pressure on active-duty instructor manning and T-6B readiness, not a step toward wholesale outsourcing.

McCoy flagged something he sees coming that has not yet shown up in the public accounts of Street to Fleet: aviators returning from recent deployments as genuine combat veterans, who will move into CNATRA’s instructor cadre in the near term. McCoy was unambiguous about the value of that shift. There is no substitute, he told me, for a student naval aviator sitting across a briefing table from someone who has employed weapons in combat. That is the mechanism, in his account, by which a training command that is currently focused on fixing its own production math starts to become the kind of open, operationally-current learning system that keeps pace with a threat environment that will not wait for a five-year modernization plan to catch up.

Mr. Fixit

What came through across the conversation was less a modernization narrative than a description of triage performed with an eye already on what comes after it. McCoy was candid that a system in crisis makes innovation challenging because so much of the available time and energy goes into simply making the machine run. However, CNATRA continues to innovate in parallel on initiatives to deliver production efficiencies, uphold standardization, and improve training quality. His stated ambition is to hand his successor a pipeline with the right number of airplanes, the right number of instructors, and time-to-train at entitlement, so that the next Chief of Naval Air Training can accelerate training modernization with a fully operational production line.

CNATRA is not yet the dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture that the kill web environment McCoy’s own aviators will eventually operate in demands. What McCoy described to me is the harder and less visible work of building the foundation that architecture will eventually stand on, without compromising the standard that determines whether the aviators coming off that foundation are ready for the Fleet waiting for them.

Note: This is complete version of the interview.

A condensed version was published earlier on Breaking Defense on September 4, 2026. 

Remarks to the Nevada National Guard Pre-Command Course, September 15, 2026

By Robbin F. Laird

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the waiting area outside the Secretary of Defense’s office at the Pentagon, watching a small television, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. As a New Yorker, my reaction was immediate — this was no accident. Someone in the room mentioned that an air defense alert was going up, but there was still a strange, suspended hope that this might stay a “New York event.” I didn’t believe it. We went ahead with the meeting anyway. Then the building shook.

What happened next has stayed with me longer than almost anything else in four decades of this work. We moved outside into what I can only call controlled chaos, smoke rising, people running, and yet, in the middle of it, an extraordinary sense of purpose. No one was waiting for orders. As I made my way toward the parking lot, I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers heading back into the building. It wasn’t a photo op. It was instinct, leadership that had no plan to consult, because no plan existed for what had just happened, and that acted anyway.

About a week later, I took the train up to New York to sit down with Mike Wallace for a 60 Minutes segment on the French counter-terrorism model. I knew Manhattan from my Columbia days, long before the towers existed, and I’d watched the skyline get redefined by them. Now I watched it redefined again, pulling into the city and seeing that absence, like a chapter had been written into that skyline and then physically torn back out. On camera, I talked about Judge Bruguière and how France had built its counter-terrorism approach the hard way, through trial and error, including stopping a hijacked Air France jet in 1994 before it could be flown into the Eiffel Tower. The warning lights had been blinking for years. We just hadn’t believed anyone would pull it off here.

That’s the distinction I want to open with tonight. Crisis management assumes the ground eventually goes still again: you identify the problem, you fix it, you get back to steady state. On 9/11, and in every homeland defense scenario your Guard has trained for since, the ground doesn’t go still. The people who function best in that moment aren’t the ones with the better binder. They’re the ones who can act on an incomplete picture, adjust in public as the picture changes, and keep moving. That’s not crisis management. That’s chaos management.

Some of you have read the book. I’m not going to summarize it. I’m going to spend our time together on five things from it that I think apply directly to what you do.

Stop Managing Crises. Start Managing Chaos.

Crisis management has a built-in assumption baked into the word itself: disorder is temporary. You identify the problem, you fix it, you restore the prior steady state. That logic still works for a bounded, well-understood incident, a single building fire, a single accident, a single bad actor with a known playbook.

It fails the moment the system itself is shifting under you. And that, not the bounded incident, is the normal operating condition for homeland defense. Cascading wildfire, grid, and cyber events arriving on top of one another. Compressed timelines that don’t leave room for the deliberate planning cycle you trained on. Multiple jurisdictions and multiple agencies in the room at once, each with its own authorities, its own chain of command, its own definition of what “resolved” looks like.

