The Manning Myth

The Navy has been on a manpower reduction crusade for a couple of decades now – yes, I use ‘crusade’ in the religious context since the Navy’s fixation on reduced manpower borders on a religious zeal to find the Holy Grail of zero manning.  Manpower reduction has been used as the rationale for retiring perfectly good ships with significant service life remaining, the foundation for badly flawed ship designs and support concepts (LCS, Zumwalt, and Ford, for example), the disastrous minimal manning fad of the last couple decades, and the entire movement towards unmanned platforms.

Let’s take a closer look at the manpower issue (see, “NavyManpower History”).  A good starting point, as always, is history.  The table below shows the Navy’s manpower since the end of WWII and breaks out the officer and enlisted numbers.

Navy Historical Manpower (2)
Year	Officers	Percent of Total	Enlisted	Percent of Total	Total a	Officer-Enlisted Ratio
1945	323,755	9.5%	3,005,534	88.2%	3,405,525	1 : 9.3
1955	72,444	10.4%	617,296	88.4%	698,504	1 : 8.5
1965	77,196	11.5%	584,683	87.4%	668,808	1 : 7.6
1975	66,036	12.1%	474,596	87.0%	545,725	1 : 7.2
1985	71,079	12.3%	503,072	86.8%	579,594	1 : 7.1
1995	58,778	13.4%	371,670	84.9%	437,926	1 : 6.3
2005	52,826	14.6%	305,735	84.2%	362,941	1 : 5.8
2010	51,390	15.8%	268,660	82.8%	324,400	1 : 5.2
2017 (3)	53,465	16.5%	263,866	81.4%	323,944	1 : 4.9
2018 (3)	53,250	16.2%	268,123	81.4%	329,263	1 : 5.0
2019 (3)	53,860	16.1%	274,972	82.0%	335,400	1 : 5.1
a The Navy also pays for an additional 1%-2% of non-officer/enlisted personnel

There are a couple of striking aspects that jump out of the table.  One is that despite the Navy’s claims of manpower shortages and costs, we somehow, inexplicably, managed to operate a 600 ship fleet in the Reagan era (1985, for example) with a total manpower pushing twice the levels of today’s Navy.  And yet, today, we don’t seem to be able to afford half the ships and can’t afford half the manpower.  Does that seem logical?

Also striking is the steady increase in proportion of officers.  Compare the current 16% officers to the WWII level of 9.5%.  This figure is somewhat skewed by non-officer/enlisted additions to the total manpower.  A more revealing way to look at this is to look at the officer to enlisted ratio.  In WWII it was 1 officer for every 9 enlisted (1:9.3) and today it is one officer to 5 enlisted (1:5.1).  We’ve almost doubled the ratio of officers to enlisted!  Want to save some manpower costs?  Reduce the officer corps to the WWII level of around 9.5% and get that ratio back to around 9 enlisted per officer!

We’ve almost doubled the relative number of officers since WWII.  Have the enlisted personnel gotten steadily stupider so that they require more supervision?  I don’t think so.  The growth of the officer corps parallels the explosive growth in the number of Admirals that we’ve so derisively noted on many occasions.  Our officer ranks are artificially and uselessly swollen and overloaded.  I hear constant complaints about too many young officers with the result that none of them receive the training, watchstanding, and shiphandling time they need to develop. 

In 2014, Adm. Thomas Copeman addressed the impact of manpower shortages on fleet readiness and acknowledged a shortfall of 8,000 sailors or 15% of the fleet’s billets.(1)  Simple arithmetic tells us, then, that the fleet billets totaled 53,333 (8000 / 0.15 = 53,333) or an average crew size of 190 sailors (53,333 / 280 ships = 190 sailors per ship).

Using the estimate of 53,333 sea billets and the 2010 total manpower size of 324,400, we see that only 16% of the Navy is at sea !  That’s 271,000 land based (324,000 – 53,333 = 271,067) and only 53,333 at sea.  Does this seem right?  Certainly, we need shore support but does it seem right that 84% of the Navy is land based?  Isn’t that called an army?  Want to save some serious big money?  How about a deep dive into the jobs performed by the 84% of non-sea based naval personnel?  I don’t have a breakdown of the types of jobs and number of people in those jobs but common sense tells me that there’s a whole lot of unnecessary jobs being performed.

Here’s a wild analysis.  Let’s say we have 40 land-based naval facilities and each employs, say, 100 people.  That’s 4000 people.  Compare that to the 271,000 land based personnel that we apparently have.  Make whatever modifications to my assumptions you want.  It won’t begin to approach justifying 271,000 land based naval personnel.

