New Technologies, Changing Priorities Foretell Need for Fewer Naval Personnel

As Service Adjusts its Course, the Force Will Become Smaller, More Broad-based

By MARGARET ROTH
Sea Power Correspondent

At a time when the Navy is making deep cuts in uniformed personnel, the “bottom line” is not a number but a “revolutionary” concept in how the service matches its sailors to its needs, according to the chief of naval personnel.

The Navy’s 2005 budget calls for 7,900 fewer active-duty Navy personnel and 2,500 fewer reservists. Over time, the service’s planned personnel cuts are dramatic. From 2003-08, the Navy will have eliminated 25,035 slots, or 6.5 percent of the force.

The service’s needs are changing rapidly. New ships with smaller crews, a surge Navy available for more days at sea, and new warfighting concepts such as sea basing all foretell the need for fewer people with a broader array of talents and skills.

It’s not the end-strength numbers that count, though, but how the Navy is cutting — with careful, thorough consideration to each and every job, Vice Adm. Gerald L. Hoewing told Sea Power.

“Right now the strategic environment is one of a global war on terrorism,” he said, in which the Navy needs “to make sure that we have the capability of surging our national power into an area where we need it very quickly” — unlike in the Cold War, when the military had weeks or months to build up troops.

“As we build these capabilities and eliminate the duplication, and realign to make ourselves stronger, the number of people actually goes down in the process. So the requirement is less,” Hoewing said. “Therefore, we will reduce proportionally and, at the same time, make sure that we invest in those people so that they are able to operate the equipment of the 21st century.”

Hoewing called the Navy’s approach to manpower restructuring under Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark, who has made it a high priority, “a revolution in the way we identify work for sailors and the way we grow and develop sailors.

“Now that means less people, but, in my mind, there’s a big difference between cutting manpower and finding the true requirement and manning to that requirement.”

This restructuring process consists of:

Using technology in the design of the Navy’s newest ships and planes — the Littoral Combat Ship, DD(X), CVNX, Joint Strike Fighter and F/A-18E/Fs — that enables them to be operated with fewer personnel, “which then gives you the capability of going out and getting more ships and greater capability,” Hoewing said.
The industry term for this approach is “human systems integration.”
“You will see that permeating throughout the Navy’s acquisition process by 2010,” Hoewing said. Over time, the Navy hopes to use some of the money saved in the process to modernize or replace its so-called legacy ships and aircraft, including the older destroyers, the amphibious assault ships, F-14s, S-3s and EA-6Bs.
But manning on older systems can be reduced. Experiments led by Vice Adm. Timothy W. LaFleur, commander of Pacific naval surface forces, demonstrate that an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer with a “normal” crew of about 320 people can function with as few as 200, without running a risk of having too few sailors, or sailors without the right qualifications, to handle damage control in a combat engagement.

Reshaping the officer corps with an eye to fewer accessions and greater retention. “We have an officer corps right now that is not optimally shaped for the force we have,” Hoewing said.

For example, “In surface warfare and submarine warfare, we have shortfalls at lieutenant commander and commander,” he explained. So rather than bringing in more junior officers, for whom there aren’t enough jobs to go around, and whittling down their numbers through attrition, Hoewing said the Navy is focusing on holding onto the junior officers it has by giving them incentives — monetary, opportunities for command or leadership at sea and for education — to stay and rise through the ranks.

“You pay for those incentives by reduced manpower coming in the front door,” he said. “So the officer corps will get smaller.” So will the proportion of restricted line officers and staff — who include engineers, meteorologists, public affairs officers, doctors, chaplains and judge advocate general officers — as the Navy looks for jobs ashore that might be done more economically by non-uniformed personnel.

Currently, the balance between unrestricted line and restricted line is about 50-50, which will shift slightly in favor of the unrestricted line, Hoewing said.

Evaluating jobs to see exactly what skills, experience and education they require, and whether they can be performed by non-uniformed personnel. This concept, in effect, expands the “total force perspective” to include not only active-duty and reserve forces, but government-service civilians and private contractors.
For example, with advances in computerized personnel systems, the Navy doesn’t need as many pay clerks aboard ship, Hoewing said. Similarly, it does not require as many postal clerks. And by adopting some of the technology used by cruise ships, it might not need as many personnel to feed a ship’s crew.

The Navy is “identifying the tasks, every single one, thousands of them, that we would expect a sailor to accomplish to successfully fulfill the requirements of a job and the collateral jobs associated with it,” Hoewing said.

“Once you know what those tasks are in great detail, you can then break those tasks down into what knowledge, skills, abilities and tools a sailor needs in order to accomplish it. And you can put all that stuff in a database.”

The concept, called Sea Warrior, will eliminate the boilerplate educational requirements that may fail to recognize an individual sailor’s unique skills and on-the-job experience.

The Navy is about three-quarters of the way through its evaluations of enlisted jobs, Hoewing said. It has just begun looking at the officer corps. A McLean, Va.-based firm, Logistics Management Institute, is guiding the review, he said.

A Rand Corp. military manpower analyst said the Navy appears to be sincerely interested more in reorganizing than in cutting for its own sake.

“I think it’s very genuine, this commitment” to optimizing the use of naval personnel, as opposed to just reducing the manpower budget, said Susan Everingham, director of Rand’s Forces and Resources Policy Center.

Rand is working with the Navy on two personnel management projects, one looking at senior leadership development to better understand the requirements of specific jobs and the other focusing on officer management.

One of the more dramatic aspects of the Navy’s re-evaluation of its manpower needs is the diversification it means for sailors, Hoewing said.

He used as an example a recent visit by Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Terry D. Scott to the experimental ship HSV-1. Scott had remarked to Hoewing that he was trying to figure out the Navy rating for a second class petty officer who was tying up the ship. “So our mental construct is, ah, that’s a boatswain’s mate, a deck seaman whose responsibility is topside work.”

But then, shortly after the ship got underway, that same petty officer was on the bridge, from which Scott surmised that she was the boatswain’s mate of the watch. When he asked her what her job was, he learned she was engineering officer of the watch, with responsibility for running the engineering plant from the bridge and handling lines.

“So now you’d sit there and go, ‘Ah! Engineering. Propulsion plant. Must be a machinist’s mate,’” Hoewing explained.

Wrong. As it turned out, she was an electronics technician.

The point of the story, Hoewing said, “is that our sailors of the future will have greater skills across more disciplines because the highly technical platforms, aircraft and submarines of the future are going to require those skill sets.”

The work-life balance remains important, Hoewing said. However, “We think in the 21st century there are ways to solve the work-life balance equation even better than creating jobs ashore that aren’t military-essential.”

At aircraft intermediate maintenance departments, for example, by making operations more efficient — bringing parts and tools to the sailors, for instance — the Navy could get more work done and keep sailors’ highly specialized skills fresh during shore rotations, rather than have them maintaining inventory at a base recreation supply store.

Not only that, but the sailors could keep civilized hours, with time for their families, for continuing education — even for lunch, Hoewing joked.

Looking further into the future, he said, “I don’t think we will ever be finished with this process. What you want to do is make sure that you’re always shaping your force, and we may find that the strategic international environment as we move four, five, six years down the line may change and you may see an entirely different strategy that is going to emerge.”