From Navy Times.
Ailing SurFor
The Navy’s plan to get back to the basics of ship maintenance
By Philip Ewing -
[email protected]
Posted : May 12, 2008
The surface Navy’s ability to self-assess its ships’ capabilities has “declined,” undermining combat readiness and calling into question many of the changes instituted by a shrinking Navy in the past few years, according to the Navy’s Surface Forces commander.
In a message to the surface fleet, Vice Adm. D.C. Curtis called April 18 for a “strategic pause to get back to basics on how we maintain and operate our ships.”
Since 2001, the Navy has tried to reduce manning, eliminate duplicative training, and break the fleet’s traditional operational and deployment cycles in favor of a nearly continuous ability to surge forces as needed. At the same time, training commands have shifted increasingly to virtual training as a less-costly means of preparing new sailors for the fleet.
Curtis’ message suggests some of those changes may have gone too far.
“We must conduct a rigorous assessment of the impact on readiness of these changes so we can make appropriate course corrections,” he wrote.
That message was released as news was breaking that two ships, the destroyer Stout and the cruiser Chosin, had been deemed “unfit for combat” by the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey. And it followed by a week another fleetwide message from Curtis that railed against sloppy “ship appearance, honors and ceremonies, and watchstanding,” alluded to visible rust on pierside ships in San Diego, and said the outward appearance of a ship “sets the standard and tone for what you do inside the lifelines. ... Show me a sharp ship and I will show you a ship ready to fight!”
Surface Force Master Chief (SW/AW) Michael Schanche sent a message of his own, singling out chiefs across the surface Navy and charging them with whipping their crews back into shape:
“Shipmates, I have always been incredibly proud to be the surface force master chief. Today however was the first time during my tenure that I have to say that I was professionally embarrassed!”
Exactly what Curtis meant by a “strategic pause” is not clear. He declined to be interviewed for this report. But Schanche said in a May 1 phone interview that the pause is not a stand-down.
Fleet Master Chief (SW/AW) Tom Howard, the top enlisted sailor in the Pacific Fleet, called it a time to take inventory.
“Taking a strategic pause is time for commanders and all leaders to take a moment and review what they are doing as they operate their ships,” Howard said. “Let’s just slow down a bit, look around and see truthfully where exactly we are at.”
Schanche called it “an individual thing each command is working on, a chance to take a deep breath and see if processes are meeting their mark.”
They certainly weren’t hitting their mark aboard the Norfolk, Va.-based Stout or the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii-based Chosin. Inspectors found that neither ship could shoot its guns, fire many of its Tomahawk cruise missiles, or use its flight deck or its Aegis radar systems. No leadership changes have occurred aboard either ship since the reports were released, Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss said.
Room for improvement
To prevent those kinds of problems elsewhere in the fleet, Curtis outlined “five specific areas where I expect improvement”:
• Standards. Commanding officers are responsible for setting and adhering to standards, and must seek out help if they need it, Curtis wrote.
• Training. The reduction of schoolhouse training in favor of computer-based training to save money may have gone too far, Curtis suggested.
• Procedures. Commanding officers must insist on “strict compliance ... and nothing less,” Curtis wrote.
• Processes. Traditional maintenance processes, inspections, spot-checks and the like are essential to keeping “warships mission capable.”
• Responsibility. The wardroom, chiefs’ mess and crew can overcome “constrained resources and high op-tempo ... with the right attitude and commitment to excellence.”
The Stout and Chosin failed their InSurvs because the crews didn’t follow standards, Rear Adm. Kevin Quinn, commander of the Atlantic Surface Forces, told Rep. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican and ranking member on the House Armed Services military readiness subcommittee. The two met April 23 to discuss surface force readiness, and Quinn said the bad performance was “a command issue,” not a money issue, Forbes told Navy Times.
Nonetheless, Forbes said he would ask Congress for $120 million to fund the Navy’s depot-level maintenance at 100 percent of its needs, up from the current 97 percent.
On the training issue, Curtis isn’t the first Navy official to express concern over the computer-based training for today’s sailors. In an April 23 talk with petty officers first class, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (SW/FMF) Joe Campa said he worried that the Navy had gotten too far away from hands-on, wrench-turning instruction.
Posts on Navy Times’ online message boards agree: “The Navy for the last five or six years has been mainly training sailors to be operators and depending more on contractors for repairs,” wrote one reader, using the name “CMENKEN.” “If you never train your sailors to repair items, then it is hard for them to tell when things are starting to break.”
As for Curtis’ emphasis on captains’ insisting on procedure, Campa said the responsibility also belongs to chiefs and first class petty officers. “When I look at programs like 3M [preventive maintenance], damage control maintenance — you should be driving those programs on the deck plates.”
Howard agreed: “Every sailor with chevrons on their sleeve needs to realize that as leaders they are also responsible in all this for the cleanliness, preservation and material condition of their ships, and that is across the board in every community.”
That goes for Curtis’ mention of “traditional maintenance” and “spot-checks,” too. Campa recalled his days as a command master chief, “when I would go out there and do spot checks and I would not let them pick what I was going to check — I would pick it myself, and let me tell you, ... too many times I would find something where the maintenance person wasn’t well-trained in how to do that maintenance.”
But as specific as Curtis made his expectations, they did not appear to have many teeth: Schanche said there were no new benchmarks or deadlines by which crews would be expected to show progress — “the benchmark is continuous improvement,” he said.
A boatswain’s mate aboard an amphibious ship in San Diego shook his head when asked whether the “pause” added more pressure on junior sailors to account for the waterfront shortfalls Curtis noticed.
“It’s not much more than usual,” he said.
Mark D. Faram and Gidget Fuentes contributed to this report.
