A sailor’s life: Overworked, undertrained, understaffed, stressed out

The Feb. 8 report from the Government Accountability Office follows another GAO report released last May that concluded the Navy routinely assigns fewer crew members than required to ships and found in the four years between 2016 and 2020 that crew shortfalls nearly doubled, increasing from 8% to 15%.

Add to that more than 85% of officers who report they don’t get the recommended seven hours of sleep a day during deployments, with two-thirds getting five hours or less, and it’s a prescription for burnout.

In fact, “crew fatigue” was a contributing factor in a pair of 2017 fatal ship collisions that claimed the lives of 17 sailors.

The latest GAO report has an anodyne title, “Navy Ship Maintenance: Actions Needed to Monitor and Address the Performance of Intermediate Maintenance Periods,” that belies the alarming firsthand testimony from candid interviews with unnamed sailors from a representative sample of 10 classes of Navy ships, including submarines, surface ships, and aircraft carriers.

“Ships’ crews are really only working with a handful of personnel to accomplish everything they are responsible for,” lamented one sailor. “The hours of required maintenance exceed the hours in a day.”

“Workforce shortages at sea result in workdays that regularly exceed 16 hours,” said another sailor.

“Crews are overwhelmed with maintenance work,” reported a third. “On one surface ship, a large work center that required many in a crew had only three sailors available to complete weekly maintenance checks.”

Congress mandated the report to identify the reasons for long delays in routine ship maintenance that have kept some warships out of service for months and, even in some cases, years.

For example, last year, a Congressional Budget Office report said Los Angeles-class attack submarines take, on average, four and a half months longer than scheduled to return to the fleet.

“As a result, some submarines have missed deployments or had their deployments at sea shortened,” the CBO report concluded. “The delays have reduced the number of submarines that the Navy can put to sea, idling expensive ships and their skilled crews.”

The GAO found that due to personnel shortages and ambitious deployment schedules, enlisted sailors on maintenance duty often work killer shifts, not only at sea but when they are in port for repairs as well.

“There is no downtime. The work seems to be non-stop,” said one sailor, describing the high operational tempo. “It is really hard and causes high levels of stress.”

“It’s not sustainable for obvious reasons,” said Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, which is set to hold hearings on the findings next month.

“What’s more concerning to me is that the report said the days were even longer and more difficult when they’re in port and back home,” Waltz told the Washington Examiner. “And the number of instances they’re citing where the ships tie up to the pier, yet the crew is canceling vacations with their family and canceling leave after they’ve been gone for six months because they’ve got so much backlog maintenance.”

Under the guarantee of anonymity, sailors unloaded a litany of complaints to the government investigators, painting a disturbing picture of ships limping out of port with makeshift crews and jury-rigged equipment.

“Ten of the 16 ships’ crews we met with stated that they resorted to cannibalizing parts — that is, taking functional parts away from other ships,” the GAO report said. “One surface ship crew described taking parts off two other ships of the same class, leaving them less-than-operational, so their ship could remain operational.”

While anecdotal, the feedback was consistent in expressing widespread frustration by sailors who complain they lack the tools, training, or personnel to do their jobs to the high standard expected of them.

A sampling of their comments:

• “A submarine may borrow 10 to 12 personnel from other ships for deployment. Afterward, a huge vacuum occurs when qualified maintenance personnel leave to support a deploying submarine.”
• “Crews just fix equipment with Band-Aids so that a submarine can get underway. Essentially, a commanding officer does not want the ship to be perceived by superiors as the ‘boat that cannot get underway.’”
• “Many of the Navy’s schools do not teach crew members how to service equipment onboard ships because much of that equipment is obsolete.”
• “Because many of the ship’s systems are obsolete, new parts are often unavailable. Crew members are told simply to make it work.”
• “There are back-ordered parts that will not be available until 2023. If crew members cannot find a part, they may not perform maintenance until that equipment or system is upgraded.”
• “Crews do not learn how to maintain equipment they are expected to repair. For example, crew members are trained on repairing boilers, which only apply to 10% of the Navy’s ships.”
• “Maintenance is usually not a priority for a ship’s leadership until leadership wonders why maintenance is incomplete.”

The Navy is not disputing the report’s findings and has accepted all its recommendations for improvement.

“We’ve really been leaning into this, and we have been helped by very good retention,” testified Vice Adm. John Nowell, the Navy’s chief of naval personnel, before a House Armed Services subcommittee earlier this month.

Nowell insists the Navy is making headway whittling down the number of unfilled jobs, known as billets.

“We have 145,000 sea duty billets, and right now, the report that I got as of the end of last week was about 5,000 to 6,000 gaps at sea,” said Nowell, which would amount to a 4% shortfall, compared to 15% a year ago.

“We’ve got 10,000 more sailors at sea now than we had in 2017,” he said. “I’m not saying that we’re happy with that number. We’re doing a number of things to get after that.”

The Navy will have another chance to explain how to improve maintenance and morale at a Mar. 3 House subcommittee hearing.

“What jumped out at me is just the dearth of really experienced sailors,” said Waltz, the first former Green Beret to serve in Congress.

“What I’m going to be asking about is, is what kind of retention issues and in what specialties do they have? The Navy spends a lot of time highlighting pilots and Navy SEALs, and that’s great, and I think that’s one of the reasons their recruiting is so strong,” Waltz told the Washington Examiner. “But when you have someone who wasn’t a pilot or wasn’t a SEAL, and now they’re a boiler repairman or a sonar repairman, how are they retaining them given what these sailors are describing?”

“The answer cannot be, ‘Well, this is why we need a bigger budget for the Navy,’ solely, right? The answer cannot be, ‘Congress, you’ve just gotta throw more money at the problem.'”

“I’ve got no other ask right now for Congress,” Nowell said but added the Navy’s recruiting efforts would be greatly helped if Congress passed the increased defense budget that was authorized last year.

Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.