By Geoff Fein
MOBILE, Ala.–Although the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will operate with a crew of only 40 onboard, they are well-trained and meeting the challenges this new surface ship presents, according to a Navy official.
“With 40 people, we recognized a while back the workload is going to be very demanding, which is one of the benefits of having the Gold crew as our ready relief,” Cmdr. Curt Renshaw, commanding officer of the USS Independence‘s (LCS-2) Blue crew, told reporters last week during a tour of the ship.
Renshaw said while there is almost no comparison between any other ship he has been on and the Independence, all of the things that go into readying a ship to sail and go into harm’s way remain the same.
“How you achieve those standards is absolutely different,” he added. “The crew we have is very much optimized for the ship.”
When Renshaw was an ensign he had a chief that told him “you spend 90 percent of your time on 10 percent of your people, because they were slow starters, they didn’t get it, or would never get it,” Renshaw said.
“In our case we don’t have that 10 percent. So that 90 percent of the time is spent on trying to get the mission done and finding innovative ways to get solutions to achieve the same standards we have achieved on every other ship. That’s been our going in philosophy,” he added.
On his previous ships, Renshaw noted he had a supply department, with a supply officer, logistics specialist, dispensing clerks, personnel specialists, postal clerks and yeomen.
“From that perspective 20 percent of our crew, or more, was devoted to the administrative and supply support of the crew,” he said. “On this ship I have one logistics specialist chief and that’s it.”
But with LCS, the Navy has taken a different approach to how it is going to handle logistics, Renshaw said.
In San Diego, where the first four LCS will be homeported, is a logistics support team and material support team as well as an admin support center, Renshaw noted.
“That is completely different. But the neat thing about the 21st century, everything is very networked. You will see a network centric ship…we have very good connectivity,” he said. “What we are learning now is how to implement the most efficient means to reach back and get that capability.”
The Navy has invested some money that will pay dividends with other ships, Renshaw said.
Rather than LCS’ crew trying to e-mail or phone back to the support teams, they will use web forms that will be replicated on the support teams’ computers, he explained.
“For example, when I fill out my eight o’clock reports on material readiness of the ship–my department heads fill those out–they appear on someone’s screen back in San Diego,” he said. “When they have a supply status they can enter that in and it pops back up for our people.”
With a crew of 40 the workload is extremely difficult to do.
On his previous ship, Fire Controlman First Class Jeffrey Gibson said there were 300 crew and 30 officers. “We have eight officers and 40 crew [on Independence]. Every single one of our sailors puts in overtime. Every single one of our sailors puts in more time away from their family to make this happen.”
“We are certainly busy, but we knew that coming into this. We knew LCS was going to be a challenge,” he added. “We are all trained and have been trained, some of us in excess of two years. We know our job well, and that alleviates a lot of the other issues you normally find.”
And working on Independence has been a challenge too, Gibson said.
“Every day is a new challenge, every day there is new equipment to learn, every day there is little changes in things going on,” he said.