How lean manning saps morale, puts sailors at risk

[CommunityEditor]

In the summer of 2001, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark tasked his leaders with finding ways to cut the size of the crews needed to operate and maintain ships.

He understood then that in just a few years, the fleet would include a new family of minimally manned ships: the littoral combat ship, DD(X) and CG(X). Clark wanted sailors ready to drive existing ships with reduced crews so they’d be prepared when the new ships came.

Today, the skyrocketing cost of LCS threatens its long-term viability; the DD(X) program, now called DDG 1000, has been reduced to three ships; and the follow-on cruiser remains at least a decade away.

In the meantime, the centerpiece of the Navy’s warship arsenal remains the same: Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers. Both classes require lots of sailors to run safely and effectively, and will be sailing for years to come.

But the Navy has cut end strength by 60,000 sailors, acquired a new mission that requires deploying 10,000 to 14,000 sailors a year into the war zone on individual augmentee tours, and created the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, which requires thousands more sailors.

The result: a drastically undermanned and overworked fleet. Keeping the minimal manning model in force has worn out the crews consigned to proving the concept. That has led to slipshod maintenance, failed inspections and, in extreme cases, mishaps.

Adm. John Harvey, head of Fleet Forces Command, is doing the right thing by soliciting concerns from sailors and actively reapportioning seagoing and shore billets where they are most needed. Navy manpower planners now must take a hard look at true manning requirements, find inefficiencies ashore and properly man deploying units. If, by the end of all that, they don’t have enough sailors, they need to ask Congress for more.

[CommunityEditor]

When the cruiser Port Royal ran aground in February off Hawaii, Navy investigators found a number of reasons for the failure. The ship’s navigational gear was broken. Watchstanders lost their situational awareness. The fathometer wasn’t working, so the ship had no way of assessing depth.

But the investigation also found two other problems that have become all too common in the surface fleet: The captain had barely slept, and qualified lookouts who could have spotted the disaster in time were stuck doing jobs in other parts of the ship.

Both problems — too much work to do and not enough people to do it — are byproducts of the fleet’s years-old practice of “optimal manning,” slowly whittling the number of bodies in each command throughout the fleet.

Interviews with sailors, officers, leadership and experts, and a review of internal Navy documents, illustrate several problems in the fleet caused or worsened by shrinking crews:

• Increasing workdays and precious little time for rest.

• Fewer people to maintain or repair equipment aboard ship.

• Crew members with valuable expertise being pulled for other jobs — and never replaced.

• Lower material readiness of ships — and even mishaps.

A site visit report from the Naval Inspector General’s office to commands in Hampton Roads, Va., laid out the problems, listing the sailor deficit as the issue commanders complained about most.

“Manning issues abounded throughout the region and clearly represented the greatest concern with regard to commanders’ ability to safely and effectively accomplish their missions,” said the report, which was completed this spring and obtained by Navy Times through the Freedom of Information Act. “Numerous manpower reduction initiatives, combined with manpower ‘taxes’ on commands to accomplish external missions, severely test many commands’ ability to function.”

Comments from sailors show just how tough life has become.

“Everything from standing watches and back-to-back deployments is getting really bad,” one first class petty officer told Navy Times. He asked that his name not be used because he is still serving on active duty.

“Just look at the surface side of the house. These sailors are standing watches, then going to work, then going to stand another watch. You tell me when these sailors are getting any sleep, or time to eat,” he said.

Ensign Eric Wynn, of the cruiser Vicksburg, said he thought the effects were even worse for junior officers, who work, stand watches and study to get qualified as surface warfare officers in a climate of smaller crews.

“A SWO JO gets a hard lesson in time management during the first 18 months on board,” Wynn said, estimating that young officers get only three or four hours of sleep on busy days.

“Lean manning at sea means one thing: sleep deprivation,” he said. “Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes, injuries, neglected equipment maintenance and repair, and poor crew morale. All of these affect mission readiness and success. We’ve known for years that sleep deprivation can have the same effects as being drunk.”

Big Navy knows the fleet is unhappy with lean manning. Adm. John Harvey, head of Fleet Forces Command, used one of the earliest posts on his official blog to ask sailors what they thought about manning in the Navy. And he acknowledged to Navy Times on Sept. 28 that the Navy was still adjusting to its current end strength of about 330,000 people, after cutting about 60,000 sailors over the previous six years.

“We’ve hit where we think our floor is,” he said. “Now, how do we best live with this number? I know we have not got it right in all the particulars.”

