SUPSHIPS adopts the Salamander Program

Can you help me connect the dots? Can you see something we have been warning and talking about on this blog since ... well ... we started?

First;

"I would tell you a number of our problems in shipbuilding programs, recent problems, had their roots in what I would say is a severe undervaluing of what the supervisor did, probably at the senior Navy level," Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy said at an American Society of Naval Engineers conference on July 14.

McCoy said that understaffing led to a brain drain in SUPSHIP, which became critical when older employees began retiring without handing down the skills their replacements needed. "We looked at the Gulf Coast shipyards, and I want to say there was a three-year period from like 2005 to 2008 where 75 percent of the people at SUPSHIP Gulf Coast had less than five years of experience in the supervisor business," he said.

McCoy pointed out that an array of vital ships are built on the Gulf Coast, including one of the Littoral Combat Ship models and amphibious platforms, making it all the more critical to make sure the region's Navy shipbuilders have proper supervision. The vice admiral assured the audience that SUPSHIP now has the funding it needs and is ramping up its staff.

Existing SUPSHIP employees were also forced to repeat the qualification process, and many of them had to undergo additional training to get up to speed. "I'll settle for the next year or two at just being brilliant at the basics before we even do some of the other things," McCoy said, "and I have to know every single day that fundamental welding is correct, cabling is correct, coatings are correct, every single day I have to know it."

You're welcome. You can make your consulation fees payable to a bar tab at Singletons under the name "Salamander Yacht Club."

From the "how is that transformation working for 'ya now" file,

Officials Concerned Navy Is Reducing Manning On Ships Too Hastily While the Navy is driving toward reduced manning on ships to lower total ownership costs, some officials are concerned that the sea service may be taking sailors off of those ships without full foresight into the second- and third-order effects.

At an American Society of Naval Engineers conference last week, Rear Adm. Thomas Eccles, deputy commander for naval systems engineering said that he saw a graphic illustration of poorly thought-out reduced manning on a new LPD-17. The ship had an automated engine room that theoretically obviated the need for keeping a watchstander in the engine room, but after a problem arose in the network, the ship had to switch to a backup computer system and sailors needed to shut down an engine. However, the automatic shut-down signal didn't detach the engine from the reduction gear, which was still being twirled by an active engine.

"So when the shut-down engine with no lube oil continued to turn at a high rate because the engine on the opposite reduction gear was still clutched into that engine, we had a bad day," Eccles recounted. "And not only did I have a bad day, several of us in the room did. But the sailors on that ship had an acutely bad day. So who should have been in the engine room?"

Eccles said the issue should have been obvious at a system design level, but wasn't properly thought through.

"I'm convinced that what they didn't do is a sufficient job of considering what are the downside effects of taking that large processor out of the engine room in the form of the [machinist's mate second class] who could have made that shutdown and de-clutch," Eccles said. "Because that guy makes a lot of decisions, and the men and women who do that today don't have to be in our engine room, but their decision sets have to be in the right place, and until we get that right we ought to be a little bit slower about taking them out of our engine rooms. My personal opinion."

Sid, Byron .... aren't the bold parts almost directly lifted or at worse paraphrased from our comments in .... 2006/7?

Oh, and you can just extend that Singletons tab ... Byron is thirsty, Sid is laughing like a hyenna, and that vein in my forehead is throbb'n.

With a crew in the 40s, each sailor on the LCS needs to be highly trained to take on work that would require multiple people on a destroyer.

With more and more ships that require a small number of highly experienced sailors, Eccles said he is concerned about where those sailors will come from. "That's not somebody who just came out of boot camp, unless he just came out of boot camp and a bunch of other schools and somehow gained the maturity that I think is only gained at sea," he added.
...
Other officers shared his concerns. Rear Adm. David Johnson, deputy commander for undersea technology, recalled that when the Virginia-class submarines were designed, several lower-level positions were eliminated in favor of putting two petty officers at the ship patrol station.

"Great, we reduced the watch bill by six guys," Johnson said. "But the problem is, now we don't have a pipeline to feed to actually go and create the people that would sit in those seats because we took out the junior guys who actually learn to drive the ships."

Johnson also argued that pushing more maintenance off until the ship is at port has created heavy in-port workloads, and the situation may be driving good sailors out of the Navy.

Rear Adm. Jerry Burroughs said the problem goes beyond the day-to-day operations of a ship, especially on ships where low manning was not a part of the original design.

"The problem I think we're at today is, you get to a point where you take manning down any lower, it gets very difficult to fight the ship from a damage control perspective and maintain the ship," Burroughs said. "So I'm very interested in watching LCS and seeing how that model works from a manning perspective, because it's very low, and they accounted for that in design and I'm very hopeful that they'll be successful in showing ways to do that in the future."

I told 'ya. Things will reach a point where they can't push things to someone elses PCS cycle and all this will come out. Welcome to the party folks. You're buying. If 'ya ain't happy, tell it to Clark, Mullen, and Roughead - this is their baby.

... and finally - from the "Are we a learning institution" part of the Navy via Navy Times July 26, 2010 pg. 16 By Mark D. Faram.

Navy leaders could cut as many as 25,000 sailors and officers from the ranks in the next few years as part of a wide-ranging drawdown they are considering to offset skyrocketing manpower and equipment costs as budgets shrink.

Ummmm, no. We need to back up a few steps. If we are going to do this - you need to do what I proposed last week. You. Must. Start. By. Cutting. Flag. Officer. Staffs.

Then we go through non-warfighting billets, etc - I won't go though the process again of explaining it - email me if you are new and are sans-clue.

It is a false economy to think you are going to save any money in the medium to long run by having fewer Sailors on ship's manning documents. Full stop.