Since the deadly collisions in Seventh Fleet in the summer of 2017, the surface force has been working assiduously toward a redux. Philosophically, this reawakening is captured in the phrase, “transition from a culture of compliance to a culture of excellence.” According to Vice Admiral Richard Brown, Commander, Naval Surface Forces, compliance is foundational and refers to things such as inspection, certification, and fundamental professional competence.
Over the past year, much effort has been undertaken to ensure the compliance element of the equation. For example, the Navy has revamped the certification processes required in ships as they prepare for deployment. Maintenance—and the time required to implement repairs and upgrades—has been protected fully for the first time in decades. In addition, the career paths and professional training of surface warfare officers (SWOs) have been revised and augmented, and the manning of ships throughout the surface force again has been given priority, if not primacy. In total, the changes have been so significant as to allow for a new set of benchmarks for surface ships at deployment in 2019: they will be free of casualty reports, manned at 92 to 95 percent, and fully certified in all mission areas, without waiver.
Excellence, however, is what lies beyond the necessary bedrock of compliance. Excellence is needed to ensure victory in great power competition. Vice Admiral Brown has determined that excellence can be attained only through a reemphasis on warfighting—across the entire surface force.
The Complex Life of Ships
A full-scale effort to concentrate on the profession of surface warfare—from navigation and seamanship to complex warfighting scenarios—is hampered by the realities of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP). The OFRP seeks to maximize employability while preserving maintenance and training with continuity at the individual ship and strike-group levels. It spells out, for example, regularly occurring periods in a ship’s life when the ship will enter a shipyard for maintenance and upgrade. Ships are complex systems-of-systems that require routine repair, maintenance, and modernization to ensure the Navy’s technological advantages do not wane. As such, a regular return to repair shipyards for extended periods is inescapable.
Sailors can expect to spend between 6 and 15 months in a shipyard during a 36-month OFRP cycle. During shipyard periods, skills such as shiphandling, navigation, and tactical proficiency decay, as the exigencies of the shipyard take precedence. The question to be asked, then, is: What is the utility of an entire crew spending months in an industrial environment?
The crew remains on board to continue their ownership and responsibility for their ship. In addition, they provide for the safety and security of the ship, while functioning as the shipboard system interface between the Navy and the private industry/contractor workforce. The ship’s force supports such critical processes as the approval of work authorization forms (WAFs), system and component tag-out, and quality assurance efforts associated with the maintenance. Perhaps most significant, in a nonnuclear shipyard, only ship’s company personnel are allowed to operate systems and equipment. This alignment, energizing, and testing of systems, performed by the crew, is an essential element of contracted maintenance, particularly during the testing phases of the repair process.
Having said that, the ship’s company also creates friction in the repair process. From missed communications related to the opening of locked spaces, to delayed processing of WAFs because of a ship’s desire to approve ship alteration drawings, to lengthy discussions regarding the particular shade of white paint selected for an interior passageway, the crew adds friction. From the perspective of those performing the work, there are real questions regarding what benefit the crew brings to the process.
As for the crew, they will spend the entire shipyard period in tactical decline. Shipyards are notoriously bad for morale. While some members of the crew are sent off for individual or team training, only a minor percentage of the crew is off ship at any given time. One thing is certain: The ship’s professional capabilities and capacities are in rapid and serious decline during shipyard availabilities.
Think Differently
The Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual allows for (and details a policy that supports) the transfer of responsibility for shipboard systems from ship’s company to shipyard control during depot maintenance availabilities. This system transfer is a normal routine in Navy-owned (public) shipyards and is supported by established, formal work control procedures and a robust shipyard test organization. In commercial or private shipyards, on the other hand, these policies and procedures are neither established nor often used, and, consequently, a ship’s company is required during much of the maintenance period. The Navy should implement a policy change to allow a broad transfer of responsibility from the ship’s company to the shipyard—for both public and commercial shipyards—to get Navy crews out of shipyards.
At the start of the maintenance availability, the Navy should turn over the ship to Naval Sea Systems Command (NavSea), including the control and operation of all systems. After all, NavSea is charged to execute maintenance to the technical standard, returning a materially ready ship to the crew at the end of the availability. Aviators do not accompany their aircraft to a naval air rework facility. Those agencies return “full up” aircraft for employment by operators.
This is not to say none of the ship’s company would be present, at any time, during an extended availability. As maintenance of a ship is completed, the crew would return to reassume responsibility for systems, which officially would be turned over following rigorous pierside and underway testing evolutions involving crew and shipyard. Moreover, this turnover period, if properly managed, might provide a convenient and appropriate venue for the efficient conduct of the Board of Inspection and Survey inspection (InSurv), when the ship would have access to the sophisticated repairs that sometimes are necessary following these inspections. As for the shipyard, InSurv could be contractually built into arrangements as a final certification of readiness. This would spur the closest quality control and minimize the standard, “it took a year to fix the ship, after the yard was over” problem.
A similar but more conservative approach already is used in the construction of new ships—the shipbuilder (contractor) owns and operates the ship until it is delivered to the Navy. Initially, a small Navy crew is assigned before the ship is commissioned into service. This pre-commissioning crew increases in number as construction progresses, reaching full complement as the ship is delivered. Until they get to the ship, crewmembers are in training.
Even for certain in-service ships undergoing repair in commercial shipyards, this approach is being demonstrated. The USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) is being repaired in a commercial shipyard as if it were in a pre-commissioning (new construction) status, and the ship’s company is primarily off the ship. The private shipyard, Huntington Ingalls Industries, is a destroyer-building yard and is capable of enabling the transfer of responsibility to NavSea. The shipyard uses Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards of work control instead of Navy tag-out standards and is funded to provide and perform force protection, damage control, shipboard security and safety, and preventive maintenance on ship systems.
As the Navy undertakes the significant effort to modernize the warhorses of the force—the Ticonderoga-class cruisers—the ships are transferred to NavSea and significantly de-manned following induction into the modernization program. The maintenance is executed by the contractor with a caretaker crew on board numbering as few as 50. The responsibilities for all aspects of ship operations, including safety, security, and maintenance (including tag-out), are transferred to NavSea.
Reaching the surface force goal of manning ships at 92 to 95 percent is a difficult challenge, but freeing sailors from ships in maintenance would help. There are more billets to fill than sailors to fill them; this problem could be remediated by making crewmembers, who would be less than usefully occupied in a shipyard, available for training or other tasking. The entire crew could be made available for schools, trainers, underway periods in other ships in need of particular ratings, or other real-world taskings.
First Steps
There are challenges in this approach. First, the existing training and support structure would have to be expanded to accommodate increased crew availability. Second, the manning and skill sets at the Regional Maintenance Centers would have to be increased to provide the skilled and knowledgeable personnel able to align, operate, and test transferred systems. Third, shipyards would require some increased funding to account for the loss of sailors conducting safety and security functions. Fourth, additional rigor and standardization would have to be established regarding the routine transfer of a ship to NavSea, and, perhaps more important, from NavSea back to the surface force.
If the goal is to move from a culture of compliance to one of excellence, placing an entire ship’s company into the professional suspended animation represented by a long shipyard availability is a price too high to pay. Under the best of circumstances, ships regularly leave shipyards with barely enough still-qualified officers of the deck, engineering officers of the watch, combat information center watch standers, helmsmen, and quartermasters. And those who remain qualified often have not stood a watch in months. Under the current system, it takes too long to get a ship back in step and in compliance, let alone ready for high-end, complex warfighting tasks. The Navy can pursue excellence by ensuring that ships’ companies maintain their fighting edge by training and operating in the fleet while shipyards fix their ships.