Here’s some more wild analysis.  The Navy has around 230 admirals.  I have no idea what size staff an admiral has but assuming each has a staff of, say, 20, that’s a total of 4600 personnel who do nothing but wait on admirals.  Want to save some manpower costs and get more sailors to sea?  I don’t even need to spell out the answer to that question, do I?  At around 190 crew per ship, the admiral staffs are equivalent to the manning of 24 'average' ships !!!!!!!!!!!

What does all that manpower cost?

From the Navy 2018 Personnel Costs (includes base pay, retirement savings, allowances, etc.)

• Officer budget: $8.5B for 53,250 officers  == $159,624 per officer
• Enlisted budget: $18.6B for 268,123 enlisted == $69,402 per enlisted

Why are manning costs so important to the Navy?  According to the Navy, it’s because personnel costs are a major part of a ship’s annual operating cost.  Secretary of the Navy Modly describes the problem,

For example, the average per-hull operating cost in the fleet today is about $2 billion, which is twice the per-hull cost of operating the fleet in the 1980s, Modly said.

“We have to reverse that trend,” Modly said. “We have to be more distributed.” [ed. Huh?  ‘distributed’?  What does that mean and what does it have to do with operating costs?]

The cost of retaining crew members and providing services for the crew member families is part of why per-ship operating expenses are increasing.

“The cost of caring for families is increasing,” Modly said. “It’s hard to buck that trend. It is what it is.”

One solution is reducing the number of people on ships. The challenge is increasing lethality while reducing the number of people required to run a ship, Modly said. The result can be more lightly-manned ships, but with more highly trained crews. (4)

Wow!  It costs $2B per hull per year?  Yikes!  No wonder the Navy wants to reduce the personnel costs.  They must be most, or least a significant portion, of the operating costs, right?  Let’s just do the math and see how bad those personnel costs are.  We earlier determined that the average crew size per ship is around 190.  We saw that the 2018 cost for an officer was $160,000 per year and an enlisted was $69,000.  So, taking into account the officer to enlisted ratio we’d get an average personnel cost of somewhere around $80,000, I’m guessing without doing the math.  Just for fun, let’s go way bigger and assume an annual personnel cost of, say, $250,000 per sailor.  For 190 people, that’s an annual personnel cost of $47.5M.  My gosh, the Navy wasn’t kidding.  That’s … uh … wait a minute.  Compared to the $2B total operating cost per ship, the personnel cost is only 2.4% of the total.  That’s almost insignificant.

I recognize that the annual personnel cost is a squishy number and depends on what you choose to include/exclude.  For example, base salary is obviously included but what about meals, medical and dental care, travel expenses to/from duty assignments, mail service, uniform allowances, and so on.  Some would seem legitimate to include, some would seem ridiculous, and some would seem debatable.  That’s why I picked the $250,000 number.  Even doubling that would still only put the personnel costs at 4.8% of the total ship operating cost which would still mean that it’s almost insignificant.

All of this leads us back to the personnel deployment question.  The personnel costs for ships are minor, however, the personnel costs for the total Navy (including the 84% land based) are substantial at around $27B.  This, again, screams at us to deep dive into that 84% land based component and see how much of that is really warranted.  If we could cut half of the land based positions (yes, this means getting rid of the people whose job is to develop and present gender sensitivity training and the like!), we’d save on the order of $11B per year !!!!!

Setting that aside, SecNav Modly is suggesting that one solution is reducing the number of people to run the ships.  He said, ‘more lightly-manned ships, but with more highly trained crews ‘.  Didn’t we try exactly that with the LCS and it failed spectacularly?  We were left with ships that couldn’t perform even minor repairs at sea, had to spend inordinate amounts of time in port for scheduled repairs, were unable to perform even routine maintenance, were overworked and overstressed, and the ship had to be designed to be abandoned at the first hit due to lack of damage control personnel.  And you want to try that again, SecNav?  Do you recall the definition of insanity, SecNav?

So, what we’re seeing is that, in the past, we consistently managed to operate and fund a much larger Navy and naval manpower, had a more efficient manpower model (officer to enlisted ratio), and were able to fully man twice as many ships as today.  Further, we see that 84% of the today’s manpower is land based which just screams inefficiency and waste.

I think the Navy is just using manpower costs as a scapegoat for gross negligence and inefficiency.

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(1)Navy Times website, “3-Star: Sailor Shortage Threatens Surface Navy's Readiness”, Sam Fellman, 14-Jan-2014,

http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140114/NEWS05/301140020/3-star-Sailor-shortage-threatens-surface-Navy-s-readiness

(2)https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/usn-personnel-strength.html

(3)Department of the Navy Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 Budget Estimates

https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/19pres/MPN_Book.pdf

(4)USNI News website, “Navy $40 Billion Savings Effort Linked to Force Structure Assessment”, Ben Werner, 21-Feb-2020,

https://news.usni.org/2020/02/21/navy-40-billion-savings-effort-linked-to-force-structure-assessment