Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: terryr@ogicse.ogc.edu (Terry Rooker) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: Military Cuts Message-ID: <12965@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 10 Jan 90 03:27:50 GMT References: <12686@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12757@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12819@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12878@cbnews.ATT.COM> <12926@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR Lines: 35 Approved: military@att.att.com From: terryr@ogicse.ogc.edu (Terry Rooker) In article <12926@cbnews.ATT.COM> argosy!freeman@decwrl.dec.com (Jay R. Freeman) writes: > > >From: argosy!freeman@decwrl.dec.com (Jay R. Freeman) > > >> The general figure used for planning these things is that you need 3 >> ships for every one that you need on station. [...] > >Would a fix for these problems be to have more than one crew trained for each >carrier, and to rotate crews more often than ships? Isn't that done with >ballistic missile submarines? (The original poster was discussing aircraft >carriers.) You could, but it would still be expensive. The manpower costs are among the highest in the military (at least the US military :-). For a carrier you'd be adding 5-6000 men for every extra crew. As it is the navy tends to keep crews on the small side and relies on shore side maintenance facilities. To increase the deployment cycle of the ships much more of the maintentance would have to be done by the crew, so each crew would have to be larger. That means you'd have to more than double the number of men. Increased operational activity would probably reduce the effective lifetime of the hull, so the replacement shipbuilding schedule would have to be shorter. Then where are you going to find the planes. They would need to shorten their cycle, unless we were going to buy several new air wings. I think you get the idea. Two crews might help in the short term, but the long term expenses would be prohibitive. -- Terry Rooker terryr@cse.ogi.edu