The US Navy is experiencing an ongoing shortage of qualified mariners. The solution? Sideline 17 support and replenishment ships, according to US Naval Institute News. The proposed action involves entering these ships into an “extended maintenance” period and reassigning their crews to other ships, potentially freeing up 600 to 700 sailors.
It’s definitely a head-scratcher.
Military Sealift Command has drafted a plan to remove the crews from 17 Navy support ships due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels across the Navy, USNI News learned.
The MSC “force generation reset” identified two Lewis and Clark replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports (EPF) and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases that would enter an “extended maintenance” period and have their crews retasked to other ships in the fleet, three people familiar with the plan told USNI News Thursday.
Based on the crew requirements on the platforms, sideling all the ships could reduce the civilian mariner demand for MSC by as many as 700 billets.
[…]
The new effort, known informally as “the great reset” has yet to be adopted by the Navy and is awaiting approval from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, USNI News understands.
Here’s Ms. Franchetti:
Of course, there’s a COVID angle to this mismanagement disaster.
Continued from USNI News:
The punishing schedule for the mariners led to a retention issue for MSC that was accelerated by the severe “gangway up” COVID-19 prevention measures ordered by retired MSC commander Rear Adm. Michael Wettlaufer.
“[During] COVID nobody was getting off the ship, mariners were being treated poorly and so they started to quit,” a retired MSC mariner told USNI News.
Since then, “mariners have been quitting at a greater rate than MSC can hire new ones… People say ‘I had to quit because it’s a terrible work-life balance. I can’t go to sea and also have a family, so I got to leave.’”Another former MSC mariner told USNI News he enjoyed sailing with MSC, but he saw his older peers deal with divorce and estrangement from their children and didn’t want that for himself.
“I can’t say much bad about MSC, he said. “But when I left, I left because of my family.”
That pressure to retain experienced mariners led to the decision to craft the plan to sideline ships, three sources familiar with the plan told USNI News.
“This is basically the result of many years of neglect and mismanagement of their force,” Sal Mercogliano, former MSC mariner and associate professor of history at Campbell University told USNI News on Thursday. “They are just burning through people.”
The math is just not adding up, thanks to the mismanagement and the extreme, hysterical COVID reaction.
The Military Sealift Command operates a fleet of logistics ships that refuel and resupply the Navy’s ships around the world and are crewed by 5,500 civilians who are employed by the Navy.
Across the MSC there are about 4,500 billets for mariners on a wide variety of U.S. support ships ranging from resupply vessels, fleet oilers that refuel ships and aircraft, salvage ships, the Navy’s two command ships, submarine tenders and hospital ships.
For every billet on an MSC ship there are about 1.27 mariners to fill the positions, a ratio that two former MSC master mariners told USNI News on Thursday was unstainable.
“If you’re required to have 100 people on a vessel. There are only 27 more people on shore at any given time to rotate those crew members,” a former MSC mariner told USNI News.
At that ratio, a mariner would be at sea for four months and off for about a month and then return.
“That math just doesn’t work,” the former mariner told USNI News. “No one is able to have a healthy work-life balance and be able to get off the ship and get adequate time to go home, have time at home with their family, take leave, take care of medical requirements [in that timeframe]. There is so much training required of every billet at MSC to stay proficient with Navy requirements and training and merchant marine credentialing.”
Just another day in the Globalist American Empire.
