Skilled Sailor Shortage Scuttles At-Sea Maintenance
How a sailor shortage is crippling ship maintenance at sea
Story by Diana Correll
The Navy’s manning shortages are curbing the service’s ability to repair its ships while at sea, according to a watchdog report released Monday.
Sixty-three percent of executive officers – a ship’s second-in-command – surveyed reported that insufficient manning made it “moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while underway,” according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
At-sea basic maintenance and repairs are critical to ensuring a ship can carry out its mission, according to the GAO.
But Monday’s report, based on interviews of sailors and leaders across the fleet, reveals that basic maintenance duties and repairs are hindered not only by manning shortages, but also by inaccurate Navy guidelines and substandard training.
As of late last year, the Navy was lacking nearly 14,000 enlisted sailors to keep its aircraft carriers, surface ships and attack submarines properly manned, according to the GAO.
The watchdog also found that aircraft carriers, cruisers and amphibious assault ships did not have enough enlisted sailors assigned to them to meet requirements for safe operations as laid out by the Navy Manpower Analysis Center.
Navy should be ‘offended’ by its own maintenance and manning faults, admiral says
“The Navy has not provided crew levels sufficient to meet the ship maintenance workload,” one sailor told GAO investigators.
This results in a smaller crew having to do more work, compounding the stressors of ship life.
“More capable sailors that perform a lot of maintenance get burned out and tired of taking up the slack for other sailors and leave the Navy to do the same work for better pay and working conditions,” another sailor said in the report.
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“Navy executive officers and sailors told GAO there were widespread concerns about sailor training,” the report states.Sailors also aren’t always prepared for their jobs aboard ships, and those serving in maintenance-heavy roles “may be less experienced than other sailors on that same ship,” according to the GAO.
Training for sailor-led maintenance is also insufficient, sailors told the watchdog.
Sailors attend A school after boot camp to get initial training with instructors and computers, but some interviewed by GAO questioned how well A school prepared them for their shipboard duties.
“Specifically, sailors expressed dissatisfaction with both the quality of training – whether it prepares them to perform maintenance aboard ship – and the format in which training is delivered,” the report said.
The Navy is working to enhance sailor-led maintenance training through its Ready Relevant Learning initiative, which involves distributing videos of sailor-led maintenance to schoolhouses, according to the report.
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The GAO offered several recommendations, including that the service improve the “quality of information on the number of ship’s crew available for duty” and guarantee that personnel numbers and skill levels for certain kinds of maintenance are tailored for specific ships and classes.
Opening the floodgates to bottom-scoring recruits will do nothing to alleviate these critical issues, as most will not qualify for an “A” School in the first place. That Big Navy is failing in providing relevant initial training at the schoolhouse in indefensible. The Navy needs skilled mechanics and technicians to operate and maintain its vessels, not half trained “A” School grads and more Deck Division non-rates to chip paint.
Navy Recruiting Soars!
Category: Big Navy
Come on, Ed – gotta really tap into that alliteration!
“Skilled Sailor Shortage Seriously Scuttles Sea Support”. Since this is bad news, you can even preface it with “Scary Shit:”. Working in ‘sadly’ or ‘surely’ is easy, but bonus points to anyone adding something about selling sea-shells.
Sorry LC. I ran out of coffee and inspiration at about the same time.
Susie “Skilled Sailor”, Sadly Says “Shortage Seriously Scuttles Sea Support” sees Seashore Shell Surveyor as Superior Stationing.
Was Susie male or female before her enlistment began?
That’s variable based on supply and demand.
All is well. Ya’ll are just nattering nabobs of negativity.
Yabbos of Yelling?
But DEI and drag videos are coming along fabulously!
And what happened to all of the “stunning” and “brave” alphabet crowd that was supposed to flood the Navy with recruits? Maybe Big Navy needs to go into a Village and get some People to make a catchy tune, telling how great it is “In The Navy”?
Increase the grog rations cause the lash and sodomy isn’t filling the decks.
Worked fabulously. However they were all CAT IVs and most couldn’t get a clearance higher than FOUO. Hard to work on the nuclear power plant or repair a radar without being able to read on higher than a third grade level and no clearance.
My data is old because I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but one of the issues is something that’s been in the works for a long time.
I did a tour as an “A” school instructor early in my career. I was in aviation, not surface, but the principles are the same.
