A room ashore for nearly every shipboard sailor - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

A room ashore for nearly every shipboard sailor

Within three years, almost all junior sailors living aboard ships in port will trade their mass berthing, gang heads and daily inspections for two-person barracks rooms with private bathrooms, cable and Wi-Fi.

Those changes mark the final phase of Homeport Ashore, a plan with roots in a 1996 decision to pay housing allowances to single E-6s on sea duty. That trickled down to E-5s and E-4s, and now has been expanded to the more ambitious goal of getting every shipboard sailor a place to stay ashore when his ship is in port.

The program has already made great strides. Four years ago, 24,000 junior enlisted sailors lived on ships, and a generation ago, most enlisted sailors of all ranks called their gray hulls home.

But Navy officials say that giving even the most junior sailor a place to live ashore results in fewer discipline problems, fewer diplomatic incidents caused by sailor misconduct overseas in places such as Japan, and improved retention. The Navy’s top officer told Congress in March that he has accepted the challenge of moving all but 2,100 sailors into barracks by the end of 2010.

“As you know, we are working to move our E-3 and below and E-4 less than four years of service off our ships and provide them with [barracks space],” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on military construction March 11. “At the present time, I have 9,000 sailors who do not have accommodations. By the end of 2010, [that number should fall] to 2,100.”

There are 51,513 single sailors on sea duty in the E-1 through E-3 ranks and E-4 with less than four years.

No timeline has been set for when the final 2,100 sailors will move off their ships, and sailors who want to stay on ships will be allowed to do so. But Naval Installations Command spokesman Cmdr. William Fenick says Navy officials want to free up rooms for the sailors who want them “as soon as possible” after 2010 and are working on a Bachelor Housing Master Plan to make it happen.

Currently, all officers, all sailors E-5 and above, and E-4s with at least four years of service qualify for either a housing allowance or a barracks room when their ship is in port. Junior sailors on shore duty, those assigned to carrier air wings and those assigned to cramped vessels such as submarines, minesweepers, and most frigates and destroyers also rate a barracks room. Junior sailors with dependents qualify for family housing or BAH.

But single junior enlisted sailors assigned to aircraft carriers, amphibs, cruisers and some Military Sealift Command support ships can spend months living in cramped spaces aboard ships when their ship is in port.

‘Industrial environment’

Giving all sailors a place to stay ashore brings them in line with the other services, according to a top sailor in Japan.

“The only uniformed person ... that lives in the same place that they deploy — when they return to home port — is the surface fleet sailor. Not the Seabees, not the Marines, not the Army. When they come back home, they are all in [barracks],” Naval Forces Japan Regional Command Master Chief [AW/SW] Luis Cruz said. “The fleet surface sailor is the only one that is required and expected to live in the same place they deploy.

“It was OK when I was a young sailor,” said Cruz, whose first sea tours came aboard the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood and the aircraft carrier Midway in the early 1980s. “But by today’s standards, with what we try to get out of young men and women to stay in the Navy, that’s a big quality of life issue for them.”

Especially since a ship in port isn’t the most pleasant place to live.

“When the ships come back here to [Fleet Activities bases] Yokosuka and Sasebo, when they come back into port, they are in an industrial environment,” Cruz said. “They are chipping and painting. They’re getting the ship ready to go back to sea. But that’s where these young men and women are expected to live.”

While a Navy survey conducted last year showed an improvement in living conditions aboard ships, life onboard still has its drawbacks.

An online survey of 5,000 sailors conducted last year by the chief of naval personnel showed a doubling since 1999 — from 21 percent to 49 percent — of enlisted sailors who said they are satisfied with shipboard berthing and a tripling of enlisted sailors — from 12 percent to 37 percent — of sailors who said they were satisfied with shipboard privacy.

But only 29 percent said they had enough storage on ships. One-third said ships are too noisy; 45 percent said they do not get enough sleep; and less than half of those deployed aboard a ship were satisfied with their Internet access.

Navy officials say that offering sailors a room off the ship makes a difference.

