By AMY KLAMPER, Seapower Correspondent

With the keel laid and construction begun on the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the Navy is intently focused on training the new vessel’s 40 crew members, a process that is setting a precedent for a future where far smaller crews will man new ships.

The USS Freedom is scheduled for delivery in late 2006. It will be the first of two different LCS seaframes designed for littoral or coastal missions that require maneuverability, agility and speed.

The LCS class will act as a platform for launch and recovery of manned and unmanned vehicles. Its modular design will support interchangeable mission packages, allowing the ship to be reconfigured for antisubmarine warfare, mine warfare or surface warfare missions on an as-needed basis.

But with a core crew of only 40, the Navy faces the daunting task of training fewer sailors to do jobs currently performed by as many as 450 people on larger surface combatants.

To accomplish this goal, the Navy is identifying a set of standard skill sets that will allow individual sailors to train for a variety of functions on the ship, according to Gregory L. Maxwell, deputy commander for human systems integration at Naval Sea Systems Command. He is working to ensure the Navy understands each of LCS’s 40 positions and the expectations that go beyond their primary function.

“Capturing work load, not just the principal or tertiary things, but below that, is critically important,” Maxwell said, adding there are some skills common to all sailors that are going to have to be spread across crew members aboard LCS.

“It is absolutely critical that we clearly, precisely, identify every skill for the position that person is being assigned to,” he said. “This is a big cultural shift.”

The idea, Maxwell said, is to tailor an individual crew member’s training to a specific set of skills with no onboard qualification training. In contrast to past practices, crew members have “to show up ready to perform,” he said. “It is an enormous challenge.”

In the past, Maxwell said, sailors were trained at the same pace through classroom instruction before easing into on-the-job training. But under the Navy’s new approach, training will be self-paced through computer and distance learning, and those with prior knowledge and specific skills may be able skip some training segments entirely.

Maxwell said one of the greatest challenges in training sailors for missions aboard LCS is mitigating the potential for losing a sailor — and the several key functions he or she performs — while operating at sea.

“One of the comforts of going to sea with a ship of 320 people when you get in trouble is you turn to your buddy on the right and say ‘help me out,’” Maxwell said. “Well, there may not be anybody to turn to on LCS, so we’ve got to get it right.”

Thus, the training systems the Navy develops “are going to have to augment and maintain [sailors’] proficiency at a very precise level.”

In the meantime, the Navy has mapped out all of the skills necessary for LCS, “down to taking the trash out,” said Navy Cmdr. Curt Renshaw, Naval Surface Force, Pacific Fleet, adding that the service will need to find the right sailors to perform these specific functions. The first step, he said, “is to find somebody that’s got a majority of those skill sets and tailor their training to meet the rest of them — all the way up to their watch standing.”

For example, a number of positions on the LCS can be filled by sailors skilled in information technology (IT), fire control or electronics technician (ET) ratings that “share the same technical knowledge base,” Renshaw said. “So a sailor who is an IT already on some ships is performing some functions that technically belong to the ET rating.”

While the Navy is relying on some existing training methods, much of the old approach will not apply to LCS. For years, he said, the Navy has developed its training in support of new platforms — an “almost impossible model” for going to sea with the small number of crew members on LCS.

“We have, at the expense of sailors, quite often introduced new capabilities and then said we’ll figure out how to train later,” Maxwell said. “On a ship of 40 people you’re not going to be able to do that.”

Instead, he said, LCS is designed to provide operators with the technological ability to perform multiple functions. “We’re saying now, you’re going to put a multitask operator here, so we have to design that way and then build your training to support that,” he said.

Further complicating LCS training is the modularity factor inherent in LCS, Maxwell said. In addition to its crew of 40, LCS will boast 20 crew members in an aviation detachment plus 15 sailors in the mission package — specific interchangeable modules that include antisubmarine, mine and surface warfare. “This is going to add complexity to the ship, not take it away,” he said.

Renshaw said the Navy will have to train these sailors separately before incorporating them into the larger crew. LCS does not permit the luxury of training a sailor for six months onboard ship, so learning how to train sailors to come prepared to join a team could prove challenging.

“You can sit in the classroom and watch movies and get lectured, but you have to have someplace to go and do some hands-on simulation — high-fidelity simulation,” he said, adding that budget constraints could hinder efforts to find the best simulator for the best price.

Paul Lemmo, business development director at Lockheed Martin, which is leading an industry team in the development and construction of the first LCS, said the company is working with vendors for all of the ship’s major systems, and that many have training for their products.

Many training courses will be offered at vendors’ factories, Lemmo said. “Sailors will actually go to the factory sites for those elements and take their [operational equipment manufacturing] training courses.”

The classes will vary in length from a week to several weeks, he said, adding that most of the training that has occurred thus far has involved familiarization with the onboard combat systems.

“They’ve come to Lockheed Martin in Moorestown, N.J., for the lab-based integration testing facility,” he said. “They work on the computer consoles they would have on the ship and operate the combat system software.”

Beginning in January, LCS crew members will begin attending the factory-based courses, he said.

“They’ll go, for example, to EADS in Germany and take a course over there on the TRS-3D Radar,” Lemmo said.