From: gherbert@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: alt.war.nuclear
Subject: Re: COME ON MISSIE DEFENCE, HURRY
Date: 28 Jul 2000 19:53:27 -0700

Dwayne Allen Day  <wayneday@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> wrote:
>Steve Bartman <sbartman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>:>Actually, this will be less of a problem.  DD-21 is supposed to have
>:>something like one third the crew of an Arleigh Burke destroyer.
>
>: It's supposed to have 95 I believe. The degree of mirth at that number
>: varies day to day on s.m.n.
>
>Yeah, but s.m.n actually tends to be rather short on actual naval
>knowledge.  It's rare that a poster there has read Proceedings, Defense
>News, Defense Daily or Janes International Defense Review.  And I've seen
>pretty hefty ignorance of the degree of automation that is already being
>tried in the fleet.

Or commercial shipping; though the average is in the 20s, new
commercial vessels in the tens-of-thousands-of-tons size range
were being equipped for crews of as little as 16 back in 1990.

There is more equipment on warships (more engines; more machinery
in weapons and sensors; more electronics; more sensor and systems
operator seats to be manned), so you can't point at that and say
that naval vessels should be able to have teeny crews.  And naval
vessels have legitimate higher damage control capability requirements
as well.  But crew sizes should be coming down.


-george william herbert
gherbert@retro.com

From: gherbert@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: alt.war.nuclear
Subject: Re: COME ON MISSIE DEFENCE, HURRY
Date: 29 Jul 2000 00:54:20 -0700

Steve Bartman  <sbartman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>gherbert@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert) wrote:
>>Or commercial shipping; though the average is in the 20s, new
>>commercial vessels in the tens-of-thousands-of-tons size range
>>were being equipped for crews of as little as 16 back in 1990.
>
>Tonnage and crew size have no relevant correlation when it comes to
>warships and merchies.

I wasn't trying to correlate in the sense of "a such and such
reduction here means an equivalent percentage there", and said so.

I'm pointing out that the degree of automation achived,
in terms of robust equipment not needing maintenance and
automatic operation and such, is now old hat.  This is an
area where Navies are not adopting very fast.  How far the
reductions can go in warships is an open question, for the
obvious reasons [DC for one].

>>There is more equipment on warships (more engines; more machinery
>>in weapons and sensors; more electronics; more sensor and systems
>>operator seats to be manned), so you can't point at that and say
>>that naval vessels should be able to have teeny crews.  And naval
>>vessels have legitimate higher damage control capability requirements
>>as well.  But crew sizes should be coming down.
>
>Crew sizes have been coming down since 1945, but there are limits that
>ought not be breached simply because recruiting is bad. A god example
>of what can be done is with the BBs in 1945 versus 1985. And a
>Spruance crew versus a Perry crew for not too dissimilar a capability.
>But a DD21 is pretty close to a cruiser, and 95 folks are spread
>awfully thin, even with automation.

See below...

[including your post replying to Dwayne:]
Steve Bartman <sbartman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Dwayne Allen Day <wayneday@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu> wrote:
>>Steve Bartman <sbartman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>:>Actually, this will be less of a problem.  DD-21 is supposed to have
>>:>something like one third the crew of an Arleigh Burke destroyer.
>>
>>: It's supposed to have 95 I believe. The degree of mirth at that number
>>: varies day to day on s.m.n.
>>
>>Yeah, but s.m.n actually tends to be rather short on actual naval
>>knowledge.  It's rare that a poster there has read Proceedings, Defense
>>News, Defense Daily or Janes International Defense Review.  And I've seen
>>pretty hefty ignorance of the degree of automation that is already being
>>tried in the fleet.
>
>I only read one of the four. And many fools don't keep up. But several
>do (Andrew T., Paul A., Tom S., etc.)
>
>In my opinion it's not the automation that's at question. Certainly a
>lot more items can be automated than the USN historically has done.
>Many other NATO navies think we're odd at how manual our engineering
>spaces still are for example.
>
>No, what I think makes such a small crew unwise are the more human
>factors. DC certainly (and DC after taking casualties), but also slack
>for training needs and infrequent ops, sickness, gapped billets, etc.
>And cleaning and housekeeping. When the FFG7 class first came out in
>the late 70s their small crews were touted as a big improvement in per
>unit weapon to crew ratios. They talked about the flow-through
>superstructure for unreps, material handling gear, etc. But nobody did
>the analysis on everyday housekeeping: decks, heads, salt water
>preservation, food service, etc. Dirty ships are dangerous ships. Look
>at the internal volume of a DD21 and imagine 95 crew (really much less
>after officers and CPOs) keeping it all wiped down and repaired in
>off-watch hours on a six-month deployment.

