The Ideal

Training fundamentals are changing fast as the Navy seeks the right mosaic of man, woman and machine to create a more efficient force

By MARGARET ROTH, Seapower Correspondent

With the delivery of two next-generation Navy ships expected within five years, putting together the training needed to ensure a versatile, highly skilled, ready-to-deploy crew is proving to be a challenge.

The Navy leadership is committed to the idea of a smaller, more highly skilled force working on ships with the latest technology, but developing methods to train those sailors and keep them proficient is still a work in progress. Along the way, the Navy will need to resolve issues such as interoperability, how best to assemble specific materials tailored to each sailor’s needs and getting those materials out to the fleet, ashore or at sea.

Those problems are all being considered in the development of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the DD(X) destroyer and future aircraft carrier, CVN 21, said Gregory L. Maxwell, deputy commander for human systems integration at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).

“A lot of the focus and attention is clearly on LCS. Because LCS is real, as opposed to PowerPoint slides,” said Maxwell. [See related story on Page 28]

But the longer-term challenges of training are common to any of the Navy’s newest ships with “optimal manning,” as the service calls its strategy of finding the ideal combination of man, woman and machine to achieve a smaller, more efficient force.

Maxwell described sweeping changes under way to train individual sailors in the specific skills needed to handle multiple responsibilities at sea, without spending significant time qualifying onboard the ship. The changes will be built into the newest-generation ships, and applied to any major modernization programs.

• Fleet Forces Command is developing a training integration standard for new ship systems, dictating that any new capabilities must be designed to allow for tailored training of what are being called “hybrid sailors.”

“We’ve never had a clear standard to build to,” Maxwell said. “In the past, we’ve developed training in support of the things we introduced. It’s one size fits all ... an almost impossible model to me if you’re going to go out and operate at sea with the numbers of people we’re talking about” — crew of 114 on the DD(X) or 2,500 on CVN 21. Today’s Arleigh Burke destroyers have crews of about 275, and the Nimitz-class carrier crews range from 3,000-3,200.

“There isn’t going to be any onboard qualification training on LCS, DD(X) or ships we’re building in the future” Maxwell said. “So this is an enormous cultural shift, particularly in the surface part of our Navy.”

• NAVSEA has established three “training technical authorities” to look separately at the surface and submarine programs, and to work with Fleet Forces Command to develop and distribute the new training standard for ship systems, “so people can understand them and interpret them both from an operational perspective as well as an acquisition and design perspective,” said Maxwell, a retired Navy captain who served 28 years on active duty.

“All we’re doing in this sense is saying that the sailor is part of the system. If you’re building some new capability, you have to account for the sailor’s part of the system now, and you have to deliver training that will support that.

“It’s sort of an, ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality. And that should in the future eliminate a lot of the Band-Aid fixes we’ve got out there now.”

• Training administration — the supervision and recordkeeping involved in making sure sailors are trained and remain proficient — will be moved off the ship. Onboard training systems will be designed to capture training data, Maxwell said, which will then be transmitted to shore when the bandwidth is available to do so.

The only person who will have to spend time onboard doing what used to involve numerous officers and senior enlisted sailors, he said, is the person who sends training data to the sailor’s shore command.

While much of the progress in this Revolution in Training, as the Navy likes to call it, is still more in policy than practicality, the end result is a very real matter of safety and survivability on the Navy’s newest ships, Maxwell said.

As much as will be asked of the smaller, more highly skilled crews, “If they don’t have these skills … we’re going to fail. Because you’re not going to have the backup of additional people out there to cover for lack of skills,” he said.

“This is a real challenge to the system. We’ve trained in herd mentality for years. … They all are taught the same thing, and they all graduate with the same level. And it’s not the skills necessary to go out there and perform immediately on the deck plate,” he said.

Given time to develop sailor-specific job profiles and build training into new combat systems, the Navy theoretically will no longer need to invest in training that a sailor might not need. “You know precisely what it is you want to train to” for specific sailors and ultimately specific teams of sailors. “And we’re moving down that path,” Maxwell said.

There is no clearly defined end to that path. Nor is it clear how much of a sailor’s training will take place at contractor facilities, how much in Navy schoolhouses and how much through distance learning. That will depend in large part on each ship’s specific needs, Maxwell said.

The service has about 150 “schoolhouses,” such as the Navy Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Fla., and the Navy Supply Corps School, Athens, Ga.

Because of the time pressure to deliver the first LCS next year, DD(X) is proving to be a better testbed for this approach, Maxwell said. The 114 positions on DD(X), which is scheduled for delivery in 2008, have been identified in terms of the specific skills they will require. Training, both onboard and off, is being built into the upcoming, more detailed phase of the ship’s design.

“You have people there who have a skill mix far different than the way we identify those skills today. They’re going to have to be much better prepared, much better trained,” Maxwell said.

The ship is being designed with an onboard training system in which sailors “will be able to do individual operator or maintainer proficiency training,” including simulated mishaps, where they work or stand watch, he said. “They’ll be able to do team-level [training], sub-team level, unit level, all the way up.

“Coming on board at night in a contractor team, as talented as they may be, training some guys over a couple of days, and then leaving the ship — I’ll do everything in my power to eliminate that,” Maxwell said.