Manpower and the Littoral Combat Ship... Again

What is that smell? Is it realism cutting through the noise, and admission that the LCS has a legitimate people problem? Not quite.

In todays Navy it is about the technology more so than the people, unless the people are properly diverse by any number of physical attributes that have nothing to do with being a good sailor. Phillip Ewing has some great quotes in this article; we will start with these.

“It is a challenge to operate a ship this size with a smaller crew,” Sullivan said. “However, the maintenance concept is that for there to be a lot of off-ship help to maintain the ship. Secondly, with the ship itself, the systems are designed for simplicity and modular change-out.”

Good said LCS’ novel crewing would work because of good “human-system integration” and the ability of today’s sailors to adapt to computer gear. “I don’t want to trivialize it as ‘the video game generation,’ but it’s very impressive what some of our sailors are able to do,” he said.

Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan is commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, and Capt. Michael Good is program manager for the LCS mission modules. Wait a second, those weren't the quotes I was talking about, these were the quotes that reflected realistic thinking about the LCS.

“Who’s going to be a mess cook? Who’s going to sweep the passageway? When you start to operate this ship, when you’ve got these guys who have so many other jobs, you have to start figuring that out,” said retired Capt. Rick Hoffman, a former skipper of the cruiser Hue City. “They’ll put it out there, they’ll mish-mash the guys together and see how it all works, but that’s not the way to do business.”

“All of that stuff requires constant maintenance by an onboard crew,” he said, no matter how the Navy decides to set up the shore-support network. “Kellogg Brown and Root, or whoever gets the contract, isn’t going to drop out of the sky and oil the door.”

The last quote is from A.D. Baker III, who isn't fooled by all the techno babble the Navy gives about these ships absent enough sailors to insure the ship is properly maintained.

The maintenance concept for this ship escapes us. Lets see, these ships are going to be maintained by the core crew, who is going to be busy as hell concentrating on the core systems requirements, but it will also be maintained by a shore based maintenance crew. That crew will feel no ownership of the ship as it will be just one of several ships it services, you know, because all ships of the same class are the same. Then these ships are going to have crews that change with mission packages, meaning they really don't have ownership of the platform either. Finally, the shore based crew is ashore, but there will be no tenders forward deployed to insure the ships are maintained properly while on deployment.

The comments are interesting, revealing even. Captain Good, in talking about sailors, goes back to a technology reference and even whips out his joystick in his praise of them. We don't care how computer savvy a sailor is, will enough sailors have the time to insure a ship with a lot of aluminum doesn't corrode in its first ten years? A.D. Baker III suggests in the article the Navy will quietly put more sailors on the LCS, but as A.D. Baker III is retired, he may not be aware the GAO has already highlighted that Flight 0 already has seaframe constraints in regards to manpower with the MIW module, much less the rest of the ship.

So much for realistic discussions by the Navy, they nod to the issue, but believe the maritime ferries are going to wave the magic wand and work it out. Shouldn't this stuff be worked out before you build 2 billion on shipbuilding? One would think...