Sea Swap around the world

It sounds like a failure of leadership to me.

Commercial crews are entirely capable of keeping ships at sea for far longer than modern naval crews. Commercial ship owners would never tolerate the sort of behavior that modern navies seem to.

It is time to hold naval crews to a higher standard.

In the private sector, we just live with the problems related sharing equippments. It does not mean those bosses (e.g. ship owners) who sit in their office and do not need to go through all those trouble down on the shop floor actually have solutions to any of those problems.

There is also the little fact that warships… especially guided-missile Destroyers… have several times the equipment… and that equipment is several times more complex and knowledge-specific… than the “minimum the regs call for, cheapest we could find, most idiot-proof on the market” stuff on commercial vessels.

Slight variations between systems installed on “near sister” ships can mean that the operators have not been trained on the changes, and have to learn about them while operating them… not in a classroom setting with experienced instructors and training aids, like they were supposed to..

The RAN did also do the sea-swap during the East Timor crisis with HMAS Jervis Bay

What we did was sent a crew with some equpiment over to ET and and back and on the next trip over there they were swaped with the next crew who had flown over on an RAAF C-130, this was done a few times (three IIRC).

I think this falls in the category penny wise ound foolish: while it may save some cost immediately, sea swap appears to be incurring some other, greater cost at a later stage, due to breaking the bond between men and ship. I don’t think a straight comparision with merchant ships and crews applies: different duties, different stresses. When going into a potential combat zone, trust in equipment and other crew must be absolute.

So yeah I’m against the idea, the 3 Norfolk ships that did it are still messed up and have a lot of work that needs to be done to fix the damage.

It sounds like a failure of leadership to me.

Commercial crews are entirely capable of keeping ships at sea for far longer than modern naval crews. Commercial ship owners would never tolerate the sort of behavior that modern navies seem to.

It is time to hold naval crews to a higher standard.

This is a copy and paste from a post I made about Sea-Swap on the defence talk forum since I don’t feel like retyping the entire post…

Oh no… Sea Swap… :rolleyes:
The USN is playing with this idea for DDG’s and the OHP FF’s and they have been doing it for years with a couple of Mine Sweepers based out of Bahrain and it works great for small ships.
But then they tried it with a couple of San Diego and Norfolk based DDG’s (the ones out of Norfolk were the USS Stout, Gonzolez and Laboon), they deployed the Gonzolez and left Laboon and Stout in Norfolk and just rotated the crews through after the other crews got done with the normal 6 month deployment.
The idea sounded good to the higher ups (save gas money, save wear and tear on 2 ships and save transit times) but the crews hated the idea, for one the turn over of the Gonzolez was essentially “we had it, you got it now… bye” with only a couple days to figure out where everything was, what they had to work with and any equipment quirks and problems, any maintainance that could be put off onto the next crew was, also no pride was taken in the ships (after all it isn’t “your” ship why bother keeping it looking good?) and since the Gonzo was always in BFE parts deliveries were rare.
Then they had to deal with the differences between the 3 DDG’s, even though they were all Flight IA DDG-51’s they all had (seemingly) minor differences on paper but in real life lead to some trouble. For instance, Stout and Laboon had different consoles than the Gonzo but our display techs never got the training to fix the newer consoles. Stout and Gonzo had a new supply system while Laboon still had SNAP II for some reason. Gonzo had some strange boyancy issues due to her being grounded during her sea trails that also had to be learned by each crew. Also Gonzo and Stout had a different Tomahawk missile system than the Laboon so the crews had to certify on both, I remember reading a couple page document on the differences but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
The Laboon and Stout also suffered during the Sea Swap program, after all these ships were not deploying any time soon so why spend as much money on them? I know the Stouts sonar sytem was messed up and the much needed dry dock period to fix it and do other work kept getting cancelled and moved to a later date. Plus once you finished your deployment and flew back to Norfolk you did not go to your original ship, you went to take over an empty DDG that the other crew vacated.
I’m not sure what the USN’s official ruling on the experiment was (it only recently ended for the Norfolk ships) but most of the supposed benifits were out weighed by low crew morale among all 3 crews, the high cost of flying the crews out to the swap location, putting them in hotels for the turn over then flying the other crew home and the abuse of 18 months constant flogging with no time to fix problems and properly paint and maintain the ship.

So yeah I’m against the idea, the 3 Norfolk ships that did it are still messed up and have a lot of work that needs to be done to fix the damage.

French crews are Bleu & Rouge… But they all swap on their home port not away.

Regards

well according to wikapidia the British its port and starbord crews for the SSBNs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine

The USN, RN and French Navy use two crews on their ballistic missile submarines to maximise operational readiness of these assets.

The USN call them Blue and Gold crews, not sure about the others.

The PRC’s single boomer spends so little time at sea that they probably don’t need two crews, and the Russian Navy may be drifting into the same boat as numbers of boomers decline.

Thanks guys

I’ve read that some ships in the French Navy have “A” and “B” crews such as submarines and some hydrographic and signals Intelligence ships… But I ‘m not sure the crews swap while away from their home port…

Comments?

Hammer

The RAN has looked at it, principally for ships deployed to the Persian / Arabian Gulf.

Nothing concrete came out of it, mostly because the RAN doesn’t trust the ship maintenance capabilities in that part of the world.

Unicorn

“With the Class 125 frigates, the German naval shipbuilding industry will once again prove its internationally outstanding competence in the integration of state-of-the-art technologies. The new type of frigates, for instance, will allow a deployment period of up to two years in the operation area. Compared to previous vessels, the regular crew on the Class 125 frigate is halved. Two rotating crews will be exchanged every four months. Thus, frequent intensive transfer trips between Wilhelmshaven and the area of operation will no longer be required.”
http://www.thyssenkrupp-marinesystems.de/spaw/img_popup.php?img_url=/bilder/allgemein/pm_gr.jpg

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