Ayup — once upon a time, when directed to establish a new Task Force subordinate to a Numbered Fleet Commander, I intentionally wrote direction to myself and forces for routinely scheduled updates back to the Fleet Commander on our progress towards establishment and subsequent activities. Accountability was enshrined and PIM maintained — Would have been much easier not to task myself with such action, but that is not supposed to be the way of these things!
What about the role of NTSPs? Those set manpower levels required to operate and maintain ships and their systems. That may be an ideal, but it isn’t usually consistent with Authorized End Strength.
Going lean on manning has been the biggest problem. Have to get it all done, can't train in new guys, it's not working. I could have told them this in 2019 when I first went on an LCS to work.
I've never set foot on an LCS and it was pretty obvious to me that it was going to be a problem. They may have technically had the crew to fight the ship, but that's not saying much considering there wasn't much to fight with. Just watch standing had to be tiring, much less anything else. God help them if they got shot at and had to do DC.
Lean is a marginal concept for commercial enterprises, in that some stuff will work and some won't for any give enterprise. Lean is never, ever, a good idea for military operations because things are absolutely going to break down or be broken and you can't stop the line to review the causes and enact a fix. It is always 'mo betta.
LCS had too many Good Idea Fairies running around, and nobody would say no. With the amount of space devoted to aviation, is the top speed really needed?
Does it need to have two combining engineering plants that get split again for the water jets?
The LCS requirements specification from 2004 was a schizophrenic amalgam of conflicting performance and operational requirements.
Other than being 'transformational', the US Navy's senior leadership at the time clearly didn't know what it wanted out of the LCS and deliberately put those decisions into the hands of the contractors to determine.
And so it isn't any surprise that two LCS designs went into production, and that each design is a schizophrenic amalgam of conflicting performance and operational requirements, but in its own unique ways.
And right there, the first step the Navy needs to take is a serious look at the definition of each ship class’ WQ&S Bill. Can the ship fight hurt? Can all of the maintenance and cleaning be accomplished? Without an accurate standard against which to measure the current manning, knowing the current manning level becomes somewhat meaningless.
The CNO should meet with the CO of very ship and ask him or her if their ship is fully manned and combat ready. If not why not and what is being done to make it so.
Nice in theory, but the Navy has ~100 ships deployed at any given time. Have the CNO visit a few ships CO at every site he visits. Only the CNO and the CO, no outsiders who may influence the discussion.
I had thought about that, but nothing replaces a face-to-face meeting. You are correct, better Zoom than nothing, though. As the Captain is at the Admiral's request, four or five Zoom meetings a day are achievable, so in a month's time the 100 ships Captains meeting could be done. And the CNO could make a pointed comment about rusty ships.
It wasn't feasible during WW2, but with our present sized force, this should probably be true for all CO once a year for a zoom/checkin, a face-to-face prior to assuming command, and an actual ship visit very few years for every ship
Fiscal year is coming to an end, I have to assume budgets are prepared, up and down the chain of command a couple times and either in Congress' hands or soon to be.
Anyone have any idea whether there's adequate budget request to fund CNO's desires? Or is it too late and he'll have to suck it up with previous incumbent's budget and hope his couple of years yields a miracle?
Thanks Sal for once again bringing to light a critical issue. In the early 80s I saw manning documents for some aviation squadrons. These included billets that, in case of a mobilization, would be filled by Reservists. The problem was that at that time there weren’t sufficient Reservists to fill those billets. I expect today’s manning documents include similar mobilization billets and so to be fully manning there must be Reservists trained for these mobilization billets. The CNO must advocate for a fully man Reserves.
Absolutely correct. It is very likely that crewing all ships exclusively with Active Duty sailors is completely unaffordable, no matter what "tricks" can be played. In a Navy long, long ago and very far away there were essentially two crewing/manning levels. Wartime which was 100%+ of the requirement for operating the ship for long periods at Condition III/II. The other was "peacetime" which was roughly 75-80% of wartime crewing requirements. The difference between the two was to be made up of Reservists. Each ship/squadron had at least one, and for larger ships, several, reserve units that were supposed to train aboard "their" ship/squadron or those of the same class and be ready to step into specific billets. This system was similar in intent to the Army after VietNam placing a significant amount of their combat power in the Guard/Reserve.