I want to give you a diagnostic test, and I’d genuinely like you to sit with it rather than just nod along: look at how your unit spends its planning energy. Is it organized around solving named contingencies one at a time, Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C, each with its own binder, is it organized around building the capacity to absorb whatever comes next, named or not?

Most organizations, without meaning to, drift toward the first model. It’s easier to brief. It’s easier to resource. It produces a plan you can point to.

But a plan built for Scenario A doesn’t bend well when reality hands you Scenario A-and-a-half, arriving at the same time as an unrelated cyber intrusion and a jurisdictional dispute with a neighboring state’s Guard.

The reframe I’m asking you to make is this: the goal isn’t to get back to normal faster. It’s to build the capacity to function while normal keeps moving because in this line of work, normal is rarely going to hold still long enough for you to get back to it.

Reframe Exercises as Laboratories, Not Examinations

This is where I want to connect directly to your own language, because you’ve already lived this one. When I sat down with General Lau to talk about Desert Forge, we landed, almost by accident, in the course of the conversation, on a phrase that captures exactly what I’m describing: operational discovery.

Here’s the distinction. Most exercises, in most organizations, are built to validate a plan somebody already wrote. You run the scenario, the plan performs roughly as expected, everyone gets a passing grade, and the after-action report confirms what leadership already believed going in. That’s an examination. It tells you whether you can execute what you already know.

A chaos-ready force designs exercises to do the opposite: to break the plan. Deliberately. The point isn’t to confirm what you assumed walking in. It’s to surface what you didn’t know you needed, and to find that out in an exercise rather than in an actual event where the cost of discovery is measured in something other than an after-action slide.

That takes a specific kind of structure, not just a mindset. It means standing up something like a chaos cell, a small group sitting near the commander whose entire job is short, iterative experiments rather than the production of glossy concepts. It means building rapid learning loops that get insights out of the exercise and into doctrine, training, and acquisition conversations fast, before the organization pays for the same lesson twice, once in the exercise and once for real.

I suspect that, listening to this, you’re not hearing something foreign. Desert Forge is proof that you’re already doing a version of this. What I’m offering is language for it, and a frame for pushing it further and more deliberately.

There’s a reason this matters beyond the exercise itself. An organization that only ever validates its plans develops a kind of institutional confidence that isn’t earned. It looks like readiness because nothing has yet forced it to be wrong in public. An organization that deliberately breaks its own plans, on its own schedule, in a controlled setting, earns a different kind of confidence: the knowledge of exactly where the plan bends and where it snaps, discovered before an adversary or a wildfire discovers it for you. That’s the return on investment for operational discovery, and it’s why I’d argue for treating it as a standing practice rather than a one-time exercise design choice.

Build for Resilience, Not Brittle Efficiency

Modern organizations — military and civilian alike — are trained from the ground up to prize efficiency. Single suppliers. Single data hubs. Single command paths. That’s a rational design choice when conditions are stable, because every redundant channel, every backup path, every bit of leadership depth beyond the bare minimum, looks like waste on a budget slide. It’s overhead you can cut without anyone noticing until the day conditions stop being stable.

This point is directly relevant to a force that has to plug into civilian authorities, other states’ National Guards, and federal agencies on short notice, often across jurisdictional seams that don’t map cleanly onto any single chain of command. You don’t get to choose your partners in a cascading event. You get whoever is standing in the adjacent jurisdiction when the grid goes down, and you’d better already have a working relationship and a backup way to talk to them.

So here’s the question I want to leave with you, and I mean it as something to actually take back to your unit, not just a rhetorical flourish for this morning: if you lost a key node tomorrow — a headquarters, a data center, a comms hub — what could still function within twenty-four hours?

Multiple channels instead of single suppliers. Backup decision paths that cross jurisdictional lines before you need them, not after. Leadership depth beyond the minimum required to fill a billet. All of it looks like waste on a normal Tuesday. None of it looks like waste on the day the node goes down.

Forge Chaos Navigators

Everything I’ve described so far, chaos management as a stance, operational discovery as a method, resilience as a design principle, is architecture. And architecture doesn’t run itself.

