Faces of the Future

LCS crew members will revamp the Navy’s warship manning

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

Until a few months ago, Chief Fire Controlman John Norfleet worried that he was locked into a narrow career. Despite his 12 years in the Navy, Norfleet feared his assignments would be limited to the aircraft carriers and large amphibious ships armed with the SeaSparrow and Rolling Airframe missile systems that were his specialty.

But that changed in April 2005 when his assignment staffer at the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel offered him a billet on a new type of vessel under construction — the frigate-sized Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). The billet was coupled with the chance to become a hybrid sailor — an expert of many trades who would fulfill several roles aboard the new ship.

Norfleet was to be one of only 40 sailors who would comprise one of the two core crews of the first LCS and represent the wave of the future for the Navy, which is making fundamental changes to its warship manning and operations.

“I really jumped on it,” said Norfleet, a native of Somerset, Ky. “I immediately cued in on the words ‘hybrid sailor.’ Some of the systems I’ll be working on are definitely outside my rate.”

Norfleet expects to perform duties that, on other ships, might be performed by a gunner’s mate, electronics technician or information systems technician. He is training on the radar, gun and electronic warfare systems of the LCS, which he will operate in addition to the Rolling Airframe Missile that he knows so well. Norfleet also will be on tap to board, search and seize suspect vessels as a member of the ship’s boarding team.

The hybrid sailor concept is much more than a new staffing scheme. It is the means for a seminal shift in the way U.S. sailors think about their jobs and how they relate to others on a ship’s crew.

“I don’t care what rating is on somebody’s sleeve,” said Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, prospective commanding officer of an LCS crew. “We have a detailing [assignment] system that still works with rating badges” but there are sailors on the LCS crews that have different ratings for the same jobs.

Cmdr. Mike Doran, who is scheduled to command another LCS crew, said, “I tell my crew that they need to forget identifying themselves by their [rating], whether that’s engineer, information systems technician or quartermaster. They’re now an LCS sailor. They each will have their own specialization, but there’s going to be a lot of skills and training they are going to share.”

Designed to operate in the littoral areas of the world’s oceans, the LCS is to be as unique as its crew. The core crew of 40 would operate the ship and its installed weapon systems, and be augmented by up to 35 sailors assigned to a helicopter detachment and one of three interchangeable mission packages for antisubmarine warfare, antisurface warfare or mine countermeasures.

The Navy plans to deploy a fleet of at least 52 vessels but still must determine how many are to be purchased from the two classes of LCSs under construction.

The first is designed and built by an industry team led by Lockheed Martin. It is 115 meters in length and designed with a semi-planing hull that cuts through the water at low speeds and planes over it at high speeds. The first of this class, Freedom, was scheduled to be christened this month at the Marinette Marine Shipyard, Marinette, Wis.

The second class of LCS is the work of an industry team led by General Dynamics. Under construction at the Austal shipyard in Mobile, Ala., the 127-meter-long Independence is a trimaran with a center main hull and two outrigger hulls.

Both Freedom and Independence will be alternately manned by two crews, Blue and Gold. As more LCSs are commissioned, the Navy will maintain a ratio of four crews for every three vessels. When one LCS crew is relieved by another, it will spend part of its off-ship time training in an LCS simulator facility being built in San Diego for opening in 2007.

Manning a warship the size of the LCS, with an overall crew of less than 80, is one of the major challenges for the commanding officers. A similarly sized Perry-class frigate operates with a crew of 209 personnel.

Sailors aboard the LCS will have the advantage of extensive automation, including the ship’s electronic bridge, computerized mission control center and remotely controlled engineering spaces.

When Freedom goes to sea next year, Norfleet will stand watch in its Mission Control Center, the nerve center of the ship. Most crew members on a Navy ship stand watch — take turns manning the stations on the ship that must be continually occupied in a ready status.

Typically, sailors stand two four-hour watches each day, in addition to performing their regularly assigned duties within their specialties. On most Navy ships, manning battle stations interrupts a routine watch schedule to put the most qualified individuals — what some call the “A-Team” — at key stations, while everyone else rushes to another assigned battle station.

But the LCS will bring a sea change to watchstanding in the Navy. When the battle stations alarm is sounded on an LCS, there will be little hectic scrambling of sailors up and down ladders. A few off-duty crew members will rush to their battle stations, but the traditional change-out of personnel on the bridge, in the combat center and in the engineering control center will not take place. The personnel on watch as the alarm sounds will remain on station to handle any situation.

