Navy wants under 1,000 sailors on new carriers

[unhappycamper]

The Navy is asking researchers to study the possibility of a ship’s complement of fewer than 1,000 sailors for the its next class of carriers.


Navy wants under 1,000 sailors on new carriers
By Andrew Scutro - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Oct 19, 2007 18:32:11 EDT

The Navy wants to figure out a way to put an aircraft carrier to sea with a crew of fewer than 1,000 sailors.

Huh? Or better, how?

In an era when manpower costs devour 60 percent of annual Navy budgets, the service has been hard pressed not only to reduce its end strength so it can afford the ships and aircraft it wants, but to pare down crew sizes while making the most of each sailor.

The manning goals for future Navy warships are far below that of current surface combatants, with just 75 sailors expected to be aboard the Littoral Combat Ship and fewer than 150 crew members aboard the Zumwalt-class destroyers. Future submarine crews also are being optimized.

~snip~

Polmar points out that on Nimitz-class carriers, there are nearly 1,000 sailors assigned to the engineering department alone. He said a few hundred might be reduced from the crew, but the sheer size of an aircraft carrier requires lots of sailors.

“We should save on people, but it’s not a case of cutting a certain number because the engineering department needs people, you need plane-pushers and lots of them, you need a certain number of boatswain’s mates because the ship’s a certain size, and you need ship’s security.”


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/10/navy_optimalmanning_071019w/

[Eagle_Eye]

1. One theory about reducing shipboard manpower is shore based maintenance

All preventive and corrective maintenance will be done at shore based facilities (read: by defense contractors) and the sailors at sea will only be operators. The trouble with this approach (and it has been tried many times before) is for ships that undergo long deployment time (aircraft carriers for instance) suffer at the end of the supply chain.

When the shore base facility cannot turn around enough radios to keep the Operations Division going, they will have to fly technicians out to the carrier to fix the gear. As technicians accumulate on board, the manpower goes up.

[lligrd]

2. Remote Control Navy

No problem. :sarcasm:

[RC]

3. Pilotless fighter planes would help reduce the crew.

Along with more autonomous automation of the nuclear reactor. GPS navigation. Do this right and you can get the crew down to two deck apes to man the lines at docking and getting underway.