Navy Could Sideline 17 Support Ships Due to Manpower Issues | Hacker News Reader

Navy Could Sideline 17 Support Ships Due to Manpower Issues

news.usni.org

17 pointsilamont15 comments

Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169676 - Jan 2024 (74 comments)

http://web.archive.org/web/20240127200509/https://www.stripe...

Not related.

USNS ships are crewed mainly (80%+) by civilian mariners. The US Navy does not recruit civilian mariners for enlistment like with USN ships. They hire them from the wider civilian workforce.

The available workforce is too small due to a variety of reasons but the main reason is that $65k-250k isn't enough for a physically strenuous job with strict licensing requirements where you're away from your family floating out in the middle of the Indian Ocean with no port calls for half the year, minimum.

The US Navy, and therefore the Military Sealift Command, has an operational tempo that keeps increasing and qualified mariners generally do not have trouble finding employment with better working conditions.

Biggest problem for MSC is leave. You are supposed to be hitched to a ship for, say, 6 months. But then they can't find your relief, so you have to stay. You can imagine someone who was supposed to be onboard for 6 months being forced to stay for 9 or 12 months, when they finally do get off they say "never again."

It sounds like what you’re saying is the Navy is facing a labor shortage due to not making the employment offer attractive enough, correct? Based on the previous thread and this one, it appears the Navy’s offer to both labor cohorts is insufficient. Both enlisted and civilian mariners are able to find better work life balance and compensation elsewhere, hence my comment.

“No one wants to work anymore.” I believe is the colloquialism for this situation.

The Navy can only afford to spend what it has been allowed to spend.

“Nobody wants to work anymore” is a pejorative phrase meant to denigrate workers.

Nobody is denigrating mariners, from the Navy to analysts to me, they are just expressing the reality of the situation and attempting to adapt.

I don’t understand why a lack of effusive praise is taken as negativity.

>The Navy can only afford to spend what it has been allowed to spend.

I argue it's clearly mismanagement by navel leaders who love toys and see people as cheap. The US Navy gets a very predictable and consistent budget, these days around 200 billion a year plus 50 billion for the marines. They take that budget and put it into various pools, two of which are new ships and labor costs. If they don't have the money to pay a wage that would attract enough sailors to fully staff the fleet, it means they got the ratio wrong and have been overspending on ship at the cost of adequate labor.

I completely agree with this ratio view. Too much on ships and not enough on HR -> need to decommission the excess ships. To be fair, part of the whole thing is that by the nature of the beast, this requires they have eyes on the macroeconomic structure on the scale of years, which isn't easy. Because that relates to their funding and how desperate people are for work. And ships and ship orders I'm sure take a few years to push through. All that being said, it would have been wise for them to have some hedges in place for such scenarios, and to consider non-traditional employment structures such as "sail from home" type work where employees zoom into the engine room

I agree with everything you’ve written. The US Navy is simply not paying workers enough, and does not adequately value the labor. This is another example of a “labor shortage” that is really just a lack of will to appropriately compensate. Pay them more.

Move the labor shortage to a different part of the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Poor thinking. Better to reduce combat ships than support ships.

Q: What do you call a destroyer that's out of ammo?

A: A paperweight.

This is a problem with Military Sealift Command, which operates these vessels with civilian mariners (CIVMAR). MSC has had recruitment and retainment problems for a long time. These problems compound because, for instance, mariners are denied leave due to staffing shortages, causing more mariners to leave the service entirely.

CIVMARs were treated really badly during COVID which ended up creating a slow-moving problem that is now coming to a head with a collapse of the service.

Interesting also that several of these ships seem very recent construction.

Oof. Historically, navies that couldn't manage to man their ships usually lost.

automate all the things as new paradigm?

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