Unfortunately, decisions made during Operation Desert Shield/Storm effectively broke the Naval Reserve by not recalling the Reservists to fill out the crews of their assigned ships. Since the ships appeared to operate effectively without their reserve component the Navy decided that we didn't need them anymore. So, not only must the Naval Reserve be fully manned, but it must be expanded to provide the "delta" between what a ship/squadron needs in peacetime training and when deployed. While expensive, this is a cheaper solution than trying to fund 100% of shipboard billets with Active Duty personnel.
Expensive? What is more costly than abusing and burning out Sailors (plus the cost their families bear), not being able to complete their mission, or save a ship due to damage? If the Navy cannot convince the politicians to adequately fund the ships we have, then stop building ships. Be that blunt. The cycle doesn't stop if we keep using band-aids.
Don’t know the issue here, hope I’m wrong, but I have the impression that naval reservists are typically not the types of people who will fill out shipboard billets in time of war. Many of them (?) are shore based specialists; doctors, dentists, intel, logistics, public affairs, that kind of thing. So we don’t just need more reservists, they have to be the right kind.
I agree back when I first went in circa 1968/1969, we had reserves checked onboard in a regular basis, also 3 by 6 enlistees. They helped a lot, and we also knew they reserve units and could tell them what was needed in training. Later as a CWO I went our reserve unit and held training there so the units had a heads up on what we needed and helped trained them to come onboard with a quicker integration with the regular sailors. All of this occurred while working in the submarine force. But, once I transitioned to surface engineering (LDO) I never saw another reserve sailor.
This is how USN broke the USNR. First, during Operation Desert Shield/Storm they refused to recall any reservists other than "specialists" not even to let folks go home early when their ships/squadrons were on the way back from the war. Then, based on the fact that none of the ship augment units were recalled, USN disestablished all of the ship augment units as a "cost saving". Then, once the level of USNR manning were significantly reduced USN gave up USNR training centers to, among others, the Army, because they were no longer needed. So, through the application of circular logic by USN, the USNR no longer has the people to augment or rapidly backfill personnel shortfalls in the fleet. This is why, if the CNO is really serious about "full manning" USN will have to re-create the USNR of the 1990's. This will be very difficult as very few, if any, of the USNR admin/management personnel remember what a real USNR even looked like.
"Since the ships appeared to operate effectively without their reserve component the Navy decided that we didn't need them anymore."
Leadership should have expected this, because Navy were engaged in primarily unchallenged offensive operations against land targets. They probably should have mobilized the reserves anyway, to show the full cost of the endeavor, as well as to keep the reserves in a ready posture.
When my Navy son left active duty he wasn’t briefed on the Reserves only on something like how to write a résumé. One would think the Reserves would be putting a hard press on sailors leaving active duty. Now he’s considering resigning because he doesn’t want to get mobilized for some billet the active duty forces don’t want to fill.
For a brief period in the early 80's I actually had a full wartime allowance in my Gunnery Division on an Adams-class; a result of the decomming of the Forrest Sherman-conversion DDG's
CDR Salamander, yes! Not only poorly maned ships, poorly maintained ships!
Sequa to Governor Wes Moore allowing poorly maintained and manned ships to a. Strike the Key Bridge and b. Explode in the area known as the Baltimore Waters close to Locus Point!
Retaliation for me occurred yesterday at my home, “Forevermore by the Bay”.
AAPD Harris responded to another Theft!
Intake AAPD Operator asked if my stolen property had electronic trackers. Today I texted Attorney Brendan Callahan asking if I needed to install “Track
So here is a thought. I work on the AF side but we work with the Navy as well. There are a lot of uniformed Navy personel that never go to sea. I work with one that had a 20 year carreer and never set foot on a ship. So make one simple change. All shipboard positions get filled before any rear echelon positions. If you are short on sailors go grab everyone in uniform that is in a shore billet run them through any required training (only training relevant to shipboard operations) and then assign them to the ships. You can hire civillians to fill office jobs. I guess my opinion is that the empty slots should be in offices not at sea. I got a bit annoyed when we keep hearing that they dont have enough instructor pilots but a qualifed IP just got assigned as our office deputy commander.