So Harvey and other fleet leaders are working on a series of moves to put sailors in hard-hit ratings where they are needed most. For example, Harvey wants to consolidate nine amphibious squadrons into seven, send more fire controlmen to Aegis ballistic-missile defense ships and send more qualified engineers to the gator fleet.

But even though the Navy has stopped shrinking, it probably won’t grow significantly for years — if ever. And the cost of sailors, which is the Navy’s most significant expense, won’t abate, either. That is why Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead and other top leaders remain committed to reducing ships’ crew sizes as much as possible, because every body taken off a ship frees up money the Navy can spend elsewhere.

“We must strive to put in place the systems that allow us to reduce the crew sizes as much as we can,” Roughead said last year in a meeting with Navy Times reporters and editors.

“I do not advocate reducing people just to reduce people. We have to be able to compensate with technology or something that needs to take place … but my thrust is, as we look to the future, and as we build new ship classes, we have to bring the ship’s crew down,” he said.

How did this happen?
One of the first major advocates for reducing the sizes of Navy crews was then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark, who spoke often about the high price of sailors. So, in the early 2000s, he tasked the Navy with figuring out ways to trim crews.

At the time, Clark knew the fleet needed to prepare for a new “family” of minimum-crew surface ships. The new warships all would need fewer sailors than any earlier ships of their size, so the Navy had to know how to operate them before the ships showed up, leaders said.

“It’s huge,” said then-Vice Adm. Timothy LaFleur, who was commander of Naval Surface Forces, in 2003. “In the ships of the future, like [the littoral combat ship] and DD(X), we’re going to have optimally manned crews. When DD(X) and LCS arrive, we have to have that infrastructure in place.”

In 2002, Clark’s Navy Staff issued a change to the Navy Standard Workweek, the template planners use to assess how sailors use their time and, as such, how many sailors the Navy needs.

“Manpower requirements shall reflect the minimum quantity and quality of manpower required for peacetime and wartime to effectively and efficiently accomplish the activity’s mission,” said the message, signed by then-Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Norb Ryan.

The Navy extended the time allotted for work from 67 hours a week to 70 hours — which, when computed with the fleet’s manning formulas, meant the Navy could change its requirements to need fewer people, said retired Cmdr. Bill Hatch, a manning expert who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Since then, cruisers and destroyers, the bulk of the surface fleet, have been the hardest hit: Each has lost 40 to 50 sailors since the onset of lean manning, according to information provided by Naval Surface Forces. Frigates have lost 30 to 40 sailors.

The ships and their equipment haven’t changed — they still need constant attention and maintenance to stay ready to deploy and fight. So, with the same amount of work and fewer people, each sailor works more and gets less time off.

The decisions of the early 2000s began a drawdown that is only now abating, Harvey told Navy Times, although he stressed that the fleet had also added new obligations along the way.

“What we’ve done — fast forward to today — we have shrunk the Navy by about 60,000 sailors in the past six to 6½ years. And along the way, we invented the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, expanded the Seabees and expanded [explosive ordnance disposal]. We’ve done a lot of expansion along the way,” he said.

As the Navy shrunk, officials in the fleets also made internal policy changes to call for fewer sailors, Hatch said.

For example, as part of the Navy’s “Smart Ship” concept for cruisers, fleet officials designated some equipment on the ships as needing “condition-based maintenance,” so a sailor would work on a system only when it malfunctioned or broke, rather than making regularly scheduled checks. With less gear to work on regularly, a ship’s crew could shed a few people.

Another way for the fleet to require fewer people was to set up personnel requirements that assumed lower levels of readiness. For example, if Navy officials assumed a destroyer needed only a “limited” capability under normal sailing conditions, its crew would need only six signalmen, as opposed to “full” capability of 15 signalmen.

Six signalmen on a destroyer cost the Navy $342,000 per year in 2008 dollars, but 15 cost $855,000 per year, according a Naval Postgraduate School manning case study. At about $57,000 a year per signalman, that difference of nine billets, over 30 destroyers, with each ship designed to serve for 40 years, means the Navy eventually can bank more than $615 million in savings.

That dynamic, extrapolated to the entire force, means smaller crews save the Navy billions.

There are still more factors at work in today’s fleet that take away crew members. Many commands must send away sailors to serve as individual augmentees on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Although they’re no longer on board, in the eyes of the Navy bureaucracy, they still count as members of a ship’s company. So even today’s smaller official crew sizes can be deceiving, sailors told Navy Times.

