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CVN 78







USN Looks To Reduce Crew Sizes on Carriers

The U.S. Navy wants to figure out a way to deploy an aircraft carrier, which normally sails with more than 5,000 sailors aboard, with a crew and airwing numbering less than 1,000.
In an era when manpower costs devour 60 percent of annual Navy budgets, the service has been hard-pressed to not only reduce its endstrength so it can afford the ships and aircraft it wants, but to pare down crew sizes while making the most of each sailor.
The manning goals for future warships are far below that of current surface combatants, with just 75 aboard the Littoral Combat Ship and fewer than 150 on DDG 1000. Future submarine crews will also be smaller.
But when it comes to the next-generation aircraft carrier, the Office of Naval Research offers an even more dramatic vision.
For the Gerald R. Ford-class CVN 78, the initial goal is to cut 1,500 sailors from the more than 5,500 aboard today’s Nimitz-class carriers.
Now the Navy wants to see if a carrier crew of less than 1,000 is possible.
“How do you optimize manpower from a 5,000 crew to 1,000? It’s very difficult. Can it be done? Maybe,” said William “Kip” Krebs, program officer for human systems integration at the Office of Naval Research.
His office recently called on the nation’s research community to help figure out how much a sailor can be expected to do on an ergonomically designed ship and what functions on these ships can be replaced by automation.
Krebs, a former active duty aerospace experimental psychologist and current member of the Navy Reserve, says it’s one thing to build a piece of machinery — the proverbial “black box” — it’s another to design it with a human operator in mind, the definition of human-systems integration.
“It’s easy to quantify and build a black box. They are usually predictable. You’ve got certain assumptions, you’ve got certain restraints, and it’s fairly easy to build that black box,” Krebs said. “When you are dealing with humans, it’s nonlinear, it’s unpredictable. So it’s very difficult to quantify a human and human performance. I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’s just a harder problem because it’s not as straightforward.”
Through computer modeling and experimentation, ONR hopes to determine how much to expect from a sailor performing at 100 percent without an overload of stress or fatigue while maintaining situational awareness.
“When you say, ‘I want this sailor to be performing at 100 percent,’ what does that mean? Because your 100 percent is different from my 100 percent,” he said. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to understand what fatigue is or workload or stress or stressors.”
Krebs says the key is to go through the ship and identify and isolate each task by the knowledge, skills and abilities required.
“Then you can start looking at redundancies and say, ‘What type of automation tools can be created to reduce workload on that individual?’” he said. “If you look historically, for instance at the airplane, when the airplane came about, it was a stick and rudder and a couple of dials. Now you’ve got autopilot and some airplanes can take off from gate to gate all by itself, all computer-driven; it’s fully automated and the pilot has very little interaction.”
Another potential shift from traditional crewing will be the need for extensive training so that a smaller number of sailors can operate an increasingly complex machine.
“You can design a very efficient ship but then you’ve got to put someone in it who fully understands it,” Krebs said. “You are not going to get the recruit out of A-school because they don’t have the knowledge.”
For naval analyst Norman Polmar, all that crew training spells a drain of the existing pool of manpower.
“It’s more front-end training, but the more you train a sailor the less he’s available to operate on the ship,” he said. “The more complex the ship with fewer people the more you’re training them and the less useful time you’re getting from them.”
For example, on the Ford-class carriers, steam catapults have been replaced by electric catapults. That may seem more efficient, but Polmar says it’s a case where technology steals from manpower, especially if there are still Nimitz-class carriers with the current steam technology.
“You need a new school system for those guys, so you’re eating up people in instructors and support,” Polmar said.
He noted that on the current fleet of Nimitz-class carriers, there are nearly a thousand sailors assigned to the engineering department alone. He says a few hundred might be reduced from the crew, but the sheer size of an aircraft carrier requires lots of sailors.
“We should save on people, but it’s not a case of cutting a certain number because the engineering department needs people; you need plane-pushers and lots of them, you need a certain number of boatswain’s mates because the ship’s a certain size and you need ship’s security.”
So an aircraft carrier with less than 1,000 sailors aboard?
“Impossible,” Polmar said bluntly. “It’s not going to happen.”
Proposals for the research work are now being reviewed. Krebs says a decision is expected in weeks

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