"WHY do you need 3 ships..." Topic

… to be able to deploy 1?

I mean, this is crazy. A ship is only functional for 1/3 of the time? Imagine if commercial shipping worked that way! Or if every family needed 3 cars to keep 1 going?

I can see that ships need downtime for upgrading and maintenance. I can see the need for crew training and familiarization.

But really… to this extent?

Imagine that a ship spends half it's time operational… your Navy has suddenly grown in size by 50%

Is that REALLY too much to expect?

Well, as mentioned, they do need a lot of maintenance.

Then of course, they're relatively slow, so deploying to and from patrol areas on the other side of the world takes a lot of time, which of course exacerbates the need for repairs, so………..

It would be nice if they could figure out a way to whittle that down to a 1:2 ratio. That would improve things considerably, and boost combat availability by 50%.

Yea, it is too much to expect. Warships are giant extremely complex pieces of machinery, subject to massive amounts of wear and tear. The average car, or commercial freighter for that matter, isn't even comparable. We're talking orders of magnitude differences.

Every single navy since the advent of navies has been trying to increase their operational availability rate. If it was really so easy to fix this don't you think someone would have adopted that method by now?

-Will

And having less crew does not make it easier

I'm betting in wartime that ratio gets better…

Damon.

I'm betting in wartime that ratio gets better…

Eh, not really. You think peacetime maintenance is rough, wait until someone is shooting holes in your ship!

-Will

3/1 is a pretty reasonable basis for complex machinery and crews. The biological component needs time with family, in particular in peace time and when that gets pinched, ruinous turnover results.

As has been said, wartime changes things but even then, tired crews and tired machines break and when that happens more to you than the other guy, the results are usually disaster.

You think thats bad, look at combat aircraft :)

Err, aircraft generally have a better availability rate than ships do, typically 70-90% range, though you have hangar queens like the B-2 that are only at about 45%. Hours of maintenance per flight hour, however are a different story.

"… aircraft generally have a better availability rate than ships do, typically 70-90% range…".

Well yea, but look at how many hours of maintenance they get, per single hour of flight.

That isn't really what I'd call better.

Far more costly, if you ask me.

The Royal Navy has 4 Trident armed submarines to enable one to be on patrol 24/7.

However once we have a fleet aircraft carrier again we will have only one in service from a total of 2.

Also keep in mind that deploying a ship is not just getting the ship underway. Sailors typically change jobs (due to promotions, resignations, retirements, etc) every 2-3 years. So everytime you get a ship out of maintenance, you have to train that team up to an acceptable level of performance. Which takes time.

Anybody know the rotation period of combat battalions over the past decade or so? I bet theirs is comparable to ships.

It's not so much "they only work half of the time" as "they sometimes need lengthy refits". If one's in drydock for 12 or 18 months then you need two more to be reasonably confident of having one available. Your availability in a crisis may be two or even all three, but you pretty much have to work on the assumption that one will be in refit when the hits the fan, so you want two more to keep one in action.

(It's also worth noting that the small numbers make it harder. You probably wouldn't need a fleet of 36 to be reasonably sure of having 12 available for a war, but when you're only talking about a handful of units, a single mishap can affect the availability of that entire asset type, so you need a spare….)

As Dom says, with small numbers perhaps understandable that you need spares, but things like crew changes? – regular, scheduled crew changes shouldn't cause the whole thing to close down, a proportion of 'new' or 'inexperienced' crew members should be written into the system. Same thing with drydock – take a ship out of the system for a year or you don't need 2 to replace it – if you have 12 carriers and 4 are in drydock at any one time that leaves 8. Surely, to keep 4 operational you don't need 4 'spares'! Training time for a ship in maintenance? Surely that could/should be integrated into the maintenance cycle anyway.

No, not convinced.

