February 14, 2005

Nearly 25K sailors will be cut by ’07

By Mark D. Faram
Times staff writer

It’s confirmed.
The Navy will cut 13,200 sailors from the ranks next fiscal year, and 7,400 the following year. Combined with ongoing force reductions already in place, the cuts will mean nearly 25,000 fewer sailors in 2007 than there are today.

Those gloomy personnel cuts were outlined in the Navy’s budget request for fiscal 2006.

While Navy officials contend some of those cuts can be absorbed through mothballing older ships, converting support billets to civilian jobs and reducing accessions, they admit more drastic measures are being pursued.

The Navy will seek congressional approval — and funding — to implement such “force shaping authorities” as separation pays and early retirement boards. They’ll also expand the Perform To Serve re-enlistment approval program and lower some high-year tenure gates, making it harder for some sailors to re-up. The Navy can implement those two initiatives on their own without higher approval.

And the 25,000 figure is just the beginning.

“This is the projected end number, for now,” said a senior defense budget official at the Pentagon. “But are we going to continue to look at this while we execute? Sure.”

Officials would only confirm end-strength cuts through 2007. That would leave end strength at 345,300. Navy Times has learned, however, that personnel officials are planning for as many as 25,000 more cuts by 2011.

Rear Adm. Gerald Talbot, head of military personnel plans and policy for the Navy's chief of personnel, said the Navy could go as low as 320,000 by 2011.

Talbot, speaking Aug. 10 to a convention of Navy career counselors in New Orleans, said planners may implement annual cuts of 7,000 between 2007 and 2011.

‘Very surgical’ drawdown

Talbot said the Navy would learn from the hard lessons of the 1990s, when he said “the top was taken right off the Navy.”

Instead, he said, this time the service would “be very surgical in how we manage this drawdown.”

With first-term retention still topping 60 percent, officials will continue to reduce the number of recruits the service brings in, with 2006 accessions slated to be 35,000.

That is 3,000 fewer than were scheduled to be signed up in 2005 and 22,000 fewer than the 57,000 recruits brought in just five years ago.

“If you have great retention, which we continue to be blessed with, you don’t need to have as many people in the training pipeline; the training is less,” the budget official said.

To go as low as the Navy is planning will require the painful task of sending people home, but the Navy would like to soften the blow, Talbot said.

To that end, the Navy has asked for a $511 million increase in the budget for “separation and special pays.”

Possible uses for that money would be offering junior sailors separation pay, something Talbot told the counselors he’d like to see increase, “so when you walk out the door, you don't think you've been fired.”

For more senior sailors, that could take the form of a reduced retirement annuity, offering sailors some cash up front and an annuity after that, with possibly six months of medical and dental coverage, Talbot said.

Even without a nod from Congress, the Navy could bring back early retirement boards for officers and chiefs that sent many home in the 1990s.

In addition, plans are on the table to expand the existing Perform to Serve re-enlistment approval program to second-term sailors, those with between six and 10 years of service, requiring them to submit applications to re-enlist.

Along with that could come stricter up-or-out policy for E-5s, by dropping their high-year tenure gates from the current 20 years to “somewhere between 12 and 14 years of service,” Talbot said.

To help make the cuts the Navy is considering, officials continue to eye the service’s massive shore infrastructure, hoping to convert shore support jobs far from the waterfront into civilian jobs, the Pentagon budget official said.

“These will be largely infrastructure reductions, because our battle force is just about where it needs to be,” the official said.

By October 2005, the Navy plans to convert 5,529 military billets to civilian jobs and now plans to add another 960 more in 2006.

The waterfront won’t be exempt from cuts, however. Officials plan to continue decommissioning older manpower-intensive ships, opting instead for smaller crews manning high-tech ships in the future.

Shore duty for most ratings, officials say, will now be spent on the waterfront, supporting the deploying forces.

But with many older ships still in service, some reductions will have to come from the seagoing Navy as these ships reach the end of their service lives.

Six ships will go away in 2006, taking with them nearly 5,000 billets, including nearly 2,500 from the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, which defense officials now confirm the Navy wants to mothball sometime in 2006, as well as 950 billets from the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, also slated to go next year.

At the same time, the service hopes to retain more highly trained specialists needed for the crews of these newer ships, starting with the Littoral Combat Ship, which will boast a crew of only E-4s and above.

 Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

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 Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

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February 14, 2005

11-carrier Navy
JFK on the chopping block, but Mayport’s not out of the running

By Christopher P. Cavas
Special to the Times

The 11-ship carrier force indeed will become a reality, according to the new fiscal 2006 Pentagon budget submitted to Congress Feb. 7.
The drop in flattop force structure had been rumored for months, and gained strength when a Pentagon budget document was leaked to the press in late December. But until now, Navy officials would not confirm the accuracy of the move.

The new budget documents, however, clearly show the one-ship reduction from the 12-carrier force that’s been in place since 1994.

The carrier likely to be axed is the John F. Kennedy, according to a senior source who asked not to be identified. “Big John” had been scheduled to remain in service until 2018.

Although the number of carrier strike groups will shrink to 11, there are no plans to decommission any of the active fleet’s 10 carrier air wings, officials said.

Overall, the Navy and Marine Corps will get an extra $6.4 billion in fiscal 2006 over the previous year, for a total of $125.6 billion. That includes a jump of $1.9 billion in procurement funding over 2005, to a total of $18.1 billion.