When ships are in port, they are expected to contribute crew members to do guard duty and other tasks needed by the base commander, pulling sailors away from time they could be training with shipmates to do their normal jobs, the IG report says.

Overall, the Navy has adopted a culture of making do — of permanently covering for people who are “temporarily” gone or were never there at all, sailors said.

That mind-set is taking its toll.

“Every commanding officer will make mission — people will always get the job done,” Hatch said. “You’ll work them to death, but what’s the cost? Fatigue, [low] retention and potentially, damage.”

A fleet of sleepwalkers
Information Technician 2nd Class (SW) Chris Tierney, of the destroyer John Paul Jones, estimated that sailors on his ship slept three to five hours a night for weeks at a time.

But endemic weariness isn’t just unpleasant. It can be deadly, said Capt. Nicholas Davenport, a fatigue expert with the Naval Safety Center.

“Fatigue affects mental capability in many different ways. The most obvious is where people just fall asleep — they’re not functional at all. We also know that these little ‘micro-sleeps’ go on, periods of seconds in the sleep mode, and a person is not aware of that. People can actually be asleep in those seconds. The more and more fatigued they get, their higher-level cognitive function degrades in a lot of strange ways.”

Although lean manning has affected all parts of the Navy, the effects of sleep deprivation are more acute in the surface force, Davenport said, because of its culture of endurance. Aviators learn early in their careers that their performance depends on being well-rested, he said, and pilots and aircrew members don’t fly if they haven’t had a minimum amount of down time. But the surface force has developed traditions of hardiness and standing long watches that are difficult to overcome.

“In the past, we’ve kind of had this heroic mentality that says, ‘We’re well trained, we’re drilled, we’re professional,’” Davenport said. “‘Yeah, we’re gonna be tired, we’re fatigued, but we know how to manage it.’ But the science, in fact, shows us that’s not true. As people get more and more fatigued, they do have degradation of their performance in a whole variety of ways.”

Some ratings get it even worse than others. One example came from Operations Specialist 2nd Class (SW) Steven Burkett, who, like many in his rating, stands “port and starboard” watches because the Navy doesn’t fully fund the OS rating, Hatch said. Burkett described how draining it was to spend weeks at sea getting precious little sleep and trying to stand a watch in the combat information center.

“While other rates on the weekend underway sleep in, or watch TV all day, the OSes are standing watch. Then of course we get in trouble if we are caught dozing off in a room that is dark with blue lighting, with the [air conditioning] going, and the ship rocking back and forth like a cradle. When you’re tired, you’re tired. Yet when we try to explain why, it’s always our fault, and our responsibility to get enough sleep.”

Life gets difficult
Smaller crews don’t just cause sleeplessness; they make life harder for everyone on board. Navy Times heard many other examples from sailors: In one, a third class surface sonar technician spent six months of a seven-month deployment on mess duty because the ship’s supply department needed extra help, meaning he didn’t get any time at sea to do his actual job.

Officials at a fleet maintenance symposium Oct. 1 said a shortage of qualified enginemen has caused problems running the diesel engines on the fleet’s amphibious ships.

And when the cruiser San Jacinto returned from a deployment in March and got ready for a material inspection by the Board of Inspection and Survey, its captain realized the ship couldn’t get in shape to pass with the core crew he had available.

The ship needed help from as many as 87 people from 16 commands to get into shape for InSurv — proof, its commander wrote in a “lessons learned” message obtained by Navy Times, that today’s surface ships don’t have the manning they need.

“The significant labor pool which rallied in support of SJA contributed greatly to preparations for the M.I.,” wrote Capt. John Cordle. “Without this additional manpower SJA would not have been ready for the M.I.”

The overwork and fatigue caused by smaller crews has also led to accidents at sea. Port Royal’s commander, Capt. John Carroll, had only 4½ hours of sleep in 24 hours, and 15 hours’ sleep over three days, as he and his crew worked to get underway, the Navy’s investigation found.

Carroll admitted he was tired and said his fatigue was made worse as he oversaw the launch of a small boat carrying home sea trial assessors just before the grounding. What’s more, although the ship had qualified lookouts, they were helping out the supply department, working as food service attendants in the mess, and not standing watch as the ship came into port.

Before the Port Royal mishap occurred, a December 2008 study by a student at the Naval Postgraduate School linked mishaps and small crew sizes on frigates.

