Research for Personnel

Alternative sea manning concepts (ASMCs), such as flexible deployment concepts, optimal manning, and rotational crewing, will modify not only the ratio of operational to nonoperational billets but also the amount and nature of actual sea time associated with being in an operational billet. In this document, we first define some of the relevant ASMCs and discuss what is known about how they will affect Sailors. In particular, we focus on the effect of ASMCs on how sea-intensive Sailors’ careers will be. We then look at past, current, and forecast sea/shore ratios to provide a baseline and see how this baseline compares with what we might expect under the ASMCs. Finally, we examine the extent to which the changes in Sailors’ careers might affect retention and the implications for compensation.

Career paths and compensation are ideally tailored to fit the requirements of specific occupational fields and individual workers. Different skills and occupations call for different pay as well as different amounts of in-house training, career lengths, and assignment patterns. In the military, however, career paths and the structure of compensation tend to be rigid and the basic outlines have persisted since before the beginning of the All-Volunteer Force. Most analysts and policy-makers agree that the future Navy will consist of more technologically advanced platforms organized to have a more agile fleet. This fleet will call for a smaller, more experienced workforce that spends more time in operational billets. If these predictions are correct, substantial changes must occur in manpower, personnel, and training systems. It will be necessary to have more innovative career paths. In this paper, we will first show that the Navy workforce is more junior than its nonmilitary counterpart. We will then review literature that shows that this has already created problems. Next, we argue that future changes will make it even more compelling to undertake reforms needed to create a more experienced force. Then we will explore some possible reforms to create innovative career paths.

In order to investigate which duty stations and ratings are at a high risk for hearing loss, this study looked at the Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Readiness System (DOEHRS) medical hearing test records of nearly 251,000 enlisted sailors and officers over the twenty-five year period 1979 to 2004. The study found that enlisted sailors who spend most of a 24 year Navy career assigned to a Naval Surface Warship1 as opposed to being assigned to ashore duty stations or a Naval Support ship, had a much higher probability of leaving the Service with a reduction in their ability to hear. Since many individuals lose some hearing as they age, the study controlled for aging along with other factors such as gender and race to properly test if there are differences associated with ship assignments. To accomplish this task, we merged Navy medical records of hearing tests with information on each individual sailor's duty stations.

To facilitate true military transformation, the naval research community must work more closely than ever with leadership so that it can inform, shape, and support this systemic change. To this end, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) hosted the Third Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference on March 31 and April 1, 2003. The conference brought together Navy’s leadership and the research communities to discuss how to better integrate today’s research and development (R&D) efforts with leadership’s evolving manpower, personnel, and training vision. This document relates the conference presentations and discussions to aspects of the CNP’s FY03 guidance and the Navy’s R&D priorities—including efforts to shape the force, better establish manpower requirements, design Sailor-centric systems, leverage new technology, manage careers more effectively, provide service members with a positive Navy experience, and create a seamless military team.