THE NAVY’S CHANGING TIDE
By Dale Eisman
Viriginian-Pilot (Hampton Roads, VA)
March 7, 2005
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=83148&ran=14927
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Navy, so tradition-bound that it still lists the 207-year-old sailing vessel Constitution on its registry of ships, is yet in the midst of the boldest era of change since the dawn of the nuclear age.
Prodded by the business school graduate at its helm, outgoing Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark, the service has set out to re-invent every aspect of its operations -- even as the ambitious plans appear increasingly threatened by the political and fiscal strains from America’s venture into Iraq.
At Clark’s direction, the Navy has retired dozens of older ships, eliminated more than 20,000 jobs, and begun to overhaul promotion and training policies. Crews are shuffled to put more ships to sea more often, and Navy and Marine Corps air wings are moving toward a merger.
The Navy is working on at least five major new ship designs. And to claim a larger role in land battles, Clark wants some of those ships reorganized into a collection of “sea bases” that will shield troops who are hundreds of miles inland and supply them with equipment, food and firepower.
The sea service is even changing its uniforms, testing gray and khaki year-round outfits to replace the traditional winter blues and summer whites, and eliminating the requirement that a skirt be part of a woman’s dress ensemble.
“I’ve been associated with the Navy through 30 years of active duty, and a couple of years as a consultant,” said retired Capt. Greg Maxwell, now a civilian working in Washington, D.C., on a key element in the service’s makeover. “I’ve never seen so much change going on at one time. And I’m watching a lot of people very excited about that -- and also struggling a little bit with it.”
Though it has been encouraged by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Navy’s overhaul has been driven primarily by Clark, 60, who has been at the helm since 2000.
But as Clark prepares to retire this summer, there are growing questions about whether his vision for the future will continue.
THE FUTURE OF CHANGE IS UNCERTAIN
The Bush administration’s latest defense spending plan seeks to shift billions of dollars from future Navy budgets to support Army and Marine Corps operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president’s 2006 defense spending plan siphons about $9 billion from aircraft carrier, destroyer and submarine development and construction programs over the next five years to help offset war-related expenses.
Much of Clark’s program would be pared or postponed in the shuffle, including the DDX destroyer, a radical new design that supporters say will be as stealthy as today’s submarines and eventually equipped to vaporize attacking aircraft and missiles with laser weapons.
Both the administration and Congress have yet to be sold on key reforms championed by Clark, including a redesigned personnel system that the Navy leader says is vital to the service’s ability to attract and retain the highly trained, technologically savvy sailors needed for all its new ship designs.
Jeremiah J. Gertler, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, said, “The real challenge to the future of the Navy is relevance.”
Lower-risk and often lower-cost weapons, including Air Force bombers and unmanned aircraft, are claiming many missions that the Navy has considered its own, he said.
When U.S.-based bombers can strike any target in the world within a few hours and airborne drones can loiter for days at a time over potential battlefields before attacking, lawmakers may ask why they should invest in more expensive Navy systems for those jobs, Gertler said.
While the Navy’s upper echelon is seeded with admirals who appear to share Clark’s vision for the Navy, there also are questions about whether his successor will be able to sustain the momentum for change he has built.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, whom Bush nominated last week to become the Navy’s next top officer, is a Clark confidant who is highly regarded by Pentagon leaders and on Capitol Hill. But he is seen as more cautious and less charismatic than Clark. It’s also unclear whether he will enjoy the kind of close relationship Clark has had with Rumsfeld, a former corporate executive who has expressed admiration for Clark’s business acumen.
In recent interviews, Clark has insisted that he’s leaving confident about the Navy’s direction. But he recently backed away from a long-standing goal to boost the fleet to about 375 ships -- it now has 289 -- and has said acquiring the larger, faster and more powerful fleet Navy leaders want will require that Congress radically change the way it purchases ships.
For the past three years, he and other Navy leaders have quietly urged a series of budget maneuvers that essentially would buy ships on the installment plan, like most people acquire homes and cars. That would let the service provide steady work to shipbuilders and their thousands of subcontractors, stabilizing the industry and helping rein in costs, Clark argues.
But with a few exceptions, the Bush administration and Congress have insisted that ships be fully financed before construction starts. That means that in years when the Navy needs to buy a carrier or a submarine, the most expensive ships, it can’t afford much else.