The housekeeping requirements come in several flavors:
* hull volume/tonnage related (painting, rust remediation, etc)
* habitation related (x people times y days = z head cleanings, zz galley
	cleanups, etc etc)
* machinery related (machinery needing routine maintenance, repair,
	inspection, etc)

The first can be addressed somewhat with materials choices and
the like.  There exist more corrosion resistant hull materials than
standard steel; if it will cost more lifetime-cost to use steel and
employ thirty people continuously keeping the hull up, as opposed to
using more corrosion resistant steel or monel or something, then you
ought to go with the alternative material.  Different acceptable hull
lifetimes and degrees of cleanliness are also factors; you don't see
merchants trying to keep their hulls in that great shape.  They throw
them out sooner.  As vessel electronics and systems greatly surpass
hull cost, treating the hull as somewhat expendable becomes more
of a reasonable operational mode, a lesson which air forces and
armies are also learning these days.  If a tank hull costs $500k
and contains $2 million in electronics, why are you even worried
if you destroy your hulls training them to death?  Make more hulls
on an ongoing basis and swap the expensive gear... expect to see
the future main battle tank hull use this approach; it's going
to be too weight limited in the hull design to have a really robust
30 plus year service life.

The second is a factor of crew count, and to some extent inhabited
volume as well.  You need a certain number of support people for
a given total crew size (cleanup, galley, medical, etc etc).
All this really says is you need to know what your needs are in
this area and not underestimate it.  The total load does go down
something like but somewhat less than 2/3 if you have 2/3 less
crew to keep up.

Machinery related draws directly on the now well proven commercial
automated, robust equipment we've seen used in commercial shipping
for the last decade.  If warship systems were engineered to the same
specs and met the same reliability and robustness levels, they could
operate with the same MTBF and maintenance manhour reqs.

Damage control is always a big question mark.  Some areas of DC can
be addressed structurally in the design (more extensive and robust
and redundant sprinkler systems, more redundant systems overall so
you can simply accept some damage without complete failure, etc).
Some can't.  No matter how good the hulls are, reduced crews will
not do as well as larger ones in some DC scenarios, and the impact
of some additional losses in combat has to be considered.


-george william herbert
gherbert@retro.com

From: gherbert@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: alt.war.nuclear
Subject: Re: COME ON MISSIE DEFENCE, HURRY
Date: 29 Jul 2000 11:23:10 -0700

Steve Bartman  <sbartman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>gherbert@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert) wrote:
>>The housekeeping requirements come in several flavors:
>>* hull volume/tonnage related (painting, rust remediation, etc)
>>* habitation related (x people times y days = z head cleanings, zz galley
>>	cleanups, etc etc)
>>* machinery related (machinery needing routine maintenance, repair,
>>	inspection, etc)
>
>There are more factors than this, such as operational
>climate/geography, whether the platform is engaged in peacetime or
>wartime ops, op tempo including size of the in-port time chunks, etc.

Mostly, those are multipliers on the above general factors... i.e.,
if you're trying to achive higher fidelity modeling of reality,
hull volume/tonnage related is x tons times y factor for humidity
times z factor for temperature times...

Yes, they do count.  I'm just trying not to write a book here 8-)

>There are also degrees to which you assume certain variables are open
>to interpretation. For example, food service currently eats up between
>1/8 and 1/6 of the average USN crew. There are ways to significantly
>cut that through commercial products, but at great cost in dollars,
>quality, garbage volume, unrep frequency, additional training, lower
>morale, etc.

The question then becomes what are the tradeoffs of higher food
cost, garbage volume per crewmember, and unrep frequency per crew
member etc versus less crew overall.  Generally speaking, the cheapest
place to do something (be it prepare food, adjust a missile seeker,
or whatever) is in the factory during a normal 9-5 workday by an
expert with all the proper tools present.  Doing it in the field
costs several times more, including all the support costs for the
people out in the field spending the effort.