That's good in theory, but the reality is sea/shore rotation is important for retention. While there might be some who desire nothing more than to be in ships at sea, for most the workload in a sea duty billet can't be sustained day in and out for 20+ years.
On the officer side the whole career progression system (other than warrant/LDO) doesn't support long tours in sea billets. Back in my day they created the "aviation duty officer" designator, the idea being that they would just fly and not be competitive for squadron CO but I don't think that ever worked out as intended.
You could imagine a navy where ships are appropriately manned and deployment schedules are such that sea tours aren’t soul-crushing years that only a shore tour can wipe away enough for rose-tinted glasses to convince you it wasn’t *that* bad, so you agree to go back to sea. It’s not the navy we have, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but you could imagine it
But actually, if we made it so that sea tours were bearable that would make so many things better and easier, not least the problem you talk about
Another issue that crops up, particularly when things get spicy in a certain combatant commands is the use of Individual Augmentees. The last twenty-years, CENTCOM got all sorts of IA's to handle various busy-body work, important but, definitely not within their designator/rate. That pool further shrinks available bodies to fulfill shore billets that USN can draw from.
One thing that would help with more than manning is increased spending on shipyard maintenance. The Japanese have smaller crews in large part because their in-port maintenance gets done quickly. So they don't have to have sailor/s babysitting a piece of gear that "we'll get repaired this time, honest".
ROC/POE and readiness reports. As a former 2x P-3 squadron readiness officer, TO and OPSO, I can tell you from experience that no Skipper wants to hear or report that their squadron is not C2 combat ready during the home cycle workup periods. But you don’t get the manning if you don’t report as the book directs. “Yes Commodore we are ready” does not fix your manning problems. COs are gonna have to earn their Command Pin by reporting “not combat ready” and provide the solution of “I need x number of y Sailors” and not “hope the problem away” leaning on luck and the sweat of their Sailors during their command.
We need meaningful, but relaxed, shore duty, preferably accompanied by good, clean family housing. You can’t abuse sailors and expect them to reenlist.
The US Navy met/exceeded its recruiting goals for 2024-2025. This is good news, and when combined with reenlistment, it makes the job easier. The recruiting trend is important to maintain and can wither in a strong economy. If so, the Navy should consider deploying fewer, but fully manned ships. Take pressure off crews and promote reenlistment when recruiting falters.
Aren't each one of these bullets what should be happening on a routine basis? Build ships, crew ships, make weapons, train crews and eliminate backlogs.
I may not be the shiniest apple in the bushel but these points are basic fundamentals for any sea service. If this was my list I would be wondering WTF my predecessors had been doing for decades if we are in such poor state of readiness.
A number of factors have conspired over the last three decades to produce the current situation with manning, with shipbuilding, and with repair and maintenance.
One of the most important of those factors was the Forever Wars in the Middle East which drained the financial resources needed to prepare for the rise of a major naval adversary, China. Nine trillion dollars, by some estimates.
You can buy, man, and maintain a lot ships for nine trillion dollars.
Sal - I am only an amateur here, so I humbly ask The Front Porch to forgive my naïveté. Regardless, I recall speaking with SWO ensigns in 2014 who advised there were not enough shipboard billets for them. Could CNO start a new y program where officers spend a year or so getting dirty helping a crew with the dirty work? A bandaid, yes, but better than nothing perhaps…..
Would love to see semi-annual updates on the achievement of his goals.
Ayup — once upon a time, when directed to establish a new Task Force subordinate to a Numbered Fleet Commander, I intentionally wrote direction to myself and forces for routinely scheduled updates back to the Fleet Commander on our progress towards establishment and subsequent activities. Accountability was enshrined and PIM maintained — Would have been much easier not to task myself with such action, but that is not supposed to be the way of these things!
Godspeed and Good Hunting, Always
What about the role of NTSPs? Those set manpower levels required to operate and maintain ships and their systems. That may be an ideal, but it isn’t usually consistent with Authorized End Strength.
