October 12, 2024: The U.S. Navy (USN) was unable to recruit enough sailors in 2023 and that meant the navy was short 14,000 sailors. While the navy has over 330,000 personnel, less than a third of these are at sea on any given day. The sailor shortage is most evident when it comes to adequately maintaining the ships at sea. The USN felt that a shortage of sailors could be overcome with more instructional videos broadcast to the ships. These videos, some of them interactive, would be kept up to date by navy and ship manufacturer personnel and provide enough expertise to cover the four percent shortage of sailors. This turned out to be impractical because the ships were not and could not be equipped with equipment requiring that much bandwidth. Someday, but not now.

Then there was a very effective immersive damage control simulation that the navy has been using at shore bases since the 1980s. The navy has used other interactive training systems, some that can be used when needed aboard a ship. Another recent development has been the growing use of automation. Collision prevention systems are being tested for use on ships at sea. There is already a Predictive Maintenance system to monitor ship systems and detect potential problems sooner than any system depending on the crew to do it. A navy contractor is building a robotic system to continually inspect ships for damage caused by long use, crew mishaps or a natural or wartime disaster. These automation efforts are part of an effort to reduce crew size. Some navies have had some success with this approach. In one case an unmanned engine room was developed. You still need qualified sailors to deal with any problems in the automated engine room, but so far this system seems to be working.

Another issue is that the USN needed crews with more sailors. While a four percent shortage may seem minor, it has a cascading effect because ship crew sizes were developed during decades of experience while at sea. That changed between 2003 and 2012 when the navy tried to achieve optimal manning. This practice was meant to determine how much crew size could be reduced without decreasing the ability to adequately operate the ship. Crew sizes were reduced but not enough to seriously compromise crew efficiency. Then came the 2023 recruiting shortfall and suddenly the crew shortage problem reached the breaking point.

The USN has been slow to adopt innovations because the U.S. Navy is the largest in the world and the American fleet is expensive to maintain and sustain. In the U.S. Navy, replacing older ships usually occurs after 40-45 years of service. The American fleet is not only the largest in the world, but also the one that spends the most time at sea.

In 2014 the Navy confirmed that some types of ships spend more time at sea than others. For the three years from 2011-2013 combat ships averaged 33 percent of their time at sea. Destroyers spent 35 percent of their time at sea. There were also great variations among individual ships, with some destroyers and cruisers spending over half their time at sea during this period.

Of course, this data is just about the ships. The navy is more concerned about how much time individual sailors spend time at sea. That is because the ships are in the navy for life while the sailors can decide every few years if they want to stay. The navy calls this retention and the more time sailors are at sea, the fewer of them agree to be retained and remain in the navy. To improve retention the navy wanted to keep ships at sea only 32 percent of the time and spread the sea time around so everyone eligible to be at sea does their fair share.

As part of this effort the navy announced changes in its policy on maximum time at sea per cruise. Currently crews can expect to spend up to 10 months on a cruise. That was changed to eight months. The navy pointed out that this was part of a continuous process of tweaking policies concerning how much time sailors will spend at sea.

There have been many earlier tweaks. Back in 2008 the navy adopted a policy of adjusting ship schedules so that crews spent at least half their time in port. This is called dwell time. With some 60 percent of navy personnel married, dwell time is very important. The navy also eliminated its decades old policy of regular six month deployments at sea. These deployments were far away and kept sailors cut off from home. The new policy was to keep ships closer to their home port, the better to surge a larger number of warships in an emergency. In practice that meant that when ships did go to sea they might not return for 9-10 months. That was too long for both morale and maintenance.

In the past ships returning from a six month cruise usually required a month or so of maintenance and repairs in port, with a lot of the crew taking leave. Military personnel get 30 days of leave each year. Thus ships returning from the old six month cruises were out of action for a month or more. The 2008 policy eliminated most of that and more ships are available all the time. The new 50/50 policy uses a lot of shorter trips to sea. Carriers only go out for a week or two at a time, so their pilots can get some practice. This keeps carriers and their escorts in readiness for long cruises.

