Defense News
June 21, 2010
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USN's Lean Manning Backlash
Report: Fewer Sailors Erode Readiness, Cut Ship Life
By Philip Ewing
An independent probe into the state of the U.S. Navy’s surface force has found widespread, systemic dysfunction in its manning, readiness and training, and repudiates much of the service’s high-level decision-making in the last decade.
The report — commissioned by Adm. John Harvey, the Fleet Forces commander, and produced by a seven-member panel led by retired Vice Adm. Phillip Balisle that included two serving rear admirals — warns that unless the Navy mends its ways, it will continue to see surface ships condemned in inspections and sail unready to fight.
Although sailors and Navy observers have pointed before to many of the problems and trends that Balisle’s “fleet review panel” uncovered, the report provides the clearest, most detailed look yet at how a preoccupation with saving money drove the surface Navy to a low point.
“It appears the effort to derive efficiencies has overtaken our culture of effectiveness,” the Balisle report says. “The material readiness of the surface force is well below acceptable levels to support reliable, sustained operations at sea and preserve ships to their full service life expectancy. Moreover, the present readiness trends are down.”
How did it happen? Driven by top-level pressure to be as efficient as possible, Navy leaders in the early 2000s made a series of interrelated decisions to cut sailors, reform training, “streamline” fleet maintenance and take other steps in keeping with the philosophy then en vogue of “running the Navy like a business.”
The fleet organized itself into layers of “enterprises,” which thickened already legendary layers of military bureaucracy and made command relationships difficult to understand, the panel found.
At the time, every commander assumed what his colleagues were doing would make up for what he was doing in his own area: For example, as the fleets reduced the number of people aboard ships, they expected incoming sailors to be so well prepared by the simultaneous “revolution in training” that every young new expert could take the place of many previous journeymen. As it happened, the “revolution” trained sailors by computer, and many of them arrived at their first ships never having touched the equipment they were to operate. Ships began to fall into bad shape.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead said that the move to “optimal manning” made practical sense earlier this decade, but “changes to the structure ashore, changes in some of the oversight functions” have come to hurt ships’ ability to train, do maintenance and fight.
Between 1994 and 1999, about 3.5 percent of ships failed inspections by the Board of Inspection and Survey, Balisle’s commission found. From 2005 to 2009, almost 14 percent of ships failed. Not only does this hurt the fleet of today, it means the Navy can’t keep around the ships it says are vital to building its hoped-for fleet of at least 313.
“Independent reports indicate that if the surface force stays on the course that it is presently on, DDGs will achieve 25-27 years of service life instead of the 30 years planned and 40 years of extended service life desired,” the report says.
Even the highest-profile and most vital system aboard the Navy’s front-line warships — Aegis — fails much more often than panel members expected; technical problems with cruisers’ and destroyers’ SPY-1 radars have gone up by 45 percent since 2004, the report said. But because of smaller crews, poor training and the complicated bureaucracy of getting repairs or replacement parts, many ships sail while “consciously accepting degradation.”
“Technicians can’t get the money to buy spare parts,” according to the report. “They haven’t been trained to the requirement. They can’t go to their supervisor because, in the case of the [destroyers], they likely are the supervisor. They can’t repair the radar through no fault of their own, but over time, the non-responsiveness of the Navy system, the acceptance of the SPY degradation by the Navy system and their seniors, officers and chiefs alike, will breed (if not already) a culture that tolerates poor system performance…. Sailors are losing their sense of ownership of their equipment and are more apt to want others to fix it.”
The panel found other examples of how it says the fleet tolerates mediocrity, including low levels of technical skill: “[I]t appears that a significant portion of the surface force is lacking in [personal qualifications], and this in turn suggests that many of our ships’ leaders are at worst not dedicated to training their sailors, or, more likely, simply are more tolerant of non-completion. Recent incident reports wherein non-qualified watch standers made critical errors tend to provide further confirmation.”
These trends, combined with a longstanding surface culture to “get underway at all costs,” put ships in danger because they set sail even if they’re not ready, the report said.
Although it doesn’t mention incidents by name, the report’s description gibes with several high-profile mishaps, including the 2009 grounding of the cruiser Port Royal off Honolulu and a March buoy strike by the destroyer The Sullivans off Bahrain. Inexperienced watch-standers and broken equipment helped contribute to both those accidents, each of which resulted in the firing of the ship’s commanding officer.
Balisle, now a top executive with DRS Technologies, headed the Naval Sea Systems Command until his retirement in 2005. He declined to comment on his report through a spokesman.
Capt. Cate Mueller, a spokeswoman for Fleet Forces Command, said Balisle’s report didn’t tell the Navy anything it didn’t already know.
“Fleet leaders, based upon their own prior analysis, believed that many of the problems that the panel subsequently identified — including manning shortfalls, inadequate shipboard and shore maintenance, and insufficient training — were taking a toll on surface force readiness,” she said. “In that regard, the fleet review panel confirmed, in context and in detail, what fleet leaders had suspected.”
She also reaffirmed what senior Navy leaders have hinted for the past few months: They’re swinging the pendulum in the other direction by looking to increase crew sizes, improve training and re-teach the fleet to maintain its ships and equipment.
But Mueller would not comment on specific recommendations in Balisle’s report, including precise numbers for how many sailors the panel thinks the Navy needs: 4,496 new sea billets and 2,028 shore and maintenance billets, for a total of 6,524 new billets. Those numbers are based on an overall recommendation that surface ships be automatically manned at 110 percent over their base level, to account for the roughly 8 percent effective loss of crew the committee discovered across the board.
Mueller would only concede that “it's safe to say that the intent is to shift billets from shore to sea ... except those being shifted into shore maintenance billets from other shore billets.”
The Balisle report also recommends fleet commanders impose “red lines” below which ships can’t fall and still get underway. For example, a ship just emerging from a long period in the yard would need to be certified by Naval Surface Forces to ensure it had qualified sailors and working equipment to be able to operate safely.
Port Royal went to sea on the first day after a four-month yard period, but its commanding officer wasn’t qualified and much of its critical navigation gear wasn’t working. Moreover, the ship’s watch-standers weren’t confident about where exactly it was, all of which contributed to the ship getting stuck on a coral reef for four days just off Honolulu Airport, heavily damaging the Aegis cruiser.