Tucked away in a small corner of the Navy is a component little-known outside the service but essential for mission assurance. With a barely noticeable budget and operating 65 of the Navy’s 297 battle force ships, Military Sealift Command (MSC) enables at-sea logistics—the pacing function for maritime operations. Providing agile sustainment, strategic sealift, and specialized missions to the Department of Defense, the MSC model is unique within the Navy: civilian-operated ships managed under a commercial maritime methodology.
MSC’s ships need serious help, but this is not the first time the Navy has had to deal with such a dire situation. In 2009, the surface fleet was in a state of declining readiness. The commanders of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Fleet Forces Command commissioned retired Vice Admiral Phillip Balisle to form a fleet review panel to assess the causal factors and recommend corrective actions. The panel conducted a broad, unbiased, and fair review of the surface fleet—its structures, processes, and cultural barriers. Its final report is colloquially known as the Balisle Report.
The panel examined the whole of the Navy’s surface fleet, with one exception—Military Sealift Command ships. Like the fleet of surface combatants, MSC’s ships have suffered under budget constraints and well-intentioned but harmful decisions made in the wake of the Cold War and during the war on terror, but current leaders are ready to make a course change. The first step is assessing the readiness of these critical assets. To do so, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) should commission a fleet review panel to examine MSC’s ability to man, train, and equip its vessels and recommend actions for improvement in deficient areas; in short: Balisle 2.0.
Past Is Prologue
The Balisle Report highlighted five principal factors that contributed to the degradation of surface fleet readiness.
First, the fleet suffered from declining material readiness—deferred ship’s-force-performable repairs, increased casualty reports, and a backlog of off-ship/depot-level repair requirements. Second, the optimal manning initiative reduced personnel assignments based on watchstanding but without considering maintenance demands or temporary losses of personnel resulting from legal issues, medical situations, and individual augmentations. Third, shipboard training was adversely affected by reduced off-ship training and readiness assessments. Fourth, the command-and-control structure for type command (TyCom), operational command, and administrative control at times blurred responsibility for maintenance and repair. Fifth, budgetary issues reduced maintenance funding (as low as 44 percent of what was required for guided-missile destroyers), maintenance days, and repair work. The cumulative effect of these issues—many, such as optimal manning, created by well-intentioned decisions made over several decades—was a degraded surface force. Similar problems afflict MSC today.
Material Readiness
The review panel should evaluate MSC’s ability to define and articulate maintenance and repair requirements. Critical assessments must be sufficient to define total requirements for planning, programming, budgeting, and execution processes.
Title 10 directs that the Board of Inspection and Survey (InSurv) examine all in-service Navy ships, including MSC vessels. The Board’s 2023 report noted the “largest year-to-year drop [in InSurv scores] occurred in the MSC fleet.”1 The report rated MSC ships “degraded” in six functional areas for fiscal year 2022: main propulsion, auxiliary, electrical, damage control, deck, and aviation. Damage control has consistently been scored degraded since 2018. The pictures that accompany this article tell the material-condition tale.
As with the surface fleet, the downward material trend for MSC ships can be attributed at least in part to a lack of class-maintenance plans and a designated planning activity for their development. This adversely affects the command’s ability to quantify the necessary resources for maintenance and modernization, potentially leaving MSC underfunded because of understated requirements.
The Balisle Report noted similar problems for guided-missile destroyers (DDGs). The InSurv failure rates for those ships had been increasing for more than a decade, and the destroyers were tracking not to achieve their expected service lives, potentially falling short by as much as ten years each. The report likewise pointed to a lack of class-maintenance plans and deferral as well as cancellation of onboard and onshore maintenance.
The Navy established its first organization responsible for defining complete technical requirements in 1967—Planning and Engineering for Repairs and Alterations for Conventionally Powered Aircraft Carriers (PERA CV). It followed in 1968 with PERA for Submarines, out of which grew the Submarine Maintenance Engineering Planning and Procurement office. The surface force’s equivalent organization, PERA Cruisers and Destroyers, was disestablished in 1995 but reestablished—as Surface Ship Life-Cycle Maintenance Activity (SSLCMA)—in 2009.
In the wake of the Balisle Report, in 2010 SSLCMA was expanded and renamed the Surface Ship Maintenance Engineering Planning Program. That organization articulates engineering requirements for each ship to reach expected service life and substantiates technical requirements to OpNav N96 (Surface Warfare Division). N95 (Expeditionary Warfare), N97 (Undersea Warfare), and N98 (Aviation) are those divisions’ resource sponsors in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), sometimes called “high 9s.” But MSC ships—even those counted as part of the Navy’s battle force—do not have a high 9 to advocate for them.