“We’ve got to open our eyes to what the realities are,” Clark said.
Though his plans to develop new fighting technologies have captured the greatest attention, what Clark calls “the war for people” is at the heart of changes he and his associates have set in motion.
FEWER SAILORS, HARDER WORK
To succeed in the future, the Navy must find and hold increasingly more educated and talented young Americans, Clark contends. To do that, he is pushing for “cafeteria-style” pay and benefit programs that would let sailors tailor their compensation to their needs, and “on-ramps and off-ramps” that would let them periodically jump back into civilian jobs throughout their military careers.
Clark is also bent on trimming the service’s payroll. Salaries, benefits and other personnel expenses absorb 60 percent or more of the Navy’s $125 billion budget, he said, and the Navy employs more than 900,000 people -- sailors, civilians and contractors.
For every 10,000 sailors cut, the service saves roughly $1.2 billion per year that can be used to buy equipment -- unless those funds are reallocated by Congress or the White House.
“Clark has come to the conclusion that the cost of combatants and the cost of doing business have gone up so high that he can’t expect to cover them simply by counting on increases in the defense budget,” said Bob Work, a retired Marine colonel who now tracks Navy programs at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based think tank.
He “is making a heroic assumption that if he cuts . . . 60,000 sailors and frees up on the order of $6 billion annually . . . the Navy will be able to keep that money,” Work said.
Although the Navy already plans to shed 60,000 sailors, insiders say that’s a fraction of what Clark believes may be possible.
As the number of sailors declines, more work will be expected of those who remain. But the Navy also promises to provide them with technologies that will let them work faster and better.
“This business with people isn’t about slashing and burning,” Clark said. “I’m reducing end strength because we’re learning how to run this place more effectively.”
BETTER SKILL AND EDUCATION
Maxwell, who is overseeing efforts to ensure that DDX is designed to let sailors work efficiently, said a watch-stander in the ship’s control center will be able to monitor the operation of several major systems from a single computer terminal.
As long as things run smoothly, a part of the computer screen will be available to deliver instructions on some new task the sailor needs; if there’s a problem, the sailor will be just a few keystrokes away from getting advice to solve it.
“We’re going to ask sailors to do things, multi-tasking, that we’ve never asked them to do before,” Maxwell said. That “requires clearly defining what we want them to do and preparing them for it.”
Along with new internal training regimens, the Navy is toughening its general educational requirements. By 2009, the service will make a two-year associate’s degree a prerequisite for promotion to senior chief petty officer.
The service also is working on a new “human capital strategy,” essentially a revamped personnel system including Clark’s pay and benefit cafeterias and career on- and off-ramps. Many of those changes will ultimately require funding from Congress.
For the Navy “to win in the marketplace, sailors have to have the power of choice,” Clark said. “That means they get to choose even what their benefit package is going to look like. And it means they get to choose what their career pattern looks like.”
The Navy historically has resisted such widespread changes, in part out of fear that the uncertainty accompanying them would drive sailors away. But rather than run from the current turmoil, sailors long to be part of it.
More than 70 percent of first-term sailors now re-enlist, up from 30 percent in 1999. So many want to stay that the Navy has created a “perform-to-serve” system that puts them in competition with one another for available jobs.
“They believe that we’re doing good things,” Clark said.
Sailors have been reminded that “we do hard things and we do them as a team,” he added.
So now, when the days are long and the work especially hard, those sailors say, “Well of course, this is the military.”
--Reach Dale Eisman at (703) 913-9872 or icemandcmsn.com.
2.
Military
Special Report
THE NAVY’S CHANGING TIDE: SERVICE FLOATS ‘SEA BASE’ CONCEPT
By Dale Eisman
Virginian-Pilot (Hampton Roads, VA)
March 8, 2005
WASHINGTON -- A war averted more than a decade ago may be pointing the way toward 21st-century warfare for the U.S. Navy.
In September 1994, a U.S. flotilla positioned itself off the coast of Haiti to help restore a democratically elected president to power. The flagship, the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, was stripped of its fighter planes and turned into a landing hub for Army helicopters and barracks for 2,000 soldiers.
Operation Uphold Democracy, as it was called, ended in a few weeks and the Norfolk-based Eisenhower headed to the Mediterranean for a more conventional deployment. But Navy leaders say the successful use of the Ike as a floating base, duplicated in 2001 when Marines operated from the carrier Kitty Hawk in the early stages of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, foreshadows a new naval era.
