By Robbin Laird
When the history of the Navy’s transition from kill chain to kill web is written, the creation of the Maritime ISR Weapons and Tactics Instructor — the MISR WTI — will be recognized as one of the foundational moves. The program did not emerge from a requirements document or a program of record. It emerged from a champion inside Naval Aviation who saw that the force was about to need a kind of officer it did not yet have, and who used the authority of his command to plant the seed.
That champion was VADM (Retired) Miller, who as Air Boss backed the program in its earliest days, fought to get it funded, and pushed to have it modeled on the most prestigious schoolhouse the Navy had ever built: Top Gun. I sat down with him recently to walk back through how the MISR WTI came to be, why it was such an awkward fit for a training establishment built around platforms, and why the current war involving Iran has now validated, in real operational terms, what he and a small number of advocates were arguing for nearly a decade ago.
A Platform-Agnostic Officer in a Platform-Centric Navy
The MISR WTI’s founding problem was conceptual before it was bureaucratic. Naval Aviation’s training architecture, like the rest of the Navy, organizes itself around platforms — Top Gun for fighters, the helicopter weapons schools, the various community-specific tracks that feed officers back into their type-model-series communities. Every one of those officers belongs to something. They fly something. They own something.
The MISR officer owns nothing. The role is platform-agnostic and service-agnostic, which made it doubly hard to locate within an institution that thinks in terms of airframes and communities. There is no fuselage to point to, no community sponsor demanding billets, none of the built-in identity that comes from strapping into a particular aircraft.
What the MISR officer brings instead is a discipline: the ability to pull together intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data flowing in from a stovepiped collection of platforms, fighters, the E-2D, the MQ-25 Triton, and a widening set of autonomous systems, and turn it into something a commander can act on in time to matter.
That discipline does not fit neatly into a training command built around airframes, and in my view the Naval Aviation Warfare Development Center has still not entirely solved the problem of where new platforms and new ways of thinking physically belong. But the harder issue was always cultural rather than logistical. The MISR officer’s job is to make the kill web work, not to become a community with its own swagger.
From Air Boss to Champion
Miller traced the program’s start to before his tenure as Air Boss, however, once he took over, he worked closely with Rear Admiral Dan Cheever and the rotation of leadership at Fallon — Admiral Brophy and Admiral McCoy in succession — that carried the idea forward. He was careful to credit others with the underlying concept; his own role, as he described it, was to be a champion and an accelerator. He secured funding. He pushed to elevate the effort to the institutional status of Top Gun, on the theory that prestige is what attracts talent, and that a program living or dying on the credibility of the people who pass through it had to be able to compete for the right people from day one.
The first MISR WTI course stood up under his watch in 2018. The first graduation, as he described it, was something of a leap of faith, a new kind of officer, trained against a syllabus that did not yet have a long track record, being sent out to prove a concept that had not yet been proven.
What followed was a deliberately organic process. Miller’s description of his own management style was agricultural rather than architectural: you plant the seed, the tree comes up, but you do not pretend to know in advance which branches it will grow. The instructors and early graduates were left to develop the program’s direction themselves, informed by what they learned trying to apply it in the fleet.
Resolute Hunter, the exercise built around the MISR concept, became the proof point that took the idea beyond the schoolhouse. The original ambition was modest by comparison with where the field has gone: graduate a cohort of officers and populate carrier strike groups and combatant commands with them. Admiral Stuart Munch, then at Sixth Fleet, received one of the very first MISR officers and saw firsthand what the role could do for his own command’s awareness and decision tempo. Munch became an advocate, and with Miller advocating in parallel, the program had the kind of internal credibility, success breeding success, in Miller’s phrase, that no amount of top-down direction could have manufactured on its own.
The Iran War as Validation
The conversation kept returning to the current confrontation involving Iran as the moment when years of institution-building were tested under real conditions. Miller relayed that he’s received feedback about MISR performance that was extremely positive, not because the outcome of the broader campaign was yet settled, but because it showed MISR-trained officers doing precisely what the program had been built for: connecting intelligence collection to fusion to rapid dissemination to a decision-maker, fast enough to produce a real-time targeting effect.
Recently, the Acting Secretary of Navy, Hung Cao, in notifying the Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group of a Presidential Unit Citation and specifically noted was that “the Maritime Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Cell played an important role in target coordination.
I raised Admiral Brad Cooper’s role in that outcome, since I had written previously about Cooper as what I called a kill web admiral, an officer whose career path through Fifth Fleet, a Pacific task force command, and Task Force 59 gave him an unusually wide aperture on what an integrated, multi-domain force could do. Miller agreed without hesitation: a different commander, without that background, might not have unleashed MISR-trained officers as aggressively or with as much confidence in what they could deliver. Leadership proclivity, shaped by career experience, is not a minor variable in how fast a new capability gets used to its full potential: it can be the deciding one.
