Machinist’s mates await fate of amphibs - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Machinist’s mates await fate of amphibs

A political showdown brewing in Washington could leave thousands of engineering sailors in career limbo if Congress and the Pentagon can’t agree on the near-term future of the Navy’s oldest, steam-powered amphibious ships.

At stake is the future of machinist’s mates, experts in operating the steam boilers aboard the fleet’s remaining two Tarawa-class amphibious assault ships and four Austin-class amphibious transport docks. Although the Navy wants to decommission all six of those ships over the next few years, lawmakers want to keep them around, potentially for much longer, to help the fleet grow to 313 warships.

The fate of the machinist’s mates also could affect the Navy’s other big engineering ratings — gas turbine systems technicians and enginemen — if a billet crunch prompts MMs to try to move to the other rates. As steam ships go away, replaced by ships powered by diesels and gas turbines, MMs trying to become ENs or GSMs or GSEs could increase competition.

The machinist’s mate rating — which merged with boiler technicians in 1996 — is already overmanned, with few vacancies that give junior sailors chances to re-enlist or advance. Advancement opportunity for MMs in this spring’s cycle for E-4, E-5 and E-6 was 2 percent, 7.8 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

One active engineering duty officer, who was not authorized to talk about personnel matters and so asked not to be identified, presented a simple explanation:

“If you get rid of an LPD, there’s not one being built to replace it,” he said. “Any MM billets on that vessel are gone — so if those billets are gone, it drops down the overall number [of openings] in the fleet.”

But now, with the potential that more steam ships could stay around longer than planned, the fleet may have to keep around many more MMs than thought.

Navy personnel officials said they could not speculate on what effects the proposed ship-life extensions would have on machinist’s mates, but a top community manager said that in the long term, the MM rating has a future as a smaller, but steady, corps of sailors.

“It won’t be 5,000 strong as it is today,” said Earl Salter, surface community manager at Navy Personnel Command. “But possibly as many as 3,000 to 4,000 sailors, meaning we see the rating staying viable well into the future.”

A provision in the House version of this year’s defense authorization bill would require the Navy to commission three ships for every two it decommissions — an exchange it likely cannot meet in the near future for lack of time and money. Specifically, it requires the Navy to keep the amphibious assault ships Nassau and Peleliu at least until the arrival of the replacement big-deck gators America and LHA 7, which will carry new “hybrid” electric power plants.

America is scheduled for delivery in 2012; the Navy plans to order LHA 7 this year.

But at least one influential House lawmaker, Rep. Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services seapower subcommittee, has said he believes the fleet can get as many as 10 more years of life out of Nassau and Peleliu. Overall, Taylor said, the Navy’s plans take it in the wrong direction.

“There have now been at least three [chiefs of naval operations] who tell us that they need a minimum of 313 ships, and yet they submit budget requests that don’t get them anywhere near that — in fact, this request would actually take us backward by about four ships if enacted,” he said in May.

In addition to the older big-decks, the remaining four Austin-class LPDs could also be at issue. The first two, Cleveland and Dubuque, are to leave the fleet in fiscal 2011, followed by Ponce in fiscal 2012 and Denver in fiscal 2013. Navy officials have assumed they will be able to eliminate all the ships’ machinist’s mate billets, shrinking the rating, and have other billets freed up for use elsewhere.

“Manpower that would come off those ships would be reapplied to our increase in the 10th Fleet, the cyber fleet,” said Vice Adm. John Blake, the service’s top requirements officer, in Senate testimony May 6. “It would also be used to meet additional [combatant commander] demand from organizations such as [U.S. Southern Command] and special operations. We’ve gotten demand signals to put additional folks out there.”

As such, neither the Pentagon nor the White House want Congress to enact the ship-preservation provisions in the House version of the defense authorization bill.

The amphib-life question is tied up with several defense budget issues — including the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly and the alternate engine for the F-35 Lightning II — that have brought Washington leaders to a near-standoff.

A rare White House “statement of administration policy” issued May 27 said the Obama administration “strongly opposes” the defense bill’s ship-keeping provisions and affirms the Defense Department is “committed to replacing older, less-capable ships that have become increasingly expensive to maintain and operate with ships better suited for current and future needs that will provide forces the capability to meet a wider range of combatant commanders’ requirements.”

But no matter what happens in the next few years, two major factors will keep some MMs around until the 2020s or beyond, Salter said: They will continue to be experts in auxiliaries and other equipment, and steam-engineer MMs will remain aboard the six Wasp-class big-deck gators, which will be in the fleet for a long time.

The active-duty EDO gave the example of the seventh Wasp-class gator, Iwo Jima: The last engineer to work in its engine room, he said, probably hasn’t been born yet.

DISCUSS THIS STORY