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The end of the Navy’s drawdown may well be in sight, but the effects of those cuts will be felt by thousands of sailors for years to come.
That’s because it’s not just bodies and billets that are going away. As billets are slashed — nearly 18,000 over the next six years — there will be fewer shore-duty jobs for all and lower advancement chances for many who are left standing.
The bulk of those drawdown cuts, 14,300 all told, will happen by the end of fiscal 2009. The Navy is marching toward a 322,000 end strength by 2013.
Already in the works is a plan to eliminate 4,000 billets beginning in 2008. For the most part, the cuts will potentially impact 46,000 sailors in 10 ratings.
Half of those billets are slated to be carved out of the personnel specialist rating. The other half will be felt by sailors in engineering and combat systems ratings serving in regional maintenance centers Navy-wide.
And the search for more billets to cut goes on.
The good news: Navy officials freely acknowledge the negative impact these cuts are having on those who must deal with the fallout. Future cuts, they say, will better take into account such career-crunching consequences.
“In the past, we have let [individual Navy communities] go out there and find ways to save money,” said Rear Adm. Michael LeFever, head of manpower plans for the chief of personnel in Arlington, Va. “But what those organizations have not done is fully understood the full range of impacts of those moves.”
Cutting billets, he said, not only affects sea-to-shore rotations but advancement chances, too.
“These things all tie in together,” he said.
That said, the hunt for more cuts is not over.
“We are looking very hard at the billet base right now to determine if we have the right mix in all ratings,” he said.
A “Sea to Shore Duty Working Group” is examining each rating and community in the Navy, trying to determine what the correct billet balance is for each career field. That examination could be good news for sailors in some beleaguered ratings.
“In some extreme cases, I’m even going to consider buying [billets] back or telling [communities] they need to convert [billets] from civilian to military in order to ensure the right sea/shore rotation is in place and the right billet structure is there to support it,” LeFever said.
Regardless, the next few years will be a bumpy ride for thousands of sailors who remain in the ranks.
Rotten rating
One painfully obvious victim of the force cuts is the Navy’s personnel specialist rating.
Since the personnelman and disbursing clerk ratings merged Oct. 1, 2005, advancement opportunity in the new, combined personnel specialist rating has been bad, way below Navy averages in each of the petty officer ranks. In fact, it’s the worst overall advancement opportunity in the Navy — and LeFever says it’s going to stay that way for a while.
The rating’s dive to the depths of advancement opportunity began when officials started shaving billets from the combined rating — normal in any merger.
But the problem got bad, quickly, thanks to a separate effort to move personnel specialists off Navy ships and send the duty ashore.
To make matters worse, many of the active-duty, shore-based PS billets are being converted to civilian jobs, making those in the PS rating feel like an endangered species.
By the end of fiscal 2010, the PS community will be half its present size. Some 2,000 cuts will begin in fiscal 2008 in a community that had just 4,700 sailors to begin with.
Officials candidly confirm that PS sailors will simply have to suck it up and stick it out — or find another career field.
“Very candidly, because of the drawdown and the magnitude of the numbers,” LeFever said, “we’re looking at opportunity staying about where it is for at least the next six exam cycles.”
“It will get better,” he added. “But it’s going to take time.”
Officials are trying to mitigate the cuts by spreading them over three years. Still, that won’t offer much relief for struggling sailors.
“We have started a working group from around the Navy to look at other ways to fix the problems in the PS rating as well,” LeFever said. “They are looking to see if we have the right mix of billets in the [PS] community and ensure we don’t break anymore china during this drawdown.”
The bottom line for those PS sailors unwilling to wait three years to advance: Find another Navy job.
“We are looking at converting some of them to [Navy counselor] and [legalman], and other ratings as well,” LeFever said.
Shrinking shore billets
Also being cut in half over the next two years will be the number of active-duty billets at the Navy’s five regional maintenance centers in Norfolk, Va.; San Diego; Bremerton and Bangor, Wash.; Mayport, Fla.; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
“We did a comprehensive review of nearly 4,000 billets and, in the end, determined that we could cut about 2,200 from the inventory,” said Rear Adm. John Orzalli, who commands the five maintenance centers from his headquarters in Norfolk. “This was part of a big push to look at the functions we use sailors for and to ensure that made sense from a career standpoint.”
What officials found was that nearly half the billets filled by sailors had direct ties to follow-on billets at sea, but the other half were skills sailors did while on shore duty and never used again.
Those disposable jobs will be eliminated or converted to civilian jobs starting next year.
Officials say sailors leaving active duty with experience in those skills will have the opportunity to compete for the new civilian jobs.
In fact, Orzalli said, after the initial billet review, the community managers at Navy Personnel Command made the decision to retain 126 of the billets maintenance officials had slated to cut, knocking the total cuts down to nearly 2,050.
While it seems to make sense, some deck-plate leaders are worried. They’re concerned that not only will these cuts result in sailors not having enough shore billets to rotate into, but that those same sailors will not have the opportunity to learn many critical skills they and their commands will need once those sailors rotate back to sea duty. Skills such as repairing and reconditioning valves and other engineering equipment are invaluable assets, they say.
But Orzalli contends such concerns are unfounded. In fact, he said, the work being done at the maintenance facilities is being beefed up. Sailors now work alongside civilian shipyard workers, learning those skills and earning critical naval enlisted classifications.
“We will still retain many billets where we train journeyman-level sailors in these various skill sets that are directly tied to billets in the fleet,” he said. “We will also retain other billets as necessary to help with the sea-shore rotation for some ratings.
The nearly 2,050 billets slated to go away will mostly impact sailors in sea-intensive communities such as engineering and combat systems.
But in all, 45 ratings will see some shore-duty billets eliminated in the move.
While officials say no sailor will lose his shore duty because of these cuts or be sent back to sea involuntarily, the Navy is in transition from the sea-to-shore rotations into a new system that will instead classify duty as “operational” and “operational support.”
What this means is that there’s a new way of doing business in the works. Sailors in these ratings will eventually have “rating relevant,” nonoperational duty when not in deploying units — but that type of duty, officials say, won’t begin until the Littoral Combat Ship hits the fleet in significant numbers sometime after 2011. So until then, many of these sailors will have to do recruiting or boot camp duty if they’re going to have any shore duty at all.
Though funding for these billets officially will be cut in April 2008 — resulting in $250 million in military manpower savings — not all sailors will be out of those jobs until 2011, officials say, allowing for a phase-out of active-duty people and replacement by civilians.
But officials would like to accelerate those changes, too. As a result, they are going to offer the new Sea Duty Incentive Pay to these sailors to cut their shore duty short and head back to sea; officials hope about one-third of the more than 2,000 will take them up on the offer.
In addition, they’re planning that another third will ether retire or get out, thinning the ranks. The remaining third will simply rotate back to sea when their normal tours are over.
The bottom line, LeFever said, is that the Navy is changing and the future will have more sailors working closer to, if not on, the waterfront — and cuts of unneeded shore-duty billets are a tough but necessary consequence.
“We’ve got good things happening, and we’re moving in the right direction,” he said. “But boy, at times it can be tough on some folks.”