Going lean on manning has been the biggest problem. Have to get it all done, can't train in new guys, it's not working. I could have told them this in 2019 when I first went on an LCS to work.
We need to be putting sailors on ships.
I've never set foot on an LCS and it was pretty obvious to me that it was going to be a problem. They may have technically had the crew to fight the ship, but that's not saying much considering there wasn't much to fight with. Just watch standing had to be tiring, much less anything else. God help them if they got shot at and had to do DC.
Lean is a marginal concept for commercial enterprises, in that some stuff will work and some won't for any give enterprise. Lean is never, ever, a good idea for military operations because things are absolutely going to break down or be broken and you can't stop the line to review the causes and enact a fix. It is always 'mo betta.
LCS had too many Good Idea Fairies running around, and nobody would say no. With the amount of space devoted to aviation, is the top speed really needed?
Does it need to have two combining engineering plants that get split again for the water jets?
The LCS requirements specification from 2004 was a schizophrenic amalgam of conflicting performance and operational requirements.
Other than being 'transformational', the US Navy's senior leadership at the time clearly didn't know what it wanted out of the LCS and deliberately put those decisions into the hands of the contractors to determine.
And so it isn't any surprise that two LCS designs went into production, and that each design is a schizophrenic amalgam of conflicting performance and operational requirements, but in its own unique ways.
I guess they could have made it worse if they tried. But that would take some effort.
There wasn’t a single “good idea” when the street fighter concept came to life during the Transformative/Concurrence idiocy.
The worse period to come out of the Clinton years.
And right there, the first step the Navy needs to take is a serious look at the definition of each ship class’ WQ&S Bill. Can the ship fight hurt? Can all of the maintenance and cleaning be accomplished? Without an accurate standard against which to measure the current manning, knowing the current manning level becomes somewhat meaningless.
The CNO should meet with the CO of very ship and ask him or her if their ship is fully manned and combat ready. If not why not and what is being done to make it so.
Nice in theory, but the Navy has ~100 ships deployed at any given time. Have the CNO visit a few ships CO at every site he visits. Only the CNO and the CO, no outsiders who may influence the discussion.
Zoom?
I had thought about that, but nothing replaces a face-to-face meeting. You are correct, better Zoom than nothing, though. As the Captain is at the Admiral's request, four or five Zoom meetings a day are achievable, so in a month's time the 100 ships Captains meeting could be done. And the CNO could make a pointed comment about rusty ships.
Or the captains could come to the pentagon.
It wasn't feasible during WW2, but with our present sized force, this should probably be true for all CO once a year for a zoom/checkin, a face-to-face prior to assuming command, and an actual ship visit very few years for every ship
Fiscal year is coming to an end, I have to assume budgets are prepared, up and down the chain of command a couple times and either in Congress' hands or soon to be.
Anyone have any idea whether there's adequate budget request to fund CNO's desires? Or is it too late and he'll have to suck it up with previous incumbent's budget and hope his couple of years yields a miracle?
Thanks Sal for once again bringing to light a critical issue. In the early 80s I saw manning documents for some aviation squadrons. These included billets that, in case of a mobilization, would be filled by Reservists. The problem was that at that time there weren’t sufficient Reservists to fill those billets. I expect today’s manning documents include similar mobilization billets and so to be fully manning there must be Reservists trained for these mobilization billets. The CNO must advocate for a fully man Reserves.
Absolutely correct. It is very likely that crewing all ships exclusively with Active Duty sailors is completely unaffordable, no matter what "tricks" can be played. In a Navy long, long ago and very far away there were essentially two crewing/manning levels. Wartime which was 100%+ of the requirement for operating the ship for long periods at Condition III/II. The other was "peacetime" which was roughly 75-80% of wartime crewing requirements. The difference between the two was to be made up of Reservists. Each ship/squadron had at least one, and for larger ships, several, reserve units that were supposed to train aboard "their" ship/squadron or those of the same class and be ready to step into specific billets. This system was similar in intent to the Army after VietNam placing a significant amount of their combat power in the Guard/Reserve.
