In terms of human resources, regarding the military personnel of the French Navy, he is responsible for their recruitment, initial and continuous training, discipline, morale and wellbeing, professional and career paths, as well as management of the workforce, jobs and skills.

The authority of the Chief of the Naval Staff is exercised over several bodies: He chairs the board of directors of the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Navy (French: Service hydrographique et océanographique de la Marine, acronym: SHOM) and supervises the French Naval Academy on behalf of the Minister of the Armed Forces.

Before the First World War, the Chief of the Naval Staff was above all the head of the military cabinet of the Minister of the Navy, and this mode of operation is the source of the name used; the officer who had effective authority over the Navy was then the admiral commanding the naval army, sometimes unofficially referred to as "amiralissime", in reference to the title of "généralissime" used at the time in the Army.

The First World War called all this into question, because an immense work of reorganisation had to be carried out at the headquarters in "rue Royale"a to conduct a long-lasting industrial maritime war and to be able to face the new threats posed by German submarines and underwater mines: a sort of "second staff" was even created, called the "directorate general for underwater warfare" (French: Direction générale de la guerre sous-marine, acronym: DGGSM) with sometimes overlapping areas of action; this observed redundancy logically led to the dissolution of the DGGSM at the end of the war and the attribution of its many prerogatives to the offices of the Navy General Staff.

In order to have a system allowing a flexible transition between peacetime — period of preparation — and wartime — period of action — the Vice-Admiral Chief of the Navy General Staff becomes, in the 1920s, the designated commander of the French maritime forces in the event of war, and the staff tasks fall in such circumstances to the Major General of the Navy, his first deputy in time of peace.

Admiral Bernard Louzeau decided at the end of the 1980s to replace the emblem of the French Navy, "a gold anchor intertwined with a cable", by a logo representing "a white ship’s bow with two blue and red waves".