Shorter Cruises CNO demands drop to deployment lengths (NAVY TIMES 03 NOV 14) ... Lance M. Bacon and David Larter Deployments have been pushing beyond the eight-month mark in the past year. The Bataan amphibious ready group will return home in late October from an 83⁄ 4-month cruise, which had been extended. The carrier George H.W. Bush and its strike group is headed home from a nine-month cruise. And the Vinson carrier strike group left in August for what’s set to be a 10month cruise. The Navy’s top officer has had enough. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert wants to shorten deployment lengths and return some normalcy and predictability to fleet schedules after years of straining op tempo. “We cannot do eight-month deployments over and over and over again,” Greenert said in speech to sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge, which returned from an eight-month cruise in late 2013. “It’s regrettable that you had to do it.” Greenert told the crew that their next deployment would be scheduled for seven months – down from the eight months that fleet bosses have been struggling to make standard. “You should anticipate your next deployment will be [about] a seven month deployment,” Greenert said in his Oct. 22 appearance on the Kearsarge, pierside in Norfolk. “That’s our notional deployment.” The details on how CNO and the fleet bosses will accomplish this are being worked out, but many defense experts are skeptical this latest plan can succeed without fundamental changes to the forces that have strapped the fleet: sky high demand for ships; unforeseen shipyard delays that force last minute schedule changes; and uncertain defense budgets. The greatest challenge to shortening deployments, experts say, will be reining in demand from the combatant commanders around the world, who request Navy forces for everything from the airstrikes against the Islamic State group to presence missions in the unsettled Black Sea. “It will be very difficult for the Navy to bring deployments down to seven months unless the secretary of defense and combatant commanders let up on the demands placed on the force,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in an interview. Even so, Fleet Forces Command says it will move out on the change and adjust the new deployment plan – which lays out an eight month deployment each 36-month cycle – accordingly. The Optimized Fleet Response Plan “was not designed for a specific deployment length, it was created to provide CNO the flexibility to adjust deployment lengths as he sees fit to respond to the needs of the combatant commanders as well as ensure the near [and] far term readiness of the fleet,” said FFC spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Cate Cook. “We said from the outset that eight-month deployments were at the ragged edge of sustainability, but our initial goal was to reduce the nine- to 10-month deployments down to eight-month deployments or less.” ‘Very Challenging Times’ It is no secret that long deployments have taken a heavy toll on ships and sailors in the past decade. The O-FRP was unveiled last year by FFC boss Adm. Bill Gortney to bring predictability back to fleet schedules by locking in 8month deployments for most ships. That plan is off to a rocky start. The carrier Harry S. Truman will deploy in the fall of 2015, nearly half a year ahead of schedule, after the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower was scheduled to deploy but had an unforeseen problem. The Ike ended a year-long drydock overhaul in late August, but work will continue into February 2015 as the Navy tries to fix the flattop’s rudders, shafts and distilling units. Overdue maintenance is one of the foremost obstacles to predictability. Upward of 60 percent of availabilities are not finishing on time as workers identify unforeseen repairs or are short-staffed to fix what has been identified, officials said. The result: an estimated loss of 2,500 operational days in fiscal year 2014, which ended Sept. 30. These overhaul delays are throwing a big wrench in the O-FRP machine, which requires the entire carrier strike group to leave the yard at set times so all ships can go through work-ups together. Catching up on maintenance is a priority for the Navy and lawmakers, and was part of the Navy’s plan to put half of the cruiser fleet and three dock landing ships in lay-up. The capacity to surge more flattops and ships forward is diminishing as the fleet struggles with lower budgets. Another challenge is that the Army and Air Force have a diminishing number of regional forces to address operational requirements in Europe and the Middle East, which places a greater burden on the blue-green team. And then there’s money. The Pentagon faces another year of deep sequestration cuts in fiscal 2016 – the cuts that wreaked havoc on the shipyards a year ago. “Right now, with the current budgets in ’14 and ’15, we’re doing OK,” said Rear Adm. Troy Shoemaker, the head of Naval Air Force Atlantic, in a recent interview. “If we cannot get some kind of compromise or resolution in Congress over the sequestration as we head into the ’16 budget, we are going to find ourselves in some very challenging times.” The ‘Sweet Spot’ Greenert has been increasingly vocal about holding back forces while the Navy resets. During an all-hands call in mid-October, he told sailors he would oppose going to a two-carrier presence in 5th Fleet to support operations against the Islamic State group and in Afghanistan. Greenert went further in his Kearsarge speech, saying his goal is to get deployments down to seven months in the next two years and that the service’s maintenance backlog is beginning to ease. “We’re almost out of that and we should be back at what I think is a sweet spot at seven-month deployments by early [fiscal year] 2016,” Greenert said. He warned that the fleet is very close to a “red line” for the diminishing amount of home time fleet sailors are seeing. “Our op-tempo is higher ... time at home has [reduced] from 63, 64 percent to about 52, 53 percent,” he said. “So we want to get that back up to 63, 64, 67 percent time at home during a 36-month [cycle].” Behind the scenes, Greenert has been pushing to shorten deployments for some time. The CNO, according to one active-duty source familiar with the back-and-forth, has never been a fan of sending sailors on eight-month deployments and has been pushing his fleet bosses to get back to historic norms of six to seven months. But Navy leaders and experts say that for deployments to shorten, the Navy will need to accomplish a feat: convincing the Pentagon to give the combatant commanders what the fleet has ready, rather than everything the COCOMs want. The combatant commanders – four-star officers who generate force requirements for their theaters, such U.S. Central Command or U.S. Pacific Command – have soaring demands for Navy ships, subs and squadrons around the world that the fleet cannot come close to meeting. From political revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Syria, to a face-off with Iran over access to the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, the fleet has been caught in an unrelenting spiral of longer cruises, only to see maintenance schedules in flux back home. The Navy’s personnel boss said fleet leaders are hopeful they can wrestle deployments back to a more-reasonable seven months. “We can’t get there for a while,” said Vice Adm. Bill Moran, the chief of naval personnel, in an Oct. 24 phone interview. “Through 2014 and 2015 we’ll still be looking at long deployments. But we’re going to continue to see this come down from nine-and-a-half to eight months over the next year. Then in 2016 we’ll start to see closer to seven months, and in ’17 we’ll likely have most everybody back to seven months.” There will be exceptions, including the cruisers and destroyers on ballistic missile defense patrols, said Moran, who agreed that the ultimate success of the CNO’s plan will mean allowing the Navy to shift from giving COCOMs everything they can conceivably deploy to only those ships fixed, manned and ready to go. “In years past we have been a demand- based force,” Moran said. “And we are no longer able to do that.” Ultimately, Moran said, that will have to mean fewer deployments than the fleet has seen in recent years.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0000