“We don’t really have the ‘A-Team’ concept, anymore,” Gabrielson said.

The current concept for manning the LCS bridge calls for three watchstanders, said Lt. Patrick Skora, navigator and assistant operations officer for the Freedom Blue Crew. However, the Navy is assessing the feasibility of assigning only two to the bridge in some scenarios: an officer of the deck who will drive the ship as helmsman, and a readiness control officer who will monitor the engineering spaces with cameras from the bridge.

The bridge of a modern destroyer might be manned by six or seven personnel.

The Navy’s recent experience with the high-speed vessel Swift and the experimental Sea Fighter ship have affirmed the practicality of minimal bridge manning in the minds of LCS crew members like Skora, an experienced officer of the deck from a cruiser who spent time training on both ships.

The LCS crew will be organized into four departments: Operations, Combat Systems, Engineering and Supply.

When the helicopter and mission package detachments come aboard, they become additional departments on the ship and their personnel are integrated in the ship’s organization.

“We’re striving for a seamless transition,” Doran said. “Since we have the experience of decades of working with aviation detachments, this won’t be very difficult.”

All members of Doran’s crew will have sea duty before they come to the LCS.

“It will remain so through the foreseeable future in LCS, given the kind of experience level that you need to have in your wardroom,” he said.

Doran’s crew will be led by eight officers and 13 chief petty officers, and there will be no administrative ratings on the LCS. Functions such as personnel and pay records will be managed ashore at the homeport. Most maintenance functions also will be conducted by the shore establishment when the LCS is in port.

Preventive maintenance and necessary repairs will be performed at sea, with distant support available. Doran sees warfighting advantages in the maintenance arrangement.

“We’ve become much more focused on the mission and on operating the ship than we [are] in maintenance,” he said.

Everyone on his crew will be trained to carry a firearm, load and service a weapon and perform damage control. All crew members will attend basic and advanced security reaction force schools for force protection.

“We just don’t have enough people,” Doran said. “We need everybody to do it all.”

There is another cultural change under way: Executive officers are expected to succeed the current commanding officer, as has been done by aviation squadrons for decades. The practice eventually will apply to the rest of the surface navy. Currently, ships’ executive officers transfer to other duty before becoming commanding officers.

One of the biggest challenges of training an LCS crew is getting the crew members in the same place at the same time. Because each LCS crew member must master a broader range of skills, training pipelines are, on average, more than one year longer than they would be for a typical sailor detailed to another ship, according to Gabrielson.

Skora, for example, will have matriculated in no less than 15 courses before his training is complete. Many training courses are in far-flung locations. Some crew members have attended training in Germany for the ship’s radar, and Spain for the Mk110 57mm gun.

Chief Operations Specialist Stephanie McConnell is an experienced antisubmarine tactical air controller, has been an instructor and already had much of the training she will need in the operations department of an LCS. But she still was scheduled for courses in the Global Command and Control System-Maritime, mine warfare, celestial navigation, firefighting and security.

McConnell said the most challenging part of qualifying as an LCS crew member is the concept of the hybrid sailor, “learning a lot of different tasks and being proficient in all those tasks. The crew members we have think it can be done.”

Petty Officer 2nd Class Chad Kaski, an electronics technician, has a background that earmarked him as a natural selection for an LCS crew. On his previous ship, an old amphibious platform dock ship, he was the only radar technician.

“If it broke, I had to dig out the tech manuals and figure out how to fix it pretty much on my own,” Kaski said. “For the most part, anything I did was brand new to me. I became pretty versatile with all the radars, the cooling systems, the dehydrator systems” and “I have a lot of hands-on [experience], do a lot of troubleshooting and that’s what I enjoy.”

By the time Kaski boards Independence, he will have been through courses in maintaining and troubleshooting equipment for navigation systems, satellite communications, communications security, computer network routers and servers and joint communications networks, among others.

He is impressed with his training track, “the courses an electronics technician wouldn’t normally get.”

Norfleet said, “On a normal platform you would never see me [as a chief] doing maintenance because more junior people would be doing it. But due to the size of our crew it’s really going to be an all-hands effort.

“I think we’ve definitely proven that you can teach an electronics technician to do a fire controlmans’ job or a gunner’s mate’s job or an information system technician’s job,” he said. “We have talented people in the Navy, so it’s a good opportunity to show off how capable our sailors are.”

Doran added, “This isn’t just another type of destroyer; this is something completely different. We really are blazing new trails.”