Research for Sea-Shore Rotation

The purpose of this study is to help the Navy identify the costs imposed on the Navy manpower system when military billets are outsourced. In particular, this paper examines how competition will affect the Navy's ability to achieve its objectives with respect to sea-shore rotation and homebasing. It provides, by community, estimates of how different outsourcing options would affect these military manpower decisions. The paper concludes that personnel policy constraints, especially the goal of providing an adequate base of shore billets for rotation, place significant limits on the number of military billets entered into A-76 competitions. Given the magnitude of manpower constraints, the Navy has two policy options: reduce the number of military billets to be competed or loosen the number of constraints. Loosening the constraints would involve: more carefully defining sea/shore ratios, allowing some A-76 competitions with high expected savings to be completed even if exceptions must be made to personnel policy goals, examining overseas shore billets that count as sea duty as good outsourcing candidates, and reexamining some of the IBR exclusions, especially for shore-intensive ratings. DTIC AD-B239314

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.

CNA has studied the relationship between various dimensions of time at sea and retention over many years. In general, we have found that more time at sea produces lower retention, but the magnitude of the effects is more modest than many Navy officers expected. We have also found that higher pay (military relative to civilian) increases retention. Given the relative magnitudes of the sea duty and pay effects, we have concluded that modest increases in pay could be cost effective in offsetting the negative effects of increased sea duty. As the Navy has considered the implications of our past studies and has wrestled with difficult downsizing choices, three questions remained about the applicability of the results of our previous studies for Navy planning: (1) Does quality of life during turnarounds affect retention? (2) What is the cost to maintain retention if time at sea is increased? and (3) Are Navy Retention/Separation Surveys consistent with previous CNA analyses? This briefing addresses these questions. We start by summarizing our answers to the three questions. Explanations of how we reached the conclusions follow.

This research memorandum examines one of the major constraints on skill utilization for Navy enlisted personnel: the requirements for sea/shore rotation. It presents a simple model of the relationship between the rotation policy for a skill community and the utilization rate for that skill. The model can be used to calculate the number of people needed to keep requirements filled while maintaining the prescribed rotation patterns. The model is applied both to ratings and to Navy Enlisted Classification codes (NECs).