This 2008 policy failed when the navy declared that growing tensions with Iran and China required a surge, so it has been hustling to find sailors and working ships to maintain a strong presence in the Persian Gulf and Western Pacific. Cuts in the navy budget in the last decade have caused other problems. Ship maintenance was being deferred and spare parts were not as available as they used to be to keep a lot of weapons and equipment on ships running. More sailors, especially experienced specialists, decided that they had been pushed too far for too long and were not re-enlisting. Many navy leaders wanted to cut back on sea time and allocate money saved towards improving maintenance, readiness, and retention. The Navy was ordered to find other ways to deal with retention and that continues to be a problem.

Even eight month cruises are pushing it in terms of damage done to morale and maintenance. Some air power analysts believe the U.S. could rely more on land-based aviation and feel that the navy is too hasty in deploying carriers for long periods so that this can help justify the expense of building and maintaining these huge ships and their escorts. In one way, long cruises do make legislators who approve the navy budget aware that what they are paying for is out there. The realities of morale and maintenance were causing the frequency, if not the length, of these cruises to shrink.

Naval planners apparently didn’t learn from their experience with crew size mismanagement on their Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). One of the most challenging aspects of life aboard an LCS is the small crew size. An LCS has accommodations for only 75 personnel. Normally, a ship of this size would have a crew of about 200. The basic LCS crew is 40, with the other 35 berths occupied by operators of special equipment. One of the more radical changes the small crew size produces is the lower proportion of crew devoted to preparing and serving food. On an LCS there are only three CS (Culinary Specialist) sailors. On traditional ships about ten percent of the crew are CS ratings. That means most other ships the size of an LCS have a crew of 200 and 20 CS rated sailors. This has resulted in most LCS captains deciding that everyone will wash their own dishes and meals are usually self-serve. The original LCS design did not contain enough food cold storage for the length of time these ships are actually spending at sea, so more refrigerators and freezers were installed. Keeping the LCS clean also turned into a team effort, with everyone pitching in.

The LCS crews are modularized so that specialized teams can be swapped in to operate specific modules. Thus, about 40 percent of the ship is empty, with a large cargo hold into which the mission package gear is inserted and then removed, along with the package crew, when it is no longer assigned to that ship. Thus the LCS has two crews when underway, the ship crew and the mission package crew. The captain of the ship crew is in charge and the officer commanding the mission package is simply the officer in charge of the largest equipment system on board. It was planned to have a variety of interchangeable modules for air defense, underwater warfare, special operations, surface attack, and so on. Such modules would have allowed the ships to be quickly reconfigured for various specialized missions. Crews would also be modularized so that specialized teams can be swapped in to operate specific modules. That hasn’t happened, and design and crew requirements for each of these modules are still a work in progress.

A smaller crew, even with more automation and other features to reduce jobs to be done, has put more work pressure on the LCS crew. So far, the heavy workload has not hurt morale but has meant many changes to how officers and crew operate. The small crew means that everyone knows everyone and it is standard for people to handle a number of different jobs. Even officers pitch in when a job needs to get done. This kind of overworked enthusiasm is actually typical of smaller naval craft. These included World War II era PT boats, with crews of up to 17, current minesweepers with crews similar to an LCS, and larger patrol boats. There's also the novelty factor. In addition to being new ships there is a new design and a lot of new tech, which gets people pumped. But the experience with the LCS has to be used to develop changes that will make these ships viable for the long haul and demonstrate that smaller crews will work in larger ships up to and including aircraft carriers.

The LCS has a displacement of 3,000 tons. Top speed is over 80 kilometers, with a range of 2,700 kilometers. Basic endurance is 21 days. LCS is armed with a 57mm gun with a range of 8,400 meters, four 12.7mm machine-guns with a range of 1,800 meters, two 30mm autocannon with a range of 6,000 meters, and a 21 cell SeaRam system for aircraft and missile defense with a range of 7.5 kilometers compared to the older 20mm Phalanx ship defense range of 2,000 meters. The LCS is available in two as a trimaran or single hull design. This further complicated maintenance and increased the workload for the crews. Moreover the initial estimate of each ship costing $460 million each was way off. The actual cost was closer to $700 million. The LCS crew size disaster and the optimal manning fiasco should have prepared the navy for the problems the 2023 sailor shortage created.