Some New Estimates of the Navy's Indirect Manning Costs

How does a change in the manning of ships and squadrons at sea affect the Navy's shore-based manning? This question, while hardly new, has arisen recently in several different contexts. One involves cost-effectivness analyses of arsenal ships - which require relatively small crews - as alternatives to traditional surface combatants. The purpose of this paper is to provide a set of empirical estimates of the response of ashore manning to changes in manning of ships and squadrons - hereafter called afloat manning - based on the most recent time-series information available. Over the past six or seven years, the drawdowns in budgets, force structure, and manning have been substantial. Inclusion of that experience in the database from which cost-estimating relationships are developed is essential to the validity of the relationships for use in assessing the cost consequences of decisions presently or soon to be at hand. The analytical construct adopted here is a model that posits delayed adjustment of shore manning to changes in afloat manning.