Random Musings on Surface Ship Manning

Surface ship manning has been somewhat of a hot-button issue lately. In the past decade, we've seen various manning experiments including the CPO as divos program, "optimally" manned DDGs, and the current rumint about a proposal to man USN amphibs with MSC personnel. It's also interesting to see the Coast Guard's view of manning. The National Security Cutter (NSC) is key to reconstituting the USCG's fleet and the third NSC, CGC STRATTON (WMSL 752), will be christened this Friday inPascagoula, MS. The 418' long NSC has 148 racks in 2-8 man staterooms for 127 or so core crew.

Today's (and tomorrow's) IW operations require ships to be adaptable and one of the best ways to achieve adaptability is by embarking different detachments for different missions. A by product of manning cuts on the DDGs and amphibious ships deploying without Marines in the past few years has been the flexibility to embark extra staffs, special ops forces, UAS detachments, etc. I think one of LCS's biggest designdrawbacks is not necessarily her small crew, but her inability to embark a significant number of additional personnel (outside the planned mission modules). JHSV should not have this problem and will be better suited for IW operations in many ways because of this design factor. Crew size certainly is a factor in mission effectiveness, not just in damage control, but measuring this impact is not an exact science.

Is there an apples to apples way to compare crew sizes on various surface combatants? Tonnage/Sailor is an imperfect ratio, but for the lack of anything better, here are some random comparisons: A WMSL is 4,300 tons with a crew size of 148 (including embarked air det) equaling 29 tons per Sailor. The NSC is designed for maritime homeland security, law enforcement and national defense missions. Contrast this ship with the similarly crewed (about 145) forthcoming DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, which is designed to perform the traditional DDG high end combatant missions of BMD, AAW, ASW, strike, NSFS, etc. At 15,000 tons, she rates at 103 tons per Sailor. An optimally manned Burke DDG (9200 tons/260 Sailors) is about 35 tons/Sailor. LCS 2 would be 37 tons/Sailor. And a WWII Fletcher Class destroyer would have a ratio of only 7 tons per Sailor. Some of the largest ships in the world -- VLCCs, run with only thirty or so crew compared to their USN multi-thousand crew CVN counter-parts, but of course the missions and propulsion of these vessels are extremely different.

Maybe "Sailors per mission" would be a better metric for comparing multi-mission combatant crewing. If it hasn't already been done, an enterprising NPS student could breakout the ROC/POEs for several ship types (including international) and do comparative study of crew sizes for his thesis.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or any of its agencies.