“Even if you’re three or four folks to a room and you’ve only got one full bathtub and one hot burner plate, guess what? It’s a lot better than the 240-man bunkroom in the air department on Kitty Hawk, and you’ve got a place to call home,” said Rear Adm. James Kelly, who commands Naval Forces Japan. “And that’s got strategic implications,” he said, referring to a reduction in liberty incidents in Yokosuka with the availability of Homeport Ashore barracks.

“The number of incidents over the last bunch of years has come steadily down.” Homeport Ashore, he said, is “the obvious reason.”

‘Square pegs into round holes’

John Baker, director of fleet and family readiness for Naval Installations Command, said decisions as to which sailors will be allowed to move off ships first have been left to base and ship commanding officers. He said Navy’s objective is to make sure that commanding officers have rooms available for every sailor when ships are in port.

“We will empower base COs and tenant COs as far as what fits best for their sailors,” Baker said. “We are not trying to fit square pegs into round holes.”

“Each ship has a number of rooms assigned,” Naval Installations Command Force Master Chief (SW/AW) Kevin Blade said. “Currently, the shipboard leadership team has control of which sailors are selected to live ashore. This has really become a good motivator for some of the sailors that might have had some disciplinary problems at one time. They see if they stay out of trouble that they have an opportunity to live off the ship.”

Baker said recently opened barracks in San Diego; Mayport, Fla.; Pascagoula, Miss.; and Bremerton, Wash., have created 1,140 more racks for sailors. Four barracks in Mayport; Everett, Wash.; Bremerton; and Norfolk, Va., that are scheduled to open by October 2009 will create 1,844. And 4,000 one-person rooms are being built through public-private venture projects in San Diego and Norfolk. That comes to nearly 7,000 new beds that could be used by shipboard sailors or could free up space in older barracks when sailors on shore duty move into newer buildings.

Base commanders have been instructed to aggressively pursue other options for opening space to get sailors off ships.

Those options include:

* Beginning more public-private ventures with civilian contractors.

* Converting seldom used visitors’ quarters to Homeport Ashore barracks.

* Giving unused tracts of land near Navy bases to private contractors in exchange for their promise to build barracks in other locations.

* Asking host nations to build more barracks.

* Converting unused family housing units to barracks.

* Altering existing plans to build barracks in place of family housing.

Fenick says the 9,000 figure that Roughead gave to show the current number of shipboard sailors without shore rooms is an estimate — the actual number varies day by day as ships pull in and out of port, as sailors report from boot camp, and as others are promoted or leave the service.

Only Naval Station Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, has room for every sailor to live ashore; other bases — especially those at San Diego, Norfolk, Mayport, Yokosuka and Sasebo — almost always have large numbers of junior enlisted living aboard ships.

Baker said Homeport Ashore rooms, like every other Navy barracks except those used by Reserve Officers’ Training Corps students during summer training, will have private bathrooms. Most will house two sailors, but larger rooms could house three. They would be fully furnished, and because sailors could bring only limited amounts of personal possessions on ships, they would be equipped with amenities such as televisions and microwaves that sailors on shore duty would be expected to provide for themselves.

Another option, Blade said, is to provide BAH to junior E-4s, which would put them on par with senior E-4s and E-5s and up. Allowing E-4s to move off base would open space in existing barracks for junior sailors, he said. Still another option, Baker said, could be to make all single junior sailors eligible for a housing allowance, although he said Navy officials would like to pursue barracks options first.

“To have them move off base is another option, but we would like to explore our current inventory before we do that,” Baker said.

Navy officials say they are willing to temporarily cut corners on the Defense Department’s single room standard — a minimum of 90 square feet per service member, while the Homeport Ashore standard is 55 square feet per sailor — in order to get sailors off ships, with the understanding that by 2016, planned construction projects will allow every sailor to have a single room.

“If there is a sense of urgency to get sailors off ships, we can conceivably see where we could double up,” Baker said, adding that the Navy’s larger barracks rooms, with about 180 square feet of space, could house as many as three sailors.

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Gidget Fuentes and Mark D. Faram contributed to this report.