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.
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