Shipbuilding accounts will be trimmed, as rumored. Instead of building six ships in 2006, the Navy will construct just four. Gone is one Littoral Combat Ship — shifted to 2007 at the request of Congress — and one of two planned T-AKE dry cargo ammunition ships, now moved to 2008.

Still in the budget are one SSN-774 Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, one LPD-17 amphibious transport dock, one LCS and one T-AKE.

The budget also reveals the Navy’s decision not to order the first DD(X) destroyer this year. Instead, the first ship will be ordered in fiscal 2007, and the planned seven-ship DD(X) buy from 2007 to 2009 has been slashed to three for a total of five ships through 2011.

The next aircraft carrier, CVN 21, also has been pushed back, from 2007 to 2008.

Moving up, however, is the LHA(R), the big-deck amphibious ship replacement for current LHA assault ships. Congress supported advancing the ship from 2008 to 2007.

The service will cap the LPD-17 class buy at nine ships, with the last ship being ordered in 2007. The Navy previously had planned on buying 11 or 12 ships.

The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson’s 2006 nuclear refueling overhaul remains in the budget, despite having been considered for decommissioning as a cost-savings measure.

Submarine force levels could drop, however, as three nuclear attack sub refueling overhauls scheduled for 2007 have been cut to one. The two subs that would have been refueled — extending their service lives up to 20 years — instead will be decommissioned.

Aircraft

The service remains committed to buying 42 F/A-18 Super Hornet variants a year, with that number being reflected for every year through fiscal 2011. The mix will begin to change in 2006, as EA-18G electronic attack versions are substituted for F/A-18 E and F strike aircraft. Four are in the 2006 budget, 12 in 2007 and 18 in 2008, for a total of 90 EA-18Gs through fiscal 2011.

Procurement of Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been cut. Two aircraft planned for 2007 have been dropped; the planned 2008 buy of 16 aircraft has shrunk to 10, and 2009’s 40 F-35s have become 32. A senior Pentagon budget official said the cuts were based on continuing development problems with the aircraft’s weight and affordability issues.

Cost also was a factor, the official said, in cutting 35 MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft from the 2006-2009 time frame. Now, nine rather than 15 Ospreys will be ordered in 2006; 14 instead of 29 in 2007; 19 instead of 30 in 2008; and 30 aircraft from 33 in 2009.

Commitment to Mayport

Florida elected officials reacted with alarm after they were told Dec. 23 by Navy Secretary Gordon England that the Navy planned to decommission “one conventionally-powered aircraft carrier” in 2005. Although the officials said England did not mention the John F. Kennedy by name, the inference was that the ship would be the 36-year-old JFK, based at Naval Station Mayport near Jacksonville, Fla. The Navy has acknowledged that the ship has a long-standing series of material problems, and it is scheduled to enter Norfolk Naval Shipyard this summer for a major drydocking overhaul. Shipyard officials already have delayed purchasing items for the overhaul, however, in anticipation that the job could be canceled. Decommissioning the ship would save the Navy about $350 million a year, service officials said.

The Navy’s only other non-nuclear carrier is the Kitty Hawk, based in Japan. That ship is planned to remain in service until fiscal 2008, and, with the Japanese government contributing to its upkeep, is reported to be in very good material condition despite being in service for nearly 44 years.

But although Florida officials expressed concerns over the size of the carrier fleet, they also were alarmed that the Kennedy’s demise would make the Mayport base a prime candidate for closure in a new round of base realignment cuts that will be determined by September. That would leave Norfolk, Va., as the fleet’s only eastern seaboard carrier base.

Sources familiar with the Navy’s thinking, however, said the service remains committed to keeping open two Atlantic Fleet carrier bases.

In the global war against terrorism, a “dirty bomb” could shut down the entire Atlantic Fleet, said one source who asked not to be identified. The source indicated the Navy would not open itself up to such a possibility.

Jacksonville officials recently began a study on the costs and effort associated with upgrading the port to enable a nuclear carrier to be based there.

Sources said other types of ships could be moved to Mayport, including amphibious ships.

Belleau Wood to be cut

For the first time in many years, the new budget shows the Navy will gain more ships in a year than it loses. The force is planned to drop to 285 ships this year, but rise to 289 in 2006.

Four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will enter the fleet in 2006, along with two San Antonio-class amphibious ships and three T-AKEs.

Decommissionings include an attack submarine, one cruiser, an LPD amphibious ship, one AOE replenishment oiler, and an LHA assault ship, the Belleau Wood.

The San Diego-based Belleau Wood, in service since 1978, would become the first LHA to be retired. The ship has been criticized by the Marine Corps as being in worse material shape than its sisters, and already had been planned to be decommissioned in 2007.

The offset in big-deck assault ships will be temporary, however, as the new Makin Island LHD is scheduled to be delivered in the spring of 2007.

Christopher P. Cavas is a staff writer for Defense News.

 Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

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We called the Belleau Wood the 'Ghetto Wood'. Not exactly Carnival Cruise Lines.

I'm cool with cutting the Navy, but we need to maintain our shipping ability and the sea lanes on which to conduct the shipping.

WTF? Who's Mr. Pillow Pants? - Clerks 2

With first-term retention still topping 60 percent, officials will continue to reduce the number of recruits the service brings in, with 2006 accessions slated to be 35,000.

Easy mission for the USN recuiting guys.