Research for Fleet

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Manning the Expanded Fleet
June 1, 2009

We investigated the personnel inventory that would be necessary to meet the Navy’s manpower requirements for the 313-ship Navy. We find that at any time over the 30-year shipbuilding plan, the Service’s immediate manpower requirements could be satisfied with an endstrength of only 322,000. However, we estimated that the Service’s minimum viable long-term personnel inventory will be between 332,000 and 334,000. One reason for the higher long-term requirements is that the Navy will have to add about 3,500 enlisted shore billets to maintain reasonable sea/shore flows for all ratings. Another reason is that the Service will need to add about 2,000 enlisted billets to support a viable “agricultural tail”-the base of the personnel pyramid that is necessary to grow the Service’s more senior enlisted ranks. In addition, we believe that the Navy’s current manpower requirement plans are based on an overly optimistic assessment of the Service’s ability to cut billets from the shore establishment; we expect that a more realistic assessment adds about 2,000 Sailors to the minimum viable personnel inventory. Finally, several changes in the fleet plan that are being considered will increase manpower requirements by a few thousand.

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An Approach to Fleet Architectures for the Director of Force Transformation Office of Secretary of Defense
November 1, 2004
The then-Director of Force Transformation, VADM Arthur Cebrowski, USN (Ret), asked the author of this document to provide views on future fleet architectures, as a contribution to his response to the mandate from Congress for a study on alternative future naval fleet architectures. The outline of this report was dictated to the author by Admiral Cebrowski. His alternative futures were for (1) force building, (2) force operations in "The Gap," that is, across the seam of the world, and (3) force operations in "The Core," that is, the globalized world. He also set out criteria for fleet architectures, to include relevancy, preserving options, transaction rates, learning capability, complexity at scale, entity cost, and risk management. The bottom lines were that future hulls be either light and maneuverable or trucks that could be adapted to changing needs across the years.
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