It needs leaders who can operate inside it under pressure, who can hold a structure like this together when it’s being tested in real time rather than on a slide. That is, specifically, the person this course is trying to produce.

There are four trainable capabilities I want to name plainly, because I think naming them is half the battle.

Adaptive thinking: the ability to act on a provisional map and revise it in public as new information comes in, without treating the revision as a failure of the original plan.

Pattern recognition under uncertainty: reading weak signals before the picture is complete, rather than waiting for certainty that a fast-moving situation will not grant you.

Emotional regulation under stress: holding steady judgment when the stakes feel real, which is a different skill from holding steady judgment in a training environment where everyone knows it’s an exercise.

Collaborative sensemaking across functions that don’t normally talk to each other: building a shared picture with people whose training, vocabulary, and institutional incentives are not your own, the civilian emergency manager, the utility operator, the neighboring state’s Guard, the federal liaison.

Here’s the honest note, and I want to be direct about it: none of this shows up automatically with seniority or rank. Command time alone doesn’t build it. It has to be deliberately built, through realistic simulation and structured reflection, not just accumulated experience, which can just as easily teach you to trust a plan that happened to work once as it can teach you genuine adaptive judgment.

So let me ask you something, and you don’t need to answer it out loud: where in your career have you actually been trained to act on incomplete information, as opposed to simply being expected to?

For most people in this kind of career, the honest answer is that the expectation arrived well before the training did. That gap is exactly what this course, and frankly what Desert Forge, exists to close.

I’d add one more thing about this list of four, because it matters for how you use it. These are not personality traits that some officers have and others don’t. They’re skills, in the same sense that land navigation or weapons handling are skills and they degrade without practice, they improve with deliberate repetition, and they can be assessed. If your unit’s leader-development program doesn’t have a way to observe and coach adaptive thinking, pattern recognition, emotional regulation, and collaborative sensemaking with the same rigor it applies to physical and technical proficiency, that’s a gap worth closing before your next command, not after.

The Five Imperatives

I’m not going to re-teach these. I’m going to give them to you as a fast, punchy list you can write down and carry with you, because if you remember nothing else from tonight, I want you to remember these five lines.

One: stop managing crises — start managing chaos. Disorder in this line of work is not a temporary deviation from a stable baseline. It is the baseline.

Two: build for resilience, not brittle efficiency. Redundancy that looks like waste on a quiet day is the thing that keeps you functioning on the day that isn’t quiet.

Three: normalize operating in sustained ambiguity — treat early decisions as tests, not final commitments. You will act before you have full information. The goal is not to eliminate that condition; it’s to get comfortable revising in public rather than defending a first call past the point it still makes sense.

Four: treat wicked problems as ongoing terrain, not solvable tasks. Some problems in this field don’t have a resolution state. They have a condition you manage continuously. Stop looking for the finish line on those, and start building the muscle to operate on that terrain indefinitely.

Five: make your own thinking — and your team’s — the primary object of attention. The organizations that survive sustained ambiguity are not the ones with the smartest single leader. They’re the ones where thinking clearly under pressure is itself a monitored, coached, and deliberately improved skill, the same way marksmanship or physical fitness is.

This isn’t a slogan. It’s a shift from being the leader who personally fixes every fire to being the one who builds the organization’s capacity to keep thinking clearly while the fire is still burning.

Those are not the same skill, and the second one is harder, because it means your job is no longer to be the smartest person solving the problem in the room. It’s to make sure the room itself stays capable of solving problems it hasn’t seen before.

Closing

You already do a version of this. Desert Forge is proof of it, operational discovery didn’t arrive in this room tonight as a foreign concept; it arrived as a name for something General Lau’s team is already practicing. My hope today is more modest than convincing you of something new. It’s that you leave with language and a framework for what you’re already doing well, and a few concrete places to push further before your next command.

Go back to your diagnostic question about planning energy. Go back to the twenty-four-hour node question. Go back to asking where in your own career you were actually trained, rather than just expected, to act on incomplete information and then ask whether the people under your next command will be able to answer that question any better than you can right now.

That’s the work. It doesn’t end when this talk does, and it doesn’t end when the exercise after-action report gets filed.

It’s the ongoing terrain I mentioned a moment ago.

Thank you — I’ll hand it over to your questions.