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Lean manning saps morale, puts sailors at risk

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.

“I feel like we are tactically ready and prepared, but there’s a price — and it’s on the backs of sailors,” Cmdr. Chris Sweeney said. “I think we are at the right number. It’s how resilient are you. If someone gets hurt, I don’t have a bench.”

The response

Top Navy leaders are often asked about manning when they meet with sailors in all-hands calls. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who tells sailors that ships are going to sea manned at 85 percent, has said he wants to begin to get IAs back to their home crews as soon as possible.

And after reading the posted messages on his blog, Harvey said fleet leaders know there is work to be done in adjusting how ships are crewed. So he said he has decided to add a total of 122 new billets in strategic places in the aviation, submarine and surface forces. They’ll be in place over the next three months.

Polices are changing as well: Under the new plan, optimally manned ships would have new protections for when and how many crew members can be plucked off for IA assignments. Harvey said he would like ships to keep 95 percent of crew members in every skill set after sailors have been taken away for IA missions, a change from today’s goal of 90 percent.

He also said he wants to protect ships getting ready to deploy from losing sailors too close to when they sail, although it wasn’t clear in early October how far in advance the IA “fence” would go up.

Atlantic and Pacific Fleet leaders are also standing up “fleet review panels,” which will investigate manning issues on the East and West coasts. That concept is still in the early stages; a spokesman for Fleet Forces Command said he didn’t have additional information about who would sit on the panels, whether they’d be permanent or other details.

Overall, Harvey said he has gotten the message that the Navy needs to tweak its policies.

“We are making adjustments within the overall manning picture. Yes, we have manning issues, but I think we have a good idea of what they are and I think we have a good idea of what we need to do,” he said.

Fleet fixes

Adm. John Harvey, head of Fleet Forces Command, plans a series of changes and additional billets to help commands across the Navy that suffer from manning issues. Fleet Forces is adding a total of 122 billets across the Navy, as well as making policy and organizational changes, which include:

Manning:

• 35 new machinist’s mates for amphibious assault ships, or five apiece for the first seven Wasp-class big deck gators.

• 30 more fire controlmen for ballistic-missile defense cruisers and destroyers.

• 30 more billets for the patrol coastal ships’ maintenance support teams.

• 16 more enginemen for Whidbey Island- and Harpers Ferry-class dock landing ships.

• 11 more engineering trainers for Philadelphia’s Center for Naval Engineering detachment.

Reorganization:

• Collapse nine amphibious squadrons into seven, redistributing the staffs so that each remaining squadron is fully manned.

• Shift six master chief surface sonar technicians from jobs ashore to posts at sea.

New policies:

• Require newly selected chiefs to stay aboard or return to their ships for their initial sea tour in that rank.

• Ensure that 95 percent of every skill set aboard ship remains in place after sailors have been pulled away for individual augmentee assignments, up from 90 percent.

• Make sure ships don’t lose sailors to IA assignments within a certain time before that ship deploys. Today, a sailor who has spent months with shipmates working up for a deployment can be pulled off for IA duty weeks or days before a ship deploys.

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Staff writers Mark D. Faram, Gidget Fuentes, Andrew Scutro and Andrew Tilghman contributed to this report.