Unfortunately, decisions made during Operation Desert Shield/Storm effectively broke the Naval Reserve by not recalling the Reservists to fill out the crews of their assigned ships. Since the ships appeared to operate effectively without their reserve component the Navy decided that we didn't need them anymore. So, not only must the Naval Reserve be fully manned, but it must be expanded to provide the "delta" between what a ship/squadron needs in peacetime training and when deployed. While expensive, this is a cheaper solution than trying to fund 100% of shipboard billets with Active Duty personnel.
Expensive? What is more costly than abusing and burning out Sailors (plus the cost their families bear), not being able to complete their mission, or save a ship due to damage? If the Navy cannot convince the politicians to adequately fund the ships we have, then stop building ships. Be that blunt. The cycle doesn't stop if we keep using band-aids.
Quit extending deployments. Trying to stretch an undersized Navy to cover oversized demands is breaking the force.
The Grand Poobahs who make the decisions regarding extended deployments do not suffer the consequences of their actions.
Don’t know the issue here, hope I’m wrong, but I have the impression that naval reservists are typically not the types of people who will fill out shipboard billets in time of war. Many of them (?) are shore based specialists; doctors, dentists, intel, logistics, public affairs, that kind of thing. So we don’t just need more reservists, they have to be the right kind.
I agree back when I first went in circa 1968/1969, we had reserves checked onboard in a regular basis, also 3 by 6 enlistees. They helped a lot, and we also knew they reserve units and could tell them what was needed in training. Later as a CWO I went our reserve unit and held training there so the units had a heads up on what we needed and helped trained them to come onboard with a quicker integration with the regular sailors. All of this occurred while working in the submarine force. But, once I transitioned to surface engineering (LDO) I never saw another reserve sailor.
In the 90s we hade reserve officers show up on ship for their two weeks once in a while, but it was rare even then
This is how USN broke the USNR. First, during Operation Desert Shield/Storm they refused to recall any reservists other than "specialists" not even to let folks go home early when their ships/squadrons were on the way back from the war. Then, based on the fact that none of the ship augment units were recalled, USN disestablished all of the ship augment units as a "cost saving". Then, once the level of USNR manning were significantly reduced USN gave up USNR training centers to, among others, the Army, because they were no longer needed. So, through the application of circular logic by USN, the USNR no longer has the people to augment or rapidly backfill personnel shortfalls in the fleet. This is why, if the CNO is really serious about "full manning" USN will have to re-create the USNR of the 1990's. This will be very difficult as very few, if any, of the USNR admin/management personnel remember what a real USNR even looked like.
"Since the ships appeared to operate effectively without their reserve component the Navy decided that we didn't need them anymore."
Leadership should have expected this, because Navy were engaged in primarily unchallenged offensive operations against land targets. They probably should have mobilized the reserves anyway, to show the full cost of the endeavor, as well as to keep the reserves in a ready posture.
When my Navy son left active duty he wasn’t briefed on the Reserves only on something like how to write a résumé. One would think the Reserves would be putting a hard press on sailors leaving active duty. Now he’s considering resigning because he doesn’t want to get mobilized for some billet the active duty forces don’t want to fill.
For a brief period in the early 80's I actually had a full wartime allowance in my Gunnery Division on an Adams-class; a result of the decomming of the Forrest Sherman-conversion DDG's
CDR Salamander, yes! Not only poorly maned ships, poorly maintained ships!
Sequa to Governor Wes Moore allowing poorly maintained and manned ships to a. Strike the Key Bridge and b. Explode in the area known as the Baltimore Waters close to Locus Point!
Retaliation for me occurred yesterday at my home, “Forevermore by the Bay”.
AAPD Harris responded to another Theft!
Intake AAPD Operator asked if my stolen property had electronic trackers. Today I texted Attorney Brendan Callahan asking if I needed to install “Track
Excellent analysis, CDR Sal!
So here is a thought. I work on the AF side but we work with the Navy as well. There are a lot of uniformed Navy personel that never go to sea. I work with one that had a 20 year carreer and never set foot on a ship. So make one simple change. All shipboard positions get filled before any rear echelon positions. If you are short on sailors go grab everyone in uniform that is in a shore billet run them through any required training (only training relevant to shipboard operations) and then assign them to the ships. You can hire civillians to fill office jobs. I guess my opinion is that the empty slots should be in offices not at sea. I got a bit annoyed when we keep hearing that they dont have enough instructor pilots but a qualifed IP just got assigned as our office deputy commander.
That's good in theory, but the reality is sea/shore rotation is important for retention. While there might be some who desire nothing more than to be in ships at sea, for most the workload in a sea duty billet can't be sustained day in and out for 20+ years.
On the officer side the whole career progression system (other than warrant/LDO) doesn't support long tours in sea billets. Back in my day they created the "aviation duty officer" designator, the idea being that they would just fly and not be competitive for squadron CO but I don't think that ever worked out as intended.
I thought ADO was like EDO with an aviation focus, lol
You could imagine a navy where ships are appropriately manned and deployment schedules are such that sea tours aren’t soul-crushing years that only a shore tour can wipe away enough for rose-tinted glasses to convince you it wasn’t *that* bad, so you agree to go back to sea. It’s not the navy we have, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but you could imagine it
But actually, if we made it so that sea tours were bearable that would make so many things better and easier, not least the problem you talk about
Another issue that crops up, particularly when things get spicy in a certain combatant commands is the use of Individual Augmentees. The last twenty-years, CENTCOM got all sorts of IA's to handle various busy-body work, important but, definitely not within their designator/rate. That pool further shrinks available bodies to fulfill shore billets that USN can draw from.
Do these manning requirements include consideration of collateral duties or other rate related housekeeping responsibilities?
We don't need bloated crews. But we do need enough ship's company to ensure someone can get more than five hours of sleep three or four nights a week.
One thing that would help with more than manning is increased spending on shipyard maintenance. The Japanese have smaller crews in large part because their in-port maintenance gets done quickly. So they don't have to have sailor/s babysitting a piece of gear that "we'll get repaired this time, honest".
And they don't operate as far from home as we do as a matter of routine.
To be honest, the surface fleet really gets maintenance cut as a matter of routine.
And we have no tenders or trained repair types to effect repairs out Conus.
ROC/POE and readiness reports. As a former 2x P-3 squadron readiness officer, TO and OPSO, I can tell you from experience that no Skipper wants to hear or report that their squadron is not C2 combat ready during the home cycle workup periods. But you don’t get the manning if you don’t report as the book directs. “Yes Commodore we are ready” does not fix your manning problems. COs are gonna have to earn their Command Pin by reporting “not combat ready” and provide the solution of “I need x number of y Sailors” and not “hope the problem away” leaning on luck and the sweat of their Sailors during their command.
We need meaningful, but relaxed, shore duty, preferably accompanied by good, clean family housing. You can’t abuse sailors and expect them to reenlist.
O/T, you might like this in reference to the conversation about the Italian air force.
https://youtu.be/cf-_-sstZCs?si=BmrSnKELuc4NGHf2
The US Navy met/exceeded its recruiting goals for 2024-2025. This is good news, and when combined with reenlistment, it makes the job easier. The recruiting trend is important to maintain and can wither in a strong economy. If so, the Navy should consider deploying fewer, but fully manned ships. Take pressure off crews and promote reenlistment when recruiting falters.
Aren't each one of these bullets what should be happening on a routine basis? Build ships, crew ships, make weapons, train crews and eliminate backlogs.
I may not be the shiniest apple in the bushel but these points are basic fundamentals for any sea service. If this was my list I would be wondering WTF my predecessors had been doing for decades if we are in such poor state of readiness.
A number of factors have conspired over the last three decades to produce the current situation with manning, with shipbuilding, and with repair and maintenance.
One of the most important of those factors was the Forever Wars in the Middle East which drained the financial resources needed to prepare for the rise of a major naval adversary, China. Nine trillion dollars, by some estimates.
You can buy, man, and maintain a lot ships for nine trillion dollars.
Sal - I am only an amateur here, so I humbly ask The Front Porch to forgive my naïveté. Regardless, I recall speaking with SWO ensigns in 2014 who advised there were not enough shipboard billets for them. Could CNO start a new y program where officers spend a year or so getting dirty helping a crew with the dirty work? A bandaid, yes, but better than nothing perhaps…..