It's also important to note that if you cut the crew size by say half
for the same tonnage/volume, that if you don't significantly re-allocate
hull volumes there's twice as much stores space per person, twice as much
hab space per person, etc.  That goes a long way towards remediating the
additional per-person impact of doing it the more-prepackaged more-
preprepared way and helping with morale issues.

>Also, a great deal of manhours are consumed by the PMS
>system, almost all off-watch. Changing to a fix-only-when-broken mode
>saves a lot of time, but adds complexity and risk elsewhere.

Or requires a design with more redundancy to start with.
Yes, these sorts of trades are some of the key questions.

>>The first can be addressed somewhat with materials choices and
>>the like.  There exist more corrosion resistant hull materials than
>>standard steel; if it will cost more lifetime-cost to use steel and
>>employ thirty people continuously keeping the hull up, as opposed to
>>using more corrosion resistant steel or monel or something, then you
>>ought to go with the alternative material.
>
>It's not only a cost issue. I'm not a metallurgist, but I understand
>that many corrosion resistant steels are much more brittle than
>current hull steel. You also need steel that works well in the Arctic
>as well as the tropics, has proper magnetic qualities, plus other
>variables. Corrosion is one variable, and it seems to be rising in the
>hierarchy due again to the number of (mostly first enlistment) man
>hours eaten up by preservation. There are lots of programs now to use
>professional painters when in port to relieve the crews and get a
>better job, but over a deployment there has to be painting done.

If you go into the alloy steels, you get both higher strength,
lower corrosion rates, and higher toughness (better Charpy notch
values including at low temperatures, etc) with several choices.
People often scream "but my god, the metal is *twice* as expensive!"
failing to understand that the steel cost for a really good alloy steel
(T-1, though that's not my favorite hull alloy choice it's about
the most expensive alloy) is only at most a thousand dollars a ton.
The extra $500/ton or so for good as opposed to average steel will
run you a few million dollars (3-5) during initial construction
and incidentally should double your hull strength and ballistic
resistance...

Monel will essentially zero your corrosion, double strength and
ballistic resistance, costs a few dollars a pound (noticeable additional
build costs) and will eliminate any need to worry about rust for
the operational lifetime.  You still want to keep it painted,
of course, but you don't have to worry about the red stuff.

>> Different acceptable hull
>>lifetimes and degrees of cleanliness are also factors; you don't see
>>merchants trying to keep their hulls in that great shape.
>
>They don't operate in the environments a warship does, or exert the
>same stresses on the hulls.

True that warships generally operate more highly stressed, etc.

>> They throw
>>them out sooner.  As vessel electronics and systems greatly surpass
>>hull cost, treating the hull as somewhat expendable becomes more
>>of a reasonable operational mode, a lesson which air forces and
>>armies are also learning these days.  If a tank hull costs $500k
>>and contains $2 million in electronics, why are you even worried
>>if you destroy your hulls training them to death?  Make more hulls
>>on an ongoing basis and swap the expensive gear... expect to see
>>the future main battle tank hull use this approach; it's going
>>to be too weight limited in the hull design to have a really robust
>>30 plus year service life.
>
>That's fine for tanks, but totally unworkable for ships. The amount of
>gear that could unbolted and moved to a fresh hull is not as large as
>you think, and much of what could be is mechanical, not electronic.
>You'd get a used "new" ship, and the cost of factory refurbishment
>before reinstall would eat up most or all of the savings. Ships are
>not mass produced like tanks either. Each one is custom made, varying
>from its sisters in many ways. Go to two yards and the number of
>differences becomes even more extreme. And over an operating life,
>with ship alts and overhauls, ships in the same class change even
>more.

Not *totally* unworkable.  Just not as simple.

Look at the trends.  More stuff is being modularized and containerized.
The German MEKO frigates did a lot of work along those lines,
some of which is being looked at over here, too.  There are
operational, repair, and construction advantages to modularizing
and containerizing the expensive parts of the ship.

Where the cable runs go is of secondary importance.
Admittedly, there are more differences than that, but you can
establish interface standards for the modules to make them
interchangeable.