Err, aircraft generally have a better availability rate than ships do, typically 70-90% range

Ship "availability" is pretty much the same. But availability is different from being a force element that can be tasked. When looked from that perspective aircraft tend to drop down to similar or worse levels than front line warships

You're forgetting that's the 3:1 is to "Guarantee" that you have, at a minimum, one available/on station. With ships you can have the proverbial one in overhaul – mostly disassembled and won't be even reassembled for 4 months, one ship training, working up after the last overhaul, on a goodwill port visit in an out-of-the-way country, or even in an availability- where it's in a drydock for a couple of days to scrape the bottom and repaint, etc. If you need a ship in the Persian Gulf NOW, neither of these is of much use. Which is why you have 3.

You can't have warships on routine tasks in shipping lanes or in harbour loaded with munitions and missiles and torpedoes, so the lengthy process of ammunitioning and deammunitioning needs to take place before and after any range period and operational deployment. Ammunitioning can only take place in specialised ammunition facilities, which the the wise MOD bean counters have been very eager to close down, so there are lengthy programming delays there…

Untying ships from crews has been trialled, but is totally corrosive to morale. In 23 years of Service, the only 2 occasions when a group of sailors has refused to sail – we didn't officially term them 'mutinies' for obvious reasons – was when they were posted away from their own ships. Perfectly good hard working seamen, but ripped away from their mates and familiar environments, and expected to go straight out for another operational deployment after only a couple of weeks leave. Frankly they had a fair point!

Perhaps you could volunteer to do 2 or 3 straight back to back optours to show how its done? Oh – and when you return to face your divorce settlement, the Navy in its gratitude will automatically send half your pay and pension to your Ex….

It's a mix of repair work and training.

For every carrier deployed, one is just back from deployment and getting repaired, and the third is getting the new crew trained up and ready to deploy.

It's possible to run ships at a higher operational tempo, the USN does it with missile subs. There, you have a 3-month deployment, roughly one month in port getting 3+ months of repairs done courtesy of 2 full ship crews and a dedicated shipyard, and then the ship is back out to sea for 3 months with the other crew while the first crew does training.

But you absolutely have to design the entire ship around that operational tempo and have multi-page lists of components that will be replaced each refit. Replaced before they break, instead of only replaced when they do break.

The surface Navy tried the multi-crew experiment with a trio of FFGs that were getting decommissioned at the end of their deployments, and found that even with two crews and a bunch of shipyard personnel, they just could not repair 6 months operational wear and tear in 1 month. Instead of cancelling the experiment early, they went with a 10week overhaul period between the last two deployments to make the ship safe enough to sail home.

Look at professional sports. They train for a season, play for a season, and then rest for a season.

Complex, difficult tasks require a lot of training, the best equipment and rest from the stress of training and deployment.

Troops work best when they are together as a team, and are familiar with the weapons and transportation systems.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek

Look at the US Navy in WWII. Most of the ships involved in the Pacific sailed almost continuously from commissioning to mid 1946 and most were decommissioned and scrapped on the spot when they got home.

I would be completely and utterly amazed if 1940s era naval tech could 'sail continuously' for five years without a refit and remain operational.

Lion pretty much hit it on the head. My last active duty billet was as the Training and Readiness for the USNs mine warfare fleet. Before that, I was at COMNAVAIRLANT scheduling Reactor Department training and inspections for the CVNs. Before that, I was the Navigator for a LHA and doubled as the Force Navigator for a PHIBRON. I know a bit about this subject.

A routine one-in-three rotation has a ship just returned from deployment, a ship on deployment and a ship in workups. A given deployment cycle is about 182 days, So, you're deployed for six months and "home" for about a year. During that year:

1. The first month is spent in Post-Deployment Leave and Upkeep.
2. The last month is spent in Pre-Deployment Leave and upkeep.
3. Four months are spent in pre-deployment work-ups of increasing complexity.
4. Usually, about three months are spent in some sort of maintenance activity
5. The remaining three months are usually tied up in some sort of local area operations.

