Issue Date: August 23, 2004
Drawdown plans target 60,000
Personnel cuts to pay for new ships, aircraft
By Mark D. Faram
Times staff writer
The Navy plans to draw down its force to 320,000 officers and enlisted sailors by 2011 — the lowest end-strength since 1940 and just over half of the 605,000 people the service had in 1990 when the last drawdown began.
These latest cuts are more than 37,000 more than were announced in February, when Navy officials confirmed they planned to shrink the service’s ranks to 357,200 by 2009.
The latest rounds of cuts, although major, are also manageable, officials contend, but the effects on the deck plates will be traumatic.
“We’re going to be very surgical in how we manage this drawdown,” said Rear Adm. Gerald Talbot, head of military personnel plans and policy for the Navy’s chief of personnel in Arlington, Va. “In the ’90s we took the top right off the Navy. This drawdown is all about managing the force correctly so we have the right human capital in the right place at the right time.”
Talbot dropped his drawdown bombshell on Aug. 10 at the annual Navy Counselors Association symposium in New Orleans.
Unlike past cuts that targeted ships and at-sea sailors, the future reductions will focus on the Navy’s shore establishment, which has remained largely untouched since the end of the Cold War.
Talbot said the troop cuts were necessary in order to pay for the new ships and aircraft the service says it needs over the next decade.
Of the Navy’s total annual budget of $115 billion, nearly two thirds, some $70 billion, goes towards manpower costs, Talbot said.
Talbot said the service wants to avoid the mistakes of past drawdowns when sailors who were forced out were unceremoniously shown the door. This time, he said, the Navy plans to leverage and expand existing “force-shaping” programs such as the Perform-to-Serve re-enlistment approval program, reexamine high-year tenure marks, and offer more robust monetary incentives for those asked to leave.
Despite those promises, the cuts didn’t sit well with Joe Barnes, a retired Navy master chief and president of the Fleet Reserve Association, an Alexandria, Va.-based organization that lobbies Congress for equitable pay and benefits for all the sea services.
“FRA is especially concerned on the impact this will have on the career force,” Barnes said. “These reductions are ambitious and apparently driven in large part by the desire to reduce spending.”
Barnes is concerned the Navy is unwisely banking on potential manpower savings on technologically advanced ships that have yet to be built and delivered.
“These things look good on paper,” he said. “However it’s just not always feasible, and could adversely affect things like advancement opportunity, benefits and thus the morale of the force.”
For his part, Talbot said the drawdown has already started and contends it’s going well.
“This year the goal was to bring down the force by 9,000, and I think we’re going to meet that goal,” he said. Proposed future cuts will slice more than 20,000 people over the next two years, with 7,900 coming in fiscal year 2005 and another 13,300 in fiscal 2006.
After that, the plan is to cut 7,000 each year until 2011.
“That’ll take us to a Navy of about the size of 320,000.” Talbot said. “We started FY 04 with about 380,000 so that’s a reduction overall of about 60,000.”
Without divulging specifics, Talbot said planners have determined where 40,000 of those cuts will come from, and have “another 20,000 to go.”
Ongoing initiatives such as optimal manning, he said, have proven the Navy can reduce manpower and still operate its ships.
Meanwhile, Navy planners are setting their sights on shore establishments for future cuts.
“There are a lot of jobs on the shore side that may be better performed at a better value by a civilian or a contractor,” Talbot said.
Talbot said the Navy will become “sea centric” as shore tours will be done much closer to the waterfront where sailors will be used to support their sea-going counterparts.
That will require reworking how shore duty is thought of today, and Talbot thinks it’s about time. “I don’t like the way we’re organized around sea and shore duty — it makes the sea business look bad,” he said. “I want the Navy to be all about sea duty, but at the same time be able to bring them along in their careers and have a normal life, including having a family.”
However, the realities of a Navy with optimally manned ships will require planners to re-think existing sea/shore rotation policies because shipboard manning levels will be critical if crew sizes are slashed. For example, Talbot said, if an optimally manned cruiser loses a first class fire controlman due to illness or injury, “it’s not like you can absorb that loss. We need to get a replacement there very quickly,” he said.