Manpower and Manning
Military Sealift Command shipboard manning levels should be increased to match operational, maintenance, and training requirements. MSC is required to follow commercial standards, which mandate minimum complements of officers and crew to support watchstanding and operational practices that ensure the safe operation and security of the ship. As a consequence, MSC personnel are assigned “optimally”—that is, based on the minimum numbers. Unlike commercial ships, however, MSC vessels need additional personnel sufficient to carry out the ship’s missions and necessary force-protection measures. Furthermore, similar to the surface fleet’s optimal manning initiatives, MSC’s commercial-based model does not support the additional crew necessary to perform on-ship maintenance.
For example, when the fast combat support ships (T-AOEs) were operated entirely by the Navy as part of the surface fleet, 583 Navy officers and sailors manned them.2 Under the MSC commercial model, the T-AOEs are manned by 204 people, 168 of whom are civilian mariners (CivMars) responsible for operations, maintenance, repair, and mission requirements. Those include transferring as much as 177,000 barrels of oil, 2,150 tons of ammunition, 500 tons of dry stores, and 250 tons of refrigerated stores per underway by means of 12 underway replenishment stations and helicopter-borne vertical replenishment, leaving little time for maintenance.
The Balisle Report cites early 2000s optimal manning initiatives as a root cause of the degradation of material readiness in the Navy’s surface fleet. The optimal levels were based on shipboard watchstanding requirements only and resulted in a workforce reduction of 18 percent on board DDGs and 12 percent on board cruisers. “Rightsizing” crews for watchstanding without reducing the maintenance requirements resulted in a backlog of corrosion control, housekeeping, and deck work. The fleet review posited that it takes more people to maintain a ship than to operate it.
While MSC ships are highly automated, allowing for some reduced watchstanding requirements, automation does not alleviate the necessity for equipment maintenance and repair and corrosion mitigation. Personnel shortfalls resulting from recruitment, retention, attrition, or other manning issues also have an immediate effect on material readiness with optimal manning. The review panel should assess how much of the MSC fleet readiness problem has resulted from lower numbers of shipboard personnel.
Training
Over-the-shoulder training is fundamental to building competent mariners. The U.S. Coast Guard credentials mariners based on both sea time and demonstrated experience and knowledge, skills, and abilities. Engineering officers, for example, are tested for licensure on knowledge of motor plants, gas turbines, safety, electrical systems, general systems (hydraulics, refrigeration, distilling plants), and steam plants. Deck officers are tested on watchkeeping, maneuvering, stability, cargo handling, navigation, and chart plots. Testing is not specific to a ship, ship-type, manufacturer, or piece of equipment.
On a USNS ship, the MSC civilian master and chief engineer are responsible for assessing and training those mariners in their charge. Crew training is augmented by subject matter experts from equipment manufacturers who provide support during equipment commissioning, yard periods, and significant maintenance evolutions. Equipment service technicians also give over-the-shoulder training to MSC mariners.
Operational tempo can positively or negatively affect mariner skills. For example, MSC’s two hospital ships, the USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and Comfort (T-AH-20), are routinely in a reduced operating status. These ships get underway during national emergencies or mission-specific activations, but vessels in a reduced operating condition have minimal equipment operating, if any. Their lack of underway periods may adversely affect their crews’ ability to train in navigation, operations, and maintenance.
Some MSC vessels are on the other end of the spectrum, with operational tempos more than twice those of Navy surface combatants, which follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP). MSC ships have shorter annual yard periods than surface ships’ continuous maintenance availabilities and CNO availabilities. Some ships are underway more than a year at a time. The Sea-Based X-Band Radar, for example, was underway 662 days before receiving maintenance in 2023. More recently, the USNS Supply (T-AOE-6) deployed for 247 days while performing 143 underway replenishments in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian. Except for a 120-day dry docking at the end of 2022, the Supply has been part of Navy and coalition operations and exercises nearly 66 percent of the time in any given year.3
MSC has significant underway requirements compared to the surface fleet, which spends 19 percent in the deployment phase and 36 percent in the sustainment phase under the OFRP.4 As with training and maintenance cycles, MSC crew rotations differ from Navy active-duty sea tour rotations. MSC mariners are sometimes asked to be underway for more than 28 months of a given 36-month period, which far exceeds Navy or commercial mariner underway expectations. Such a tempo hurts mariners’ ability to attend shoreside and on-the-job training from equipment manufacturers, not to mention recruiting and retention.
