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SecNav sounds off on firings, crew size

The Navy’s long-term ability to take on its worldwide missions depends on maintaining a force of 11 carriers, according to the service’s top civilian.

The force can make do with fewer flattops for a while, Navy Secretary Donald Winter added, but in the long run, the Navy may not be able to fulfill its commitments if the permanent number drops to 10.

“We have a series of commitments that we’ve made. Those have been worked out with the combatant commanders. On average, we believe that we can meet all of those commitments with 11 carriers,” Winter said.

Winter reaffirmed his support for the Navy’s current carrier force in a Jan. 12 interview with Navy Times reporters and editors, less than a month before the Navy is expected to request a short-term exemption from its legal requirement to maintain 11 carriers.

The Navy is seeking an official sanction for the 33-month gap between the scheduled decommissioning of the Enterprise in 2012 and the commissioning of the Gerald Ford in 2015. It will be the second year the Navy has made that request, after Congress turned down the first one, and it will be a time in which fiscal hardship and a strengthened Democratic Congress appear likely to generate discussion of fewer carriers.

The Navy can drop to 10, Winter said, for “a short period of time.”

“It’s a matter of managing how many carriers are in various availabilities at any given period of time,” Winter said. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re prepared to reduce the number of carriers from a long-term perspective.”

During the interview, Winter announced that he has agreed to stay on as Navy secretary for two more months at the most to keep continuity in the Pentagon early in President Barack Obama’s term. Winter said he has committed to stay until March 13 unless a replacement is nominated and confirmed before then.

Reflecting on his time in office, Winter said he had “no regrets whatsoever” and called it “an absolutely incredible experience.” He said he was “incredibly impressed” by the sailors and Marines he has met throughout the fleet and on his trips to the war zones in the U.S. Central Command area of operations.

Shipbuilding, crew size

Winter’s tenure included cost overruns and delays for the amphibious transport docks San Antonio and New Orleans; the littoral combat ships Freedom and Independence; and the amphibious assault ship Makin Island, although the design and planning for each preceded his time as secretary.

Still, Winter battled the shipbuilders, even sending a public letter in 2007 to the head of Northrop Grumman complaining about the Navy’s problems with the San Antonio. As Winter looked back on his term in his interview with Navy Times, he said he was trying to steer the service away from unnecessarily complex programs and incorporate better quality into Navy ships from the outset.

“One of the things I want to emphasize is that when I talk about quality, I’m not just talking about the normal [quality assurance]-type deviation assessment and inspection. We need to design end-quality. And we’ve lost a lot of that over the last several years,” Winter said. Instead of building in margin for changes, the Navy and its contractors have focused on a single selling point — a ship’s speed, or the resolution of an unmanned plane’s sensors. “A rebalancing is needed here,” he said.

He reiterated his support for crew reductions, saying it was important to take advantage of technological advances without sacrificing safety.

He cited the Freedom’s ability to operate with fewer personnel on the bridge and in engineering because of automation. When asked how older, legacy ships — which weren’t designed with today’s crew numbers in mind — can be expected to steam with fewer sailors, Winter said the solution lies in modernizations.

“There are very few ships that have stayed the way they were originally designed, and we continue to modernize those ships as we bring in new capabilities. We’re doing that with the cruisers right now. We do that with the carriers every time they come in through [a refueling complex overhaul]. We do it with the submarines.

“And when we do that, we need to reflect those changes in modernization in the crew structure.”

Skipper firings

Winter also oversaw a series of high-profile punishments of senior leaders, in what is easily the strictest environment compared with the other armed services. But he defended the Navy’s methods for selecting commanding officers, despite a relatively steady line of firings across the service — from admirals to surface ship captains to squadron commanders to sub skippers. In 2008, the Navy fired a range of officers, including a three-star admiral; the heads of recruiting districts; the skipper and executive officer of the carrier George Washington after a shipboard fire; the one-star program executive officer for ships; and the skipper of a ballistic-missile submarine.

“We’ve had a long-standing history and tradition of maintaining high standards, and holding people accountable,” Winter said. “That said, you can’t always get it right and mistakes happen, or sometimes it’s just not a mistake of promoting or positioning the right individual. Sometimes situations change, and when it proves not to work, I think it is incumbent upon the service to take the corrective action.”

He contrasted the Navy with the Marine Corps and the Army — which have had fewer reliefs — by saying that land forces have “a different structure, if you will, where you have multiple individuals engaged in command.”

The Navy demands more of its commanding officers, Winter said, because “when a ship goes over the horizon, that ship and its crew [are] totally and completely dependent on the captain of the ship, and you damn well better have the utmost confidence in that individual.”

He said he examines each relief for “root causes,” but declined to acknowledge any patterns.

“I’d say again we have a history and a tradition of strict accountability, and I believe that has served our Navy well, and I see no reason to change that approach,” he said.

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For a transcript of the Navy Times interview with Donald Winter, visit www.navytimes.com/winter.