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From: budden@trout.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Are Warships Over-Manned?
Summary: ...depends
Message-ID: <1990Nov30.023937.10727@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 30 Nov 90 02:39:37 GMT
References: <1990Nov29.004354.21100@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 46
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: budden@trout.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg)

You hit a hot button...I deal with very much this problem
on Coast Guard cutters.

You left out damage control parties, the second highest consumer of
manpower on ships (both grey and white ones).

And you forgot CIC entirely.  That's the biggest consumer on cutters,
and it's not much better on Navy ships.

Military ships tend to be conservatively manned.  By that I mean
that they tend to eschew potentially risky automation -- people
have historically been considered more reliable.  That's the
perception, whether true or not.  

For Coast Guard cutters, you've also forgotten the boat lowering
detail, the boat crew, the boarding party.  Kinda difficult to do our
job without those.

Ships are crammed with equipment; equipment breaks.  So you have a lot
of organizational level maintenance folks -- repairmen built into the
crew.  

Another driver, when in port, is that cutters are supposed to have
enough people in the duty section to handle damage control situations --
a minimum fire parts.  Since cutters frequently perform rescue & assist
in port, this also requires a minimum number of warm bodies in the
duty section.

A great deal of activity in larger cutters and Navy ships can be characterized
as dealing with information systems -- sound powered phone talkers,
messengers, damage control investigators, plotters, sensor operators, ...
On the surface, each of these jobs looks automatable -- computers and
local area networks,...and the job is solved.  Oops, forgot
salt water and survivability.  Non-trivial considerations that we're
working right now to overcome (wire for details).  

An 82 foot patrol boat sails with a crew of 11, and that includes enough
for a boarding party.  Cutter calls away the boarding party with
everyone standing to some station -- nobody's in the sack for the next
watch.  So WPBs have a few days endurance at most.

Rex Buddenberg