The Navy’s manning shortages are curbing the service’s ability to repair its ships while at sea, according to a watchdog report released Monday.
Sixty-three percent of executive officers — a ship’s second-in-command — surveyed reported that insufficient manning made it “moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while underway,” according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
At-sea basic maintenance and repairs are critical to ensuring a ship can carry out its mission, according to the GAO.
But Monday’s report, based on interviews of sailors and leaders across the fleet, reveals that basic maintenance duties and repairs are hindered not only by manning shortages, but also by inaccurate Navy guidelines and substandard training.
As of late last year, the Navy was lacking nearly 14,000 enlisted sailors to keep its aircraft carriers, surface ships and attack submarines properly manned, according to the GAO.
The watchdog also found that aircraft carriers, cruisers and amphibious assault ships did not have enough enlisted sailors assigned to them to meet requirements for safe operations as laid out by the Navy Manpower Analysis Center.
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“The Navy has not provided crew levels sufficient to meet the ship maintenance workload,” one sailor told GAO investigators.
This results in a smaller crew having to do more work, compounding the stressors of ship life.
“More capable sailors that perform a lot of maintenance get burned out and tired of taking up the slack for other sailors and leave the Navy to do the same work for better pay and working conditions,” another sailor said in the report.
Exacerbating the manning shortages are sailors assigned to a specific ship who may not always be on hand for duty, due to illness or temporary assignments to another ship.
“Navy executive officers and sailors told GAO there were widespread concerns about sailor training,” the report states.
Sailors also aren’t always prepared for their jobs aboard ships, and those serving in maintenance-heavy roles “may be less experienced than other sailors on that same ship,” according to the GAO.
Training for sailor-led maintenance is also insufficient, sailors told the watchdog.
Sailors attend A school after boot camp to get initial training with instructors and computers, but some interviewed by GAO questioned how well A school prepared them for their shipboard duties.
“Specifically, sailors expressed dissatisfaction with both the quality of training — whether it prepares them to perform maintenance aboard ship — and the format in which training is delivered,” the report said.
The Navy is working to enhance sailor-led maintenance training through its Ready Relevant Learning initiative, which involves distributing videos of sailor-led maintenance to schoolhouses, according to the report.
The Navy is also aiming to share these videos with sailors via cloud based services and remote support.
Still, videos for certain maintenance specialties like electrical repair are not yet available, and some sailors noted that video training is not always reliable on the ship, given limited bandwidth.
“More (maintenance) training should be conducted before a sailor arrives at their ship and while they are transitioning between commands,” one sailor told the GAO.
The GAO offered several recommendations, including that the service improve the “quality of information on the number of ship’s crew available for duty” and guarantee that personnel numbers and skill levels for certain kinds of maintenance are tailored for specific ships and classes.
“The Navy’s guidelines for performing ship maintenance are sometimes inaccurate with respect to the time and personnel needed and are not written appropriately for sailors’ maintenance skills and supervisor’s experience levels,” the watchdog said. “Ensuring the Navy’s guidelines better reflect the actual number and skill level of maintenance personnel will enhance sailors’ ability to maintain ships.”
The Navy agreed with these recommendations, according to the watchdog.
The GAO surveyed executive officers from 232 ships in the fleet with a 91% response rate and met with more than 140 leaders and 200 sailors on 25 ships for the report, which began in January 2023 and ended earlier this month.