At the time I was an instructor, in our training labs, we used actual aircraft equipment installed in test racks to simulate the aircraft environment. Granted our systems were a couple of generations out of date, but they were real systems similar to what the students would find in the fleet. When we taught them how to troubleshoot a unit, pull a board and replace a component, they were doing it on an actual piece of equipment just like they’d be working on in the fleet.
By the middle of my career, they’d gotten away from physical equipment and were using computer simulated equipment for training purposes. Troubleshooting was basically selecting the “next step” in the process from a list, select the next test point they want to evaluate and see a simulation of the voltage, or signal or waveform on the monitor. They never actually used the physical test equipment or touched the actual equipment.
In short, the training sucked. At the very end of my career, the new sailors we got into our commands hadn’t even been taught basic troubleshooting skills. The thought was that with newer computer-laden aircraft, they wouldn’t need to troubleshoot…they’d plug in the test computer and it would tell them what component to replace. (Same reason you can’t find decent auto mechanics any more, they’re all so dependent on the ODB2 code reader telling them what’s wrong, they don’t know what to do if that doesn’t work).
It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s still going on in both the surface and aviation communities. Anything more complicated than replacing the component identified by the computer requires calling in contractors.
Sh*t is still going like that on a whole bunch of stuff. Unfortunately.
We said during the Cold War the Soviets were centralized non-thinking retards who’d lose because they did that while we didn’t. Now, that’s what we do.
The same process is at work at the community college I attend. Their “hands on” training in most of the computer related courses is moving towards those online simulations. You can take a three semester program to prepare you to take the CISCO CCNA certification exam and never actually touch a switch or router (ask me how I know). The students never actually see a “rollover” cable. Many of the classes are now online, but they still charge a “computer fee”.
Rollovers are still a thing? I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
Recruiting has always been a quantity over quality game. I could never get senior recruiters or CRF types to focus on aiming for kids who were more qualified for nuclear field, AEF, aviation, etc. Some were literally intimidated by smarter kids, some thought it wasn’t worth the effort because many had college as an option.
Bottom line, the 28th of the month rolls around, they were throwing every 31-qt waiver monkey cripple at the wall to see what would stick, then wonder why they’d all attrite and the NRD would miss shipping goals.
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was….
BUT the important things like DEI quotas, SHARP Training, and White Supremacy Awareness are taken care of, right? Nobody’s feelings getting hurt?
We didn’t worry about that any of that shit in my day, but as my son tells me constantly “Its not like that anymore. The Cold War was a long time ago.” I was in R-Division which literally stood for Repair Division. That’s all we did: at the pier, at sea, in the yards, pipping/plumbing, valve maintenance, cutting, welding, MIG/TIG…
The only non-work related “training” I can recall is a memo from the XO about not giving any more pink bellies to noobs.
The Navy Preventative maintenence program started around the time when I was aboard the ship.in
A (auxiliory) Div. also known as A gang. We repaired every piece of equipment from the ships whistle down to the reefer flats A/C compressors. The maintenace program was great because if I remember the equipment we took care of were done on schedualing times, besides fixing broken equipment as was done before the program started.
And here we see true Free Market Capitalism at work.
Make the the costs too high (environment too hostile), the ones that “you” want to sell to (recruit), are going to walk away and find a better, cheaper (cost to benefit ratio), less hostile market to buy their goods from, whatever it is that they need. And right now, it ain’t the military.
Hopefully, the executive officers are also capable of stepping in when needed to either assist with, or make said repairs. I know, it isn’t their job to actually do the work, but if the Navy is that short handed, they may have to step in and be the third hand or the extra set of eyes. The dirt and grease washes off eventually.
Don’t think the Chicoms ain’t paying attention:
Recently deceased friend was a helicopter mechanic at the
Marble Mtn. air facility. He would make repairs out in the field
but the crew would make him fly back with them.
Trust is a big deal in the military and we need skilled people
that we can trust. Pickings seem to be getting slim lately.
RIP Roland.
More DEI can fix this.
What’s so damn hard about at sea maintance? My Gunny used to say; “If the fuckin’ jeep ain’t workin’ change the fuckin’ oil, and hit the motherfucker with a BFH!”
I’m purty shur there are some CPOs out there (specially Boosuns Mates) what said the same fuckin’ thing about fuckin’ ships when they were about to fuckin’ sink in the fuckin’ ocean.