Ford Minimal Manning

Minimal manning always fails and the Navy always winds up increasing the crew size.  Despite this, the Navy keeps justifying new ship classes based, in part, on reduced manning and anticipated cost savings from the reduced crew size.  Let’s take a look at how this is working out with the USS Ford.

 

Ford was ‘sold’ partly on the basis of significantly reduced crew size and, hence, reduced Operating and Support (O&S) costs compared to legacy carriers.  The table below, adapted from Table 4 in the GAO report (1, p.42), shows the crew size and O&S costs for the Nimitz class, the Ford’s initial estimates upon which the design was ‘sold’, and the Ford’s current levels.  Critically, the Ford’s berthing capacity is 4660.(2)  Thus, Ford is already at or beyond its berthing capacity.

 

 

	Nimitz	Ford - Initial	Ford - Current
Crew Size	5200	4476	4656 – 4758 b
Annual O&S Costs a, $M	490	278	391

 

^a costs adjusted to constant FY2000 dollars

^b from DOT&E annual reports, ref. (2); ship berthing capacity is 4660

 

 

We see that the Navy sold the Ford as requiring 724 fewer crew resulting in a 43% drop in O&S cost.

 

The current reality is a 544 – 442 drop in crew size and a 20% drop in O&S cost.

 

Without a doubt, crew size and O&S costs will continue to increase as an actual deployment approaches, sometime in the next few years, perhaps.  However, the Ford has already reached the limit of its designed berthing capacity of 4660.

 

… the Navy has already increased the size of the planned crew to the maximum allowed by the ship’s design. Nonetheless, additional crewing concerns persist for key systems—including the weapons elevators, advanced arresting gears, the machinery control system, among others—that are not yet well understood and may require additional sailor support to operate and maintain. (1, p.53)

 

The history of the LCS, Zumwalt, LPD-17, and Ford demonstrate, with near 100% certainty, that the Navy’s estimates, whether crew size, O&S costs, or construction costs are always wrong and always significantly underestimated.  Despite this, the Navy keeps pumping out fraudulent estimates (fraudulent, because they know they’re wrong) and Congress keeps lapping them up.

 

Increased crew sizes over and above initial estimates have occurred for other ships and the increases have resulted in increased O&S costs.

 

Similarly, DDG 1000, LCS, and LPD 17 program officials also reported that increasing crew sizes was a major contributor to higher sustainment costs for these programs. (1)

 

The Navy has made a habit of assuming cost savings from unproven practices only to have the practices fail and the supposed savings turn into added costs.  For example,

 

Further, the shipbuilding programs we reviewed made assumptions based on unproven initiatives, in conjunction with reducing crew sizes that ended up having a greater effect on the cost of maintaining ships than initially estimated. For example, for four ship classes—SSN 774, DDG 1000, LPD 17 Flight I, and LCS—the Navy originally planned to use a maintenance initiative called performance-based logistics, which called for the use of contractors to conduct maintenance instead of sailors on board the ships.  … Shipbuilding program officials stated that the Navy has now largely abandoned this approach after attempting to contract for performance-based logistics and discovering that it was much more costly than planned.  (1, p.42-43) [emphasis added]

 

There’s your entire LCS manning and maintenance model … gone.  Wouldn’t you have thought that around day two of the LCS concept, someone would have actually made a few phone calls and priced out the contractor support instead of making a ridiculously optimistic estimate, based on nothing?  But, I digress …

 

One of the crippling aspects of the designed-in minimal manning assumptions is that the berthing capacity is physically limited.  Ford has already reached or exceeded the limit of its berthing capacity with more crew increases sure to come and the LCS long ago exceeded theirs.  I’ve heard reports and complaints from the LCS about doubling up racks and other, less than desirable berthing accommodations but I can’t independently verify them.  If you recall, one of the selling points about the LCS was that it was going to provide ‘luxurious’ accommodations, by comparison to other ships.  Well, that selling point has vanished.  It will be interesting to see what Ford does to squeeze in more berths.

 

The Ford is yet another example of the abject failure of minimal manning (and that’s before we consider damage control and combat casualties) and yet the Navy resolutely continues down that path.

 

 

 

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(1)Government Accountability Office, “Navy Shipbuilding - Increasing Focus on Sustainment Early in the Acquisition Process Could Save Billions”, GAO-20-2, Mar 2020

 

(2)Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), FY2019 Annual Report, Dec 2019, p.123