Nearly 25K sailors will be cut by ’07
(what does that tell you?   :o))


By Mark D. Faram
NavyTimes staff writer
14 February 2005


It’s confirmed.

The Navy will cut 13,200 sailors from the ranks next fiscal year, and 7,400 the following year. Combined with ongoing force reductions already in place, the cuts will mean nearly 25,000 fewer sailors in 2007 than there are today.

Those gloomy personnel cuts were outlined in the Navy’s budget request for fiscal 2006.While Navy officials contend some of those cuts can be absorbed through mothballing older ships, converting support billets to civilian jobs and reducing accessions, they admit more drastic measures are being pursued.

The Navy will seek congressional approval — and funding — to implement such “force shaping authorities” as separation pays and early retirement boards. They’ll also expand the Perform To Serve re-enlistment approval program and lower some high-year tenure gates, making it harder for some sailors to re-up. The Navy can implement those two initiatives on their own without higher approval.

And the 25,000 figure is just the beginning. “This is the projected end number, for now,” said a senior defense budget official at the Pentagon. “But are we going to continue to look at this while we execute? Sure.” Officials would only confirm end-strength cuts through 2007. That would leave end strength at 345,300. Navy Times has learned, however, that personnel officials are planning for as many as 25,000 more cuts by 2011.

Rear Adm. Gerald Talbot, head of military personnel plans and policy for the Navy's chief of personnel, said the Navy could go as low as 320,000 by 2011.Talbot, speaking Aug. 10 to a convention of Navy career counselors in New Orleans, said planners may implement annual cuts of 7,000 between 2007 and 2011.

‘Very surgical’ drawdown

Talbot said the Navy would learn from the hard lessons of the 1990s, when he said “the top was taken right off the Navy.

”Instead, he said, this time the service would “be very surgical in how we manage this drawdown.

”With first-term retention still topping 60 percent, officials will continue to reduce the number of recruits the service brings in, with 2006 accessions slated to be 35,000.

That is 3,000 fewer than were scheduled to be signed up in 2005 and 22,000 fewer than the 57,000 recruits brought in just five years ago.

“If you have great retention, which we continue to be blessed with, you don’t need to have as many people in the training pipeline; the training is less,” the budget official said.

To go as low as the Navy is planning will require the painful task of sending people home, but the Navy would like to soften the blow, Talbot said.

To that end, the Navy has asked for a $511 million increase in the budget for “separation and special pays.

”Possible uses for that money would be offering junior sailors separation pay, something Talbot told the counselors he’d like to see increase, “so when you walk out the door, you don't think you've been fired.

”For more senior sailors, that could take the form of a reduced retirement annuity, offering sailors some cash up front and an annuity after that, with possibly six months of medical and dental coverage, Talbot said. Even without a nod from Congress, the Navy could bring back early retirement boards for officers and chiefs that sent many home in the 1990s.In addition, plans are on the table to expand the existing Perform to Serve re-enlistment approval program to second-term sailors, those with between six and 10 years of service, requiring them to submit applications to re-enlist.

Along with that could come stricter up-or-out policy for E-5s, by dropping their high-year tenure gates from the current 20 years to “somewhere between 12 and 14 years of service,” Talbot said.

To help make the cuts the Navy is considering, officials continue to eye the service’s massive shore infrastructure, hoping to convert shore support jobs far from the waterfront into civilian jobs, the Pentagon budget official said. “These will be largely infrastructure reductions, because our battle force is just about where it needs to be,” the official said.

By October 2005, the Navy plans to convert 5,529 military billets to civilian jobs and now plans to add another 960 more in 2006.

The waterfront won’t be exempt from cuts, however. Officials plan to continue decommissioning older manpower-intensive ships, opting instead for smaller crews manning high-tech ships in the future. Shore duty for most ratings, officials say, will now be spent on the waterfront, supporting the deploying forces.

But with many older ships still in service, some reductions will have to come from the seagoing Navy as these ships reach the end of their service lives.

Six ships will go away in 2006, taking with them nearly 5,000 billets, including nearly 2,500 from the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, which defense officials now confirm the Navy wants to mothball sometime in 2006, as well as 950 billets from the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, also slated to go next year.

At the same time, the service hopes to retain more highly trained specialists needed for the crews of these newer ships, starting with the Littoral Combat Ship, which will boast a crew of only E-4s and above.
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Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)