VCNO: Optimal manning is over - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

VCNO: Optimal manning is over

The surface Navy’s optimal manning experiment is over, the Navy’s No. 2 officer declared in a speech before the Surface Navy Association’s national symposium on Tuesday.

“We’re going to effectively migrate, reconstitute in a way, the surface fleet afloat,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told the audience of about 200 contractors, sailors and officers. “We’ve just taken too much risk in things like optimal manning and others and that’s pretty well documented.”

Greenert’s comments come less than a week after Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the Navy plans to return 6,000 personnel to sea and operational support jobs. This largely followed the Balisle report, a panel of senior active and retired officers that recommended adding 6,500 billets back to ships and maintenance facilities.

Greenert also called for a renewed focus on shipboard maintenance down to the deckplates.

“We’ve got to sustain the fleet. We’ve had a decade of higher op tempo than we anticipated and we planned for and that has taken its toll. We have got to get to the expected service life of our units.”