They contend that the “sea base” -- a network of ships providing offshore artillery fire, air support, food, ammunition and even a place to sleep for ground troops -- is about to replace the carrier as the centerpiece of the fleet.
The Navy always has been part of the supply chain for U.S. ground troops fighting overseas. Most of the tanks and heavy equipment used in Operation Iraqi Freedom were delivered by sea, for example.
But the sea base concept makes ships the end of the supply line. Soldiers and Marines accustomed to building and defending bases inland operate from the sea, going ashore only to fight.
“This is a revolution,” said Adm. Vern Clark, the outgoing chief of naval operations.
Within a decade, if it can find the money and win over skeptics in Congress -- both tall orders -- the service may deploy the first sea base.
It may have a dozen or more ships and be spread over hundreds of square miles of ocean to protect itself against terrorist attacks like those bedeviling U.S. troops in Iraq. But it also will be close enough to shore and have weapons to directly support those troops fighting hundreds of miles inland.
A typical base could include:
--A next-generation carrier, now called CVN-21, armed with 80 warplanes and manned by a crew one-third smaller than the 3,000 needed to run today’s flattops.
--An amphibious assault ship, the LHA-R, essentially a mini-carrier carrying attack helicopters, 20 or more fighters and bunks for 1,800 Marines. It will replace an assault ship that can accommodate only six fighters.
--Several newly designed destroyers, the DDX class, each packing 80 Tomahawk cruise missiles and new satellite-guided artillery with a range of 100 miles or more.
--A collection of “littoral combat ships,” high-speed floating trucks able to ferry troops and equipment ashore, clear mines, hunt enemy submarines and intercept potential suicide-boat attackers.
--Two or more nearly carrier-sized cargo vessels, loaded with supplies, including tanks and heavy trucks, and topped with a flat deck that could serve as a landing strip for aircraft that would lift them ashore.
--One or more attack submarines.
Except for the submarines, none of those ships now exist. The Navy’s bid to develop so many new or radically redesigned vessels simultaneously is the broadest such effort since World War II.
It largely grows out of Clark’s conviction, shared by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon leaders, that future enemies are likely to be the kind of hit-and-run insurgents U.S. troops are now battling in Iraq and that Americans must become quicker and less predictable to defeat them.
“We have to provide this nation with a raiding-party kind of capability, . . . without that great big footprint” that goes with major installations and large troop concentrations ashore, Clark said.
And, he added, “We have to provide land forces with real precision.”
Officials say two of the new ships, the DDX destroyer and the MPF-F cargo ship, are especially critical to those goals. The destroyer will be manned by one-third as many sailors as are on today’s destroyers. They will be outfitted with rapid-fire, satellite-aimed guns that will let a Marine or soldier far inland target and destroy individual enemy tanks, artillery, even foxholes, through protracted battles.
The 5-inch guns on today’s destroyers are far less accurate and have a range of only about 10 miles. That means troops inland must depend on Navy and Air Force planes, which must fly so high that they often have trouble distinguishing between friendly and enemy troops in close combat.
“It’s been awhile since we have built a single ship that is going to have such a dramatic impact on the total force as DDX will have,” said Vice Adm. Phil Balisle, who heads the Naval Sea Systems Command headquartered at the Washington Navy Yard.
The cargo vessel will be sort of a floating Wal-Mart, carrying almost anything troops might need and able to send it ashore within hours. It would replace ships that must pull into port to unload and are packed so tightly that longshoremen must remove – and expose to attack – tons of gear to reach the supplies that troops really need.
Engineering a ship that can be stocked and then unloaded at sea, even in rough weather, is an enormous challenge, said Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak, the Navy’s top warfare requirements officer. And it’s expensive, with an estimated cost of $2.2 billion.
Though Navy officials insist that they’re committed to the sea base, skeptics abound on Capitol Hill and among military intellectuals.
Lawmakers last year slowed development of the new destroyers amid warnings that the DDX relies too heavily on unproven technologies, and they froze spending on the cargo ship program until the Navy provides a “detailed report” on the craft, its mission and possible alternatives.
--Reach Dale Eisman at (703) 913-9872 or icemandc@msn.com.
