ARTICLE

March 2004

Navy Downsizing Force to Pay for New Ships

‘Sea Warrior’ program will determine which jobs will stay, which will go

by Sandra I. Erwin

To meet growing demands for U.S. maritime presence around the world and adequately support the war-fighting regional commanders, the Navy says it needs more ships, but fewer sailors.

The desired expansion of the fleet—from 292 to about 375 ships—would be financed largely with cutbacks in personnel.

Although the Defense Department has not endorsed the Navy’s 375-ship goal, the expectation is that the Pentagon would not object, if the Navy paid for the additional ships with internal savings, without seeking significantly larger shipbuilding budgets.

Those internal savings only can be attained, officials said, by reducing the number of people in the Navy.

The exact scope of the downsizing has not yet been set, but it is clear that the chief of naval operations, Adm. Vernon Clark, has made this a top priority for the next two years.

“The CNO is going to recapitalize the Navy, and he is going after end-strength,” said Rear Adm. Robert Cox, director of total force programming, manpower and information resource management.

Some level of downsizing already is underway. For fiscal year 2005, the Navy is budgeting for 7,900 fewer people. A senior Navy official who briefed reporters last month said the cuts would generate savings of $254 million.

The Navy believes it can simultaneously deploy more ships and downsize the force, because ships will be more technologically advanced and staffed with smaller crews. Those crews, however, will be better educated and more skilled than ever before, Cox said in a briefing to the Surface Navy Association, in Arlington, Va.

Cox is overseeing efforts to restructure the human resources, training and education programs in the Navy, under a project called “Sea Warrior.”

Although the mandate from the CNO is to make the Navy more efficient and trim the size of ship crews, Cox said the approach is not to indiscriminately “cut to some level,” but rather to “analytically understand the work requirements and size the force accordingly.”

The current force is based on a “Cold War structure” that fails to meet the increasingly complex needs of U.S. combatant commanders, said Cox. “The combatant commander wants ‘effects-based’ operations, a specific effect applied to a specific mission,” he said. The Sea Warrior program was designed to both satisfy the combatant commanders’ demand for more skilled personnel and to improve the retention of that skilled workforce by making the Navy a more attractive employer, offering better career opportunities.

In the process, the Navy will eliminate those jobs that no longer are viewed as relevant.

The high retention rates of the past two years have resulted in overstaffing, said Vice Adm. Timothy W. LaFleur, commander of naval surface forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet. He said ships today are manned at 104 percent, on average.

Cox expects the official “launch” of Sea Warrior to get under way in the fall of 2005. At that time, the Navy will introduce a “wholesale change of our human resource system,” in the form of new career management programs and job requirements.

The Navy’s workforce today is about 960,000 strong—including active duty, reservists, civilians and contractors. The size of the future force has yet to be determined, but “it is going to be less than what it’s now,” said Cox.

Shipbuilders and weapon developers, meanwhile, will be expected to design systems that maximize automation and lower the demand for human labor, he noted.

“We have to be very cautious and understand the implications of applying man-power.”

The Navy views “people” as its biggest expense. Of the Navy’s approximately $119 billion budget for 2005, about $37 billion goes to personnel costs, and $35 billion to operations and maintenance.

But replacing people with technology is harder than it sounds, said Gregory Maxwell, director of human systems integration at the Naval Sea Systems Command. His office is leading efforts to make future ships operate with less manpower.

“We’re constantly challenged with technology as the solution to taking people off of ships, and people say that like it’s easy,” Maxwell said at a news conference. “I don’t believe that all technology can replace sailors one for one. In fact, I think that needs to be assessed.”

The Navy already has introduced a series of programs, such as “optimal manning” and “distance support,” aimed at shrinking ship crews, explained LaFleur.

Under distance support, technicians are taken off ships and based ashore. They assist sailors by email or phone.

The Navy also is saving millions of dollars in labor and maintenance by scrapping outdated “legacy systems,” LaFleur told reporters.

A case in point is the decommissioning of old frigates and Spruance-class destroyers. By eliminating those ships from the active force, the Navy saves untold millions by not having to maintain supply lines, schoolhouses and other “tails that tend to be pretty expensive,” said LaFleur.

As part of the optimal manning program, he said, the Navy reduced the crews aboard the LHD amphibious ships by 100 people. Many destroyers have taken off 50 people, and cruisers eliminated about 30.

Despite senior leadership support for these downsizing initiatives, skeptics wonder whether personnel cuts realistically can be expected to generate enough savings for the new ships the Navy wants, namely the DDX destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship.

The CNO has endorsed plans to possibly buy up to 24 DDXs and 56 LCSs. Each DDX would cost $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion, and each LCS would run about $220 million, without including mission equipment.

The Navy faces a procurement “funding crunch,” said Ronald O’Rourke, a naval analyst at the Congressional Research Service. The expectation that cuts in the force will yield the desired shipbuilding funds may be impractical, he said in a speech to the SNA symposium.

“Just how deep do the force structure cuts have to be?” he asked.

“Can the Navy live with those cuts for 15 years? That is how long the Navy wants to keep simultaneous procurement of two surface combatants.”

O’Rourke also cautioned that, by adding so many new ships to the surface force, the Navy may be unnecessarily sacrificing programs in other areas, such as undersea warfare and aviation.

“Trying to fund surface warfare platforms at the expense of other communities may not be a smart move in the long run,” he said. “Be careful.”

Back To Top