Command and Control
MSC has multiple bosses and authorities across the Navy and the joint force. Its bifurcated command-and-control structure creates a complex chain of command, which results in a fractured resource advocacy that lacks focus across MSC’s service-specific and joint requirements.
In a conflict in the western Pacific, Military Sealift Command would have operational control of all joint maritime logistics assets under U.S. Transportation Command and simultaneously carry out TyCom responsibilities for Navy auxiliaries under Fleet Forces Command and Pacific Fleet. Logistics for the joint force and Navy-specific needs could draw on all government and U.S. commercial ships and mariners. The review panel should evaluate focused advocacy for civilian mariners with Congress, the Department of Defense, and Navy leaders—not just the Department of Transportation (DoT).
The Maritime Administration (MarAd), a component of DoT, often fields congressional inquiries and testifies at committee hearings. For example, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee recently considered “posture and readiness of the mobility enterprise.” The Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation has conducted hearings on “assessing the shortage of United States mariners and recruitment and retention in the United States Coast Guard.” But in neither hearing did witnesses include anyone from the largest U.S. employer of merchant mariners—Military Sealift Command.
The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directed MarAd to form the Maritime Workforce Working Group. But MarAd might not be the right agency to assess the ability of the mariner ecosystem to support Department of Defense operational requirements generally or the Navy more narrowly.
MSC does not get the same attention from OpNav, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Congress as other agencies and Navy components. Because MSC’s different roles with different agencies and commands are not fully understood, budgetary advocacy and allocation are negatively affected.
Money
MSC maintenance budgets contrast starkly with those of the surface fleet. In the 2021 year in review, MSC spent $1.02 billion on maintenance and repair for 102 assigned ships. The Navy’s surface combatant maintenance budget in fiscal year 2021 was $11 billion, for around 239 ships.5 Put another way, the total MSC budget in 2021 represented 2 percent of the Navy’s $207 billion budget while MSC operated 20 percent of the battleforce ships. The Balisle Report observed that understated budget requirements (partly from uncertainty) resulted in underfunded maintenance. At the time of the report, the surface fleet did not know the full extent of the deep maintenance required for each ship class. MSC’s commercial-model manning and shoreside support may similarly hinder the organization’s ability to articulate its maintenance requirements, in part because the number of mariners is too low to identify all the needs.
Logistics Needs a Sponsor
The review panel should consider the Navy’s ability to explain to Congress and the Department of Defense the fleet’s requirements for MSC ships. Without this, MSC’s ability to advocate for its ships’ resources and integration within the battle force fleet for readiness, ship operations, maintenance, and support will suffer.
Surface and air combatants can only perform wartime missions if they have the required fuel, ammunition, provisions, and spare parts provided underway by MSC. This dependence may need stronger emphasis throughout the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process to identify gaps and seams between fleet sustainment requirements and platform capacity.
One clear factor is the absence of a dedicated OpNav high 9 resource sponsor for MSC. Responsibility for MSC is divided between N8 (Deputy CNO for Naval Operations for Integration of Capabilities and Resources) and N4 (Installations and Logistics). The latter has a portfolio that includes military construction, installation hardening, and the shipyard infrastructure optimization program.6
At the Naval Institute’s WEST 2024 conference, Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo stated that the combat logistics force is on “narrow margins.” He said, “We built a system based on market efficiency and are moving to a world of national resilience. Step one is to advocate for a larger, more modernized, more capable Combat Logistics Force.”
As the Balisle Report notes, the surface fleet’s culture was to get “underway at all costs,” a culture not limited to commissioned warships. MSC assets operate many years beyond those of their commercial peers, and the federal CivMars stay at sea longer than their Navy and commercial counterparts. To support ready, capable vessels and ensure the right capacity of MSC ships and mariners is available for sustained operations at sea, the Navy must first understand the condition of the MSC fleet and its mariner workforce. It is time to take a fix and get underway.
1. Board of Inspection and Survey, INSURV Annual Report, 1 March 2023 (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2023).
2. Carol S. Moore and Anita U. Hattiangadi, Inside the Black Box: Assessing the Navy’s Manpower Requirements Process (Washington, DC: CNA, 2002).
3. Military Sealift Command, “FY24–27 2nd Fleet Shipyard Loading.”
4. John H. Pendleton, GAO-16-466R: Military Readiness: Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, May 2016).
5. Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Highlights of the Department of the Navy FY2023 Budget (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2022).
6. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, OPNAVINST 5450.352B: Mission, Functions and Tasks of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 9 March 2022).