A Halfway House to an AI-Enabled Force
The conversation’s most consequential thread, in my view, concerned where MISR sits in the Navy’s longer trajectory toward artificial intelligence. Miller’s framing was that the program functions as a kind of halfway house to the future. The force is moving toward a world of maritime autonomous systems and AI-enabled weapons, and the temptation in that world is to assume the technology will do the integrating work on its own.
Miller’s view, which I share, is closer to the opposite: AI will be most useful in the hands of people who already possess a coherent understanding of the ISR picture and can judge when AI-generated targeting input is trustworthy and when it is not.
Seen that way, MISR is not simply a fix for a near-term stovepiping problem in manned ISR collection. It is a crucial interim step toward the responsible and effective use of AI in combat decision-making.
Had the Navy not built this cadre of platform-agnostic, integration-minded officers over the past several years, the arrival of AI-enabled autonomous systems at scale would have hit a force that was, in Miller’s words, stovepiped and platform-centric, handing exquisite tools to people without the judgment or training to apply them well.
Instead, MISR has produced a generation of officers whose entire professional formation has been about exactly that kind of judgment: pulling together degraded, partial, or contested information in the fog of war and stitching it back into something a commander can use. As sensors and AI both become more prolific across the force, Miller argued, the relative value of officers who can do that stitching only grows and so does the force’s resilience when, inevitably, parts of the architecture get degraded or denied in a real fight.
The Torturous Path
What stood out most in talking with Miller was how little of this was inevitable. The program survived its own awkward fit inside a platform-centric training establishment. It survived the absence of an obvious community sponsor. It survived being, by design, “unheroic” in a culture that rewards exactly the opposite.
It succeeded because a small number of advocates — Miller as Air Boss, Munch at Sixth Fleet, and eventually commanders like Cooper who had the career background to recognize what they were looking at — kept pushing it forward one budget cycle and one graduating class at a time, on the conviction that the force was going to need this capability before the rest of the institution had caught up to that fact.
The MISR WTI’s history is a reminder of how much of military innovation still depends on someone willing to plant a seed without knowing exactly which branches will grow and then defend the tree long enough for everyone else to see what it became.
Vice Admiral DeWolfe H. “Bullet” Miller, U.S. Navy (Ret.), is a former commander of U.S. Naval Air Forces (Air Boss) and U.S. Naval Air Force, Pacific, where he led efforts that drastically improved readiness across the Naval Aviation community by exercising transformational leadership.
Commissioned upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1981, he went on to qualify as a Naval Aviator and flew the A-7E Corsair II as well as all variants of the FA-18, later commanding strike fighter squadron VFA-34 as well as the amphibious ship USS Nashville (LPD 13), and the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush (CVN 77).
As a flag officer he served on the Chief of Naval Operations staff as the Director of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance before commanding Carrier Strike Group 2 that conducted the initial strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and served as the Navy’s Director of Air Warfare on the Staff of the Chief of Naval Operations before becoming the U.S. Navy’s 8th Air Boss.
As the U.S. Navy’s Air Boss, serving as Commander, Naval Air Forces, Vice Admiral Miller led the transformation of carrier aviation toward an “integratable” air wing designed to operate as part of a distributed, networked maritime force. In close partnership with the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center at Fallon, he championed the creation of new warfighting constructs such as the Maritime ISR (MISR) Weapons School and the broader MISR community, integrating advanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting into carrier air wing training and operations to enhance fleet lethality and joint interoperability. He also guided the initial integration of both the CMV-22 and fifth generation F-35 into the fleet.
A graduate of the National Defense University, Vice Admiral Miller holds a master’s degree in national resource strategy, is a Syracuse University national security management fellow and is a graduate of the Navy’s nuclear power program. His decorations include the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, Air Medal and numerous joint and campaign awards, reflecting more than 3,900 flight hours, 877 arrested landings, and multiple combat and contingency deployments.
Following his retirement from the Navy in December 2020, Vice Admiral Miller joined Huntington Ingalls Industries as corporate vice president for customer affairs based in Washington, D.C. and serving as a key link between HII’s Newport News Shipyard, senior Navy leadership, and the operational fleet.
Vice Admiral Miller retired from HII in December 2025 and continues to contribute to national and international security as a consultant, policy advisor, and speaker, holding senior fellow, board memberships and advisory roles with the Navy, various naval aviation associations and the United States Naval Academy. Drawing on decades of operational command and strategic level experience, VADM Miller is helping to shape the next generation of maritime leaders.
For my discussion of the MISRs as an example of how transformation really happens, see my new book: