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Naval Forces
As the Cost of Sailors Rises, Navy Finds Ways to Get Them Off Ships
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By Sandra I. Erwin
Navy ships in the future may go to sea with fewer, but perhaps happier sailors.
Or so goes the thinking behind the Navy’s new warship designs, which will make it possible for vessels to deploy with less than half the number of sailors that current ships require.
Aboard next-generation ships, Navy officials say, leaner crews will have “better quality of life,” as they will be spared from much of the grind and drudgery that sailors endure, especially on older, high-maintenance ships.
Then there are financial pressures.
The shrinkage of the Navy started several years ago, when leaders decided that it was time to embrace the efficiencies that technology had to offer. The service is now on track to reduce its ranks to 322,000 by 2013. That will be 43,000 fewer sailors than it had in 2005.
By all estimates, sailors are becoming alarmingly expensive. Unless the Navy continues to downsize, the service’s budget planners fear that personnel costs, over time, could bankrupt its ambitious modernization of the fleet.
Personnel costs are overwhelming not just the Navy, but the other services as well. The expense of recruiting, retaining, training and providing medical benefits for service members and retirees is growing faster than anyone had predicted, so even though the Navy is eliminating people from the ranks, its personnel costs still are expected to rise by 5 percent a year. The cutbacks help contain escalating personnel costs in the near term, although, in the long run, the Navy will save billions of dollars by operating ships with smaller crews.
“Over the past couple of years, we’ve drawn down about 10,000 sailors, just to stay apace with the increased cost of pay raises and bonuses,” says Rear Adm. Stan Bozin, director of the Navy’s budget office.
Admirals are quick to point out that the downsizing is not entirely a budget drill, but a logical step in order to take advantage of improvements in technology. Ships have become so sophisticated, officials assert, that many duties can be automated without compromising operations or overloading the remaining sailors with extra work. The intent is to have sailors in the future do less manual labor and acquire more specialized skills, which ultimately should lead to improved job satisfaction and higher retention rates.
About a decade ago, the Navy began to experiment with “smart ship” technologies that aimed to reduce sailors’ workload. But officials concluded that crews could not be cut substantially in current ships, which require lots of physical labor to maintain and operate. The only way to achieve significant downsizing was to deliberately design new ships to operate with small crews.
Most recently, the Navy tested a “rotational crewing” approach for both surface ships and submarines. The standard practice today is to have dedicated crews, which take the ship on a deployment and bring it back home. Under the rotational crew model, ships stay forward-deployed and crews fly out and back. Supporters of this concept say the Navy could save time, fuel and manpower. Rotational crewing has been the preferred method of the U.K. Royal Navy for more than a decade.
A rotation trial aboard the Navy’s catamaran, the HSV Swift, proved that the arrangement works best when crews are swapped every three or four months, says Vice Adm. Terrance T. Etnyre, who recently retired after serving as the commander of the Navy’s surface fleet.
The Navy’s best hopes for dramatic crew reductions hinge on three of its most expensive new ships — the DDG-1000 surface combatant, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Ford-class aircraft carrier.
The DDG-1000 would have a crew of 114, compared to 330 in current destroyers and cruisers. The Littoral Combat Ship would be operated by just 40 sailors, and the new aircraft carrier would deploy with a crew of 2,500, versus 3,300 today.
The current Nimitz-class carriers were designed in the 1950s and ‘60s, when manpower was cheap and easily acquired via the draft. The situation is vastly different now, when the Navy has to compete for recruits, and pay the more skilled sailors large bonuses for them to stay in the service.
In the DDG-1000, many of the pumps and valves that traditionally have been made of metal are being manufactured from composite materials that are far more expensive but require less maintenance. The elimination of high-maintenance parts, in itself, will allow the Navy to take many sailors off the ship.
Automated guns and computerized surveillance sensors also will require fewer people in the future, says Patricia Hamburger, who oversees the “human systems integration” of new ship designs at the Naval Sea Systems Command. While it may take 12 sailors to stand watch on current destroyers, only one or two will be needed for DDG-1000. Kitchen and dishwashing duties will be gone too, in favor of pre-packaged foods, she says. “A lot of the work that is not beneficial to a person’s career was designed out of the ship.” Duties that require sailors to stare at screens for long periods are prime candidates for automation, she says. “That’s not a good use of people’s time. Our attention is not that good.”
Etnyre suggests that smaller crews should be able to manage just fine, except when there are emergencies, such as major damage to the vessel, when every sailor aboard must help save the ship. “If you don’t have to do that kind of damage control, optimal manning works,” Etnyre says.
The DDG-1000, when it’s deployed in 2014, will serve as a test case for how a ship with fewer sailors can still overcome severe damage.
“In the DDG-1000, damage control is a huge area,” says Hamburger.
One of the most dreaded scenarios at sea — a fire aboard a ship — is the reason why commanders prefer to have larger crews. Hamburger says that DDG-1000 and the Littoral Combat Ship will have high-pressure water-mist sprinklers that will extinguish fires more quickly than current equipment and cause less damage, eliminating the need for large numbers of firefighters.
To protect the ship from flooding, DDG-1000 will have more water-tight compartments so areas that are flooded can be locked and the ship can still stay afloat without major disruptions.
While officials insist that the Littoral Combat Ship should realistically be able to operate with a crew of 40, studies have yet to prove that. Experts say that the Navy has not yet demonstrated that such a small crew would not endure excessive fatigue and, consequently, show diminished performance. “LCS is the most challenging case,” says one official who did not want to be quoted by name. “This has given people the most heartburn because it’s such a radical reduction.”
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