For his master’s thesis, Lt. Patrick Lazzaretti compared Class A through D mishaps aboard 27 frigates from 1998 to 2005 with the ships’ crew sizes and found that as crews shrunk, the incidence of mishaps increased. Although the study did not name individual ships or list numbers of mishaps, its findings show that the rise and fall of crew sizes tracked with the fall and rise of incidents.

In today’s fleet, even crews on station, with no mechanical problems, have to worry about whether they’ll be able to make do if a vital sailor is hurt, killed, or pulled off the crew for some other reason.

“Recently a sailor was injured, requiring him to be flown off the ship,” said Tierney, of the John Paul Jones. “With him went not just a valuable sailor and a great shipmate, but also the valuable knowledge he possesses, leaving no one with the necessary knowledge in case of equipment failure or a casualty.”

The destroyer Decatur, a ship designed for about 330 people, sailed from San Diego in May with a crew of 239. Its commanding officer said he felt he had enough people to do his job, but he acknowledged he was leading a team whose starters had to play for the entire game.


To read the complete article, please go here ---> http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/1...nning_101909w/

[bb stacker]

seems like the same thing the af is dealing with. either lower the ops tempo or increase manning.

[garhkal]

Yup. All that 'downsizing' is now coming back to bite them in the butt.

[padog]

After reading "How Lean Manning Saps Morale, put Sailors at Risk," article last week I was appauled that we consistently say we are working smarter not harder yet no one can see the bare bone issues with our fleet. We brag a new slogan about a total force and preach about work-life balance, yet we continually force unreasonable (and dangerous) requests for our sailors. Port and Starboard is a common watch-standing practice...Junior Officers and Enlisted sailors work all day (or night), stand watches then work on quals...missing meals and precious sleep along the way. Additionally, we tag the best for other missions or send them to GSA/IA because the joint military world is short bodies.

With all that, upper echelon wonders, why are we failing inspections? Why are we running aground? Why are COs relieved? Why is PMS and "smartness" on the waterfront in shambles?

Why? Because we justify the reduction of sailors (who, by the way a ship would not operate with) as a waiverable commodity. We have lost care or concern about their well-being, their rest, their exercise and nutrition, their education, their liberty and their FAMILIES. We view them as a bottom line price tag, as is evident in the article. "We save $57,000/year per Signalmen, saving $615M in 40years" but yet we spend that (and more) on the cost to refurbish ships that have accidents, ships that don't get properly maintained, ships that spend extensive times in shipyards for overhauls and on contractors who are paid WELL above the $57,000 that they are saving by eliminating sailors.

We are a nation of convenience and we have brought that convenience to our fleet. We say "reduce sailors" because we have high-tech ships (that are still working bugs). We say "reduce sailors" because we have GS and Contracted employees in every workspace and we say "reduce sailors" because we have technology that teaches the remaining sailors a "skill set" via a computer screen.

When I joined, sailors fixed ships because THEY were the technical experts, sailors did all facets of the Navy's jobs because THEY were the trainers, sailors were the experts because THEY had true-to-blood training and interaction with humans and mentors, and sailors enjoyed down time with family because THEIR shipmates stood the watch.

Is it so hard to see why we are failing across the board?

Go back to the basics...the boot camp training with standards, the "A" and "C" schools with human instructors (not CBT), SWOs who don't qualify until they truly show the standard, and to sailors...the backbone and experts in the Navy. Remove red tape, reduce spending where it will truly be beneficial and give the COs back their crew to operate safely, swiftly and expertly...then we can be a "Total Force".

[Battleshort]

BRAVO!

Well stated padog.

[garhkal]

Preach it brother!

[ElectricElvis]

We just had a mandatory survey to see how many hours we're working a day. I ended up with about fourteen and a half. That's doing work, not standing watch, not eating chow, not attending to my career details such as visiting disbursing or personnel, or sleeping, or attending sickcall or seeing to my personal hygiene and uniform maintenance.

It's high time Big Navy woke up and saw what the Bean Counters are doing to us.

[CDE]

How many times do we hear, "take care of your sailors?" How can we take care of our sailors when ships are using OSs and SKs to clean engineering spaces - and in some cases do their maintenance?

HINT TO THE NAVY: You can "take care" of the sailors buy providing ships the proper amount of people for which the ship was designed! Not 90% not 95%...ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MINIMUM...and that doesn't just mean total end strength, it means the correct ratings, the correct pay grades, with the correct NECs!