As the surface Navy enters 2015, its leaders says they are gainingbeginning to feel some momentum on getting their arms around some persistent issues bedeviling the fleet — manning gaps at sea, unforeseen maintenance problems, long deployments.
From significant manning gaps at sea to unpredictable maintenance cycles forcing long deployments, The Navy's surface boss said his fleet service is headed in the right direction.
In a January 6 interview with Navy Times, Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden said he is focusing much of his attention on getting ships into their maintenance cycles on time to support a new deployment plan designed to give ships a predictable, 36-month deployment cycle.
The problem in 2015 isn't so much the money — the maintenance budget is fully funded this year, he said — but balancing with operational schedules.
"The ebb and flow of resources is going to fluctuate, but when it comes time to pay for the work, generally in my experience there is money to do it. What's much more tenuous for us, a lot less fungible, is time," said Rowden in his first wide-ranging interview with Navy Times since taking charge of Naval Surface Forces in August.
Rowden said there's work to do to get he's not where he wants to be with getting ships through their cycles but said he's been meeting with both Navy leaders and the shipyards to see how the fleet can do better in planning the work, which can save months and millions of dollars.
In October last year, the Navy's top officer began telling sailors that the Navy had started to turn the corner on the maintenance backlog stemming from that had begun to lag because of budget cuts and longer deployments.
"We are starting to get out of this, it's a long outward crawl," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert said Oct. 23., adding that the fleet was on SENTENCE NEEDS FIXIN'
An official who spoke on background said Fleet leaders are beginning to get a better handle on the work that needs to be done on the ships, that have been ridden hard in the era of long deployments, and the time the work will take, said one official familiar with these discussions. That has pushed the Navy closer to the goal of reining in deployment lengths to seven months, down from as many as 11 months.
"I would say that I believe that we are on a good glide-slope to get where we need to be," Rowden said in the interview, just in the days before the annual Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington, D.C.
Filling empty racks
Rowden said that tThe surface Navy is also having more success filling thousands of empty billets, opened after the "optimum manning" initiatives of the past decade, Rowden said, and that he is focused on "maximizing the manning that we have."
"From the position I am in now, manpower and manning, the reality is that it is my responsibility to play the hand I'm dealt," Rowden said.
Rowden said tThe initiatives put in place by Vice Adm. Bill Moran, chief of naval personnel, are moving trends in the right direction, he noted.
And indeed, personnel officials say the number of empty billets at sea has dropped from more than 17,000 three years ago to less than just north of 3,000 today. Cmdr. Chris Servello, spokesman for Moran, said the number has dropped by more than 5,000 billets since last January, but that personnel officials are still working on getting the right sailors with the right skills in place on the waterfront.
Officials have gone to lengths to both incentive incentivize sea duty and have obtained new authorities to end a sailor's shore duty early to fill critical billets at sea.
For Rowden's part, he said he counts on his commanding officers to tell him if they are not getting their needs met.
"I work for them," he said, adding that if ships identify areas of need, his office is there to make sure they're fixed.
Morale
Morale fleet wide has been the subject of great debate over the past year12 months.
In September, an independent online survey run by a career aviator found that morale was flagging among the ranks and especially among junior surface warfare officers community.
Of 650 SWO respondents, 437 between the ranks of ensign and lieutenant, only 22 percent said the overall state of the surface warfare community was positive. Fifty-seven percent either disagreed or strongly disagreed that the SWO community was positive.
An official 2013 survey found similar dissatisfaction among the junior black shoes. in the SWO community.
A survey of 2,300 junior SWOs found that ensigns and lieutenants junior grade
in the surface fleetare more likely to see themselves leaving the active-duty Navy after their current tour than spending a career as a SWO
surface warfare officer.
They're less likely to see themselves as future commanding officers at sea when compared with the lieutenants and lieutenant commanders who took the same survey, less likely to see their work as valuable to the Navy and less likely to be satisfied with their perceived value to their command.
"As has been the case for years, the more junior you are, the less you seem to enjoy being a SWO," Vice Adm. Tom Copeman, then head of SURFOR, said in a Jan. 2 blog post announcing the survey results.
Rowden, who has spent a good deal of his time traveling around and visiting sailors since he assumed took the SURFOR helm of Naval Surface Forces, said he has found morale to be generally good. He defended the SWO career field and disavowed the old adage that "SWOs eat their young," a phrase that conveys the perception sense that the training of junior officers can be ramrod and alienating and abrasive.
"I've never heard a SWO say that," Rowden said. "There are a lot of people who want people to think that surface warfare officers 'eat their young,' but they are not surface warfare officers."
The bad rep for junior officers in the SWO trackcareer field is largely perpetuated outside the SWO community, Rowden said, adding that midshipmen are making SWO their first choice of career field in greater numbers than the other areas of the Navy.
Rowden also addressed a common complaint, that the Navy has a "zero-defect mentality," in which one mistake can end your career. where meaning that one mistake can end your career.
There is a difference, he said, between officers and sailors who get in trouble for "youthful indiscretions," and those who get in trouble for "character flaws."
As an illustration, he told a story about a young petty officer who was a top performer on his ship but who, during a stressful yards period, was found gun-decking logs.
"Everybody was lining up to keelhaul this young man, but I said, 'No, we're not going to keelhaul him. We're not even going to take him to mast. This was an error in judgment committed by a young man under enormous stress who needs remediation," he recalled. "Today, he's flying F/A-18s."
Rowden said it is incumbent upon leaders, especially commanding officers, to weed out sailors with character flaws to ensure they don't move on and cause harm to greater numbers of people.
"What we can say definitively that we can hold people accountable who fail to meet standards," he said.
Clarification: A previous version of this story misidentified the rank individual who had previously doctored logs. He was a petty officer.
David B. Larter was the naval warfare reporter for Defense News.