Normal "OPTEMPO" for a ship during it's time off deployment is about 60%.

As for deployments, that six months includes transit to and from where you are going. For instance, the trip from San Diego to Bahrain takes about 31 days at 17kts if you take every shortcut you can dream of. That's straight sailing: no passing exercises, no port visits. Given the three-in-one rotation identified above, the ship returning from deployment is not replaced by the ship prepping for deployment until she gets home, resulting in a two-month gap in operational coverage. If you want to have 100% coverage, you'll need to have a fourth ship.

Another wrench in the gears is the need to periodically take a ship out of the deployment rotation for overhauls, which can span anywhere from six months to three and a half years (CVN refueling). Looks like we need a fifth ship….

There are ways to improve the OPTEMPO of the platform, as has already been mentioned. I was responsible for setting up a Blue/Gold crew rotation for the MCMs back in the mid-2000s. We didn't have the infrastructure for it, nor the budget, but we did the best we could. One of the worst weeks of my naval career was when one of our CONUS-based training ships had a major engine casualty at the same time one of the rotational crews failed a certification inspection and couldn't deploy. We had to move another crew's deployment up two months to cover the gap. Talk about a bunch of ticked off wives….

Anyway, I hope this aids in understanding why it takes 3-5 ships to support one on deployment.

Regards,

Scott Chisholm

There are ways to improve the OPTEMPO of the platform, as has already been mentioned. I was responsible for setting up a Blue/Gold crew rotation for the MCMs back in the mid-2000s. We didn't have the infrastructure for it, nor the budget, but we did the best we could. One of the worst weeks of my naval career was when one of our CONUS-based training ships had a major engine casualty at the same time one of the rotational crews failed a certification inspection and couldn't deploy. We had to move another crew's deployment up two months to cover the gap.

And that is the major risk of dual-crewed ships with a high operational tempo. When one ship has a major issue, SOMEONE has to cover that deployment/mission. So maybe one crew gets extended a couple weeks and another one gets deployed early.

Talk about a bunch of ticked off wives…

Even with the short, 3-month deployments, we still had a lot of divorces after a deployment.

There is a difference between the potential tempo, and a "normal" tempo. You could run most of you ships where half are deployed and half are in port with upkeep, and you may keep it up for years. But it is going to catch up with you eventually, shorting the life expectancy of the ship and certainly the retention of the crew.

Warships are the single most complicated machines on the planet. They operate in an environment that is uniquely suited to destroying them. Think about the humid salt air in electronics, the debris getting in your heat exchangers, not to mention rust, rust, rust.

"I would be completely and utterly amazed if 1940s era naval tech could 'sail continuously' for five years without a refit and remain operational."

My Uncle served on the USS Phoenix which was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He said the ship touched shore for 4 days in the last 3 years of the war. Also remember, that new ships do not need refit as often as old ships, and most of the ships in WWII were fresh off the rails. But even then, if you read their histories, you will often see one configuration, then another after some major refit in 1943 or so.

The obvious solution is to only have one set of 'wives' for every 2-3 crews… This way they have a 'husband' home more often and 3 times the money to spend.

As if "hot bunking" isn't bad enough already….

The obvious solution is to only have one set of 'wives' for every 2-3 crews… This way they have a 'husband' home more often and 3 times the money to spend.

There was plenty of that going around, too.

It's rather detrimental to good order and discipline, most Sailors don't share well.

Makes a lot of business for the doc, too, dealing with black eyes and other bumps and bruises.

Indeed – that's why I mentioned it.

There used to be a story going round in my home town that the fishing community had an informal plural marriage custom with 2 'husbands' for each wife. It worked well because the men were away for a month and home for a month so could manage their schedules. It also provided for continuity if one was killed – quite a common occurrence.

I suspect this was a bit of an urban myth/slur on a community that were looked down on by the rest of the town. Fisherfolk are a caste apart in most countries.