New master’s degree will train Top Gun pilots on foreign adversaries and space warfare

Too far for missiles, I’m switching to satellites.

As the face of modern warfare changes, the faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, are hoping a new master’s degree designed for the Department of the Navy’s most skilled aviators will help them prepare for an increasingly sophisticated enemy and a battlespace that extends far beyond the horizon. 

The Master of Warfare Operations degree, which debuted this year in partnership with the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center (NAWDC) at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada – better known to the world as TOPGUN – offers the Navy’s aviation Warfare Tactics Instructors, or WTIs, certification in great warfare competition, including a survey of the history and politics of key geopolitical adversaries, including Iran, China and Russia. 

The certifications within the degree program include systems analysis, for processing data and using it to make decisions at a military leadership level, and space systems fundamentals, which gives fighter jocks a rare primer on the space domain and how it supports tactical aviation, now and in the future.

“Many tactics now involve very far over the horizon shots – everything in this Pacific … they’re gonna be way, way over the horizon. The standoff distance from the advanced [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] missile systems is enormous,” Joseph Hooper, a professor of Physics at NPS who helped create the MWO degree, told Sandboxx News. “So the shots anyone from Top Gun is going to be taking are going to be [at] enormous distances – at the very edge of the weapons engagement range for our weapons. So that relies usually on a significant influence from the space layer just to be able to get [to where] a ship is to be able to take a shot at it.”

Despite this mutually dependent relationship, WTIs typically receive almost no training about the space layer, Hooper said, and that’s despite the entire department NPS has focused on the subject, he added. 

When NPS staff traveled in the spring of 2023 to TOPGUN and other WTI schools around the Navy, he said, the interest from the pilots in the subject of space was clear.

Space operations, and information on how to deny the advantage in the battlespace to near-peer competitors like China, were “enormously popular,” Hooper said, as was interest in more information about weapons and missile systems.

“We already offer things that are a little more technical, that would give them a better intuition on this,” he added.

Others were intrigued by the strategic competition aspect of the degree.

Navy Lt. Matt Haney, an instructor at Fallon’s HAVOC, the service’s airborne electronic attack weapons school, said in a release that he enrolled in the new degree program because of the insights he’d be able to bring back to the flightline with him.

“I jumped on the opportunity as soon as it was announced that my experience as an EA-18G weapons tactics instructor would be considered for inclusion in the program,” Haney said. “Thus far, I can easily say that the content gives me a much-appreciated view on strategic competition, and I am looking forward to the other certificates in the program as well. From an accessibility perspective, I am optimistic to see how this goes as I rotate back to a deployable command, but the allowed timeframe of the program does keep me confident that I will be able to finish even if I am forced to take a break.”

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When NPS leaders spoke with Sandboxx News in late March, they estimated that 10 students had already enrolled in the Master of Warfare Operations program. They expected the full cohort of 20 to be enrolled within days. In light of the demands on fighter pilots’ time, the degree is remote and offered asynchronously, allowing aviators to complete the coursework on their own schedule. Students will have up to five years to complete the program’s 44 credit hours.

“One of the difficulties … that many of our prospective students face, is that if they come here, it can be difficult for them to continue in their career path, especially in aviation,” Bret Michael, vice provost for Academic Affairs at NPS said. “So this allows them to get that needed graduate level education that’s very high quality, but they can continue in their day jobs.”

While a pilot program quietly launched last year was available only to TOPGUN pilots, the degree is now open to all aviation WTI communities.

Randy Pugh, NPS’ vice provost for Warfare Studies, noted that the design of the degree program reflected what may be required of the Navy’s best pilots in the years and conflicts ahead.

“What are we staring down the barrel of right now that you need to know a lot more about, whether that’s space-based capabilities, whether that’s data science and artificial intelligence and operations analysis, or whether that’s great power competition, and what drives great power competition, so that you’re prepared to go fight and win today,” he said. “But also … when you get a job as an admiral or a general, that you’re ready to go and be, you know, the attaché in Beijing [and] certainly to have mil-to-mil engagements with potential competitors.”

Feature Image: An F-5 Tiger II from the Saints of Fighter Squadron Composite (VFC) 13 takes off from a runway on Naval Air Station Fallon. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Joseph R. Vincent/Released)

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