>>The second is a factor of crew count, and to some extent inhabited
>>volume as well.  You need a certain number of support people for
>>a given total crew size (cleanup, galley, medical, etc etc).
>>All this really says is you need to know what your needs are in
>>this area and not underestimate it.  The total load does go down
>>something like but somewhat less than 2/3 if you have 2/3 less
>>crew to keep up.
>
>This is the error that non-naval analysts always make. Sailors don't
>have simple job descriptions. There aren't "support people" and
>"non-support people." Highly trained technicians still clean, do mess
>duty, and stand a variety of out-of-rate watches depending on
>evolution. You can't simply cut x number of "support" people, and keep
>the brainiacs. Outside of Deck Division everyone has a trained skill,
>but Deck doesn't do all the grunt work. Everybody does. The corpsmen
>pass ammo, the yeomen clean heads, the cooks scrub passageways, the
>radiomen handle lines.

Substitute manhours for seperate support people.  I know crews cross
functional lines; I tend to plan designs in integral crewmen rather
than man-hours.  It's just a bad habit, from an operational research
standpoint.  I do know better.

>As far as inhabited volume, outside of tanks and voids it's all
>inhabited because there's gear there that needs access, for
>maintenance and DC. And if it has access it gets dirty, oily, wet, or
>all three. We're not only talking about cleaning sinks. Much of the
>upkeep is heavy-duty equipment space work that is backbreaking and
>continuous, starting with the bilges.

I know that.  Designing your equipment for low maintenance helps
a lot here.  Learning what merchant vessel designers do right
there helps a lot.

>>Machinery related draws directly on the now well proven commercial
>>automated, robust equipment we've seen used in commercial shipping
>>for the last decade.  If warship systems were engineered to the same
>>specs and met the same reliability and robustness levels, they could
>>operate with the same MTBF and maintenance manhour reqs.
>
>Some systems yes. Still/evaps, simple pumps, sanitary systems, some
>hydraulics, and the like. But warships have many more systems (five or
>six flavors of AC/DC for example), and they're used harder for longer.
>Merchies normally are at sea three weeks or less. They don't operate
>in extreme weather if at all possible; they drive around storms.
>They're very simple platforms. Propulsion and nav aids are the most
>complex things on board. They aren't nuclear or steam, and they use
>off the shelf GPS and radars. They don't need to worry about HERO,
>4500 PSI air, operating aircraft off the aft deck, or sound-isolating
>rotating machinery.

We're talking about DD21 for the current discussion; there are more
systems on the next gen carrier which are an additional problem.
DD21 isn't going to have nukes or steam.

The more systems argument is true, and will remain true even if you
start to aggressively reduce the unnecessary diversity.  The many many
flavors of power is one area deserving of massive simplification;
aircraft get by with one or two voltages.  So should ships.
Some systems will get bigger as a result.  Some cable runs will
be heavier.  Some things will be more expensive.  But it would
be a lot simpler and much much easier to maintain.

The total systems count will still be far higher though; systems give
capabilities, and warships need a wide variety of capabilities
(weapons, sensors, seahandling, etc).

The lesson from merchants is that for systems of equivalent capabilities,
the Navy way of doing it required 2-3 times as many manhours to maintain
as the merchant shipping way of doing it.  I.e., on an equivalent system
by system basis, it's possible to *significantly* reduce the crew upkeep
requirements by understanding and adopting commercial practice where
possible and beneficial.  We're seeing that now on a system by system
basis as a few key easy win technologies come on board naval vessels.
Generalize that to your whole equipment set.

Note that main propulsion is probably one area where the US Navy already
has the advantage, though; LM2500 turbines are much lower maintenance than
commercial propulsion sets.  If fuel wasn't so expensive, you would see
turbines in merchants, as they're cheaper to maintain.

>>Damage control is always a big question mark.  Some areas of DC can
>>be addressed structurally in the design (more extensive and robust
>>and redundant sprinkler systems, more redundant systems overall so
>>you can simply accept some damage without complete failure, etc).
>>Some can't.  No matter how good the hulls are, reduced crews will
>>not do as well as larger ones in some DC scenarios, and the impact
>>of some additional losses in combat has to be considered.
>
>That sounds nice from an ops research standpoint, but I prefer to
>think of it as a matter of people's lives. Somebody's brother, or
>mother. Not to mention the multi-year, multi-billion $ cost to replace
>the platform lost to a lack of DC. We learned the hard way in WWII how
>important DC is; we'd have lost hundreds more ships in the last year
>of the war in the Pacific without applying lessons learned earlier. We
>relearned with the Stark, Princeton, and other incidents that there is
>no substitute for fresh bodies to throw at a problem when the first
>ones drop from fatigue. Certainly commercial products and techniques
>can and are helping (especially in fire DC), but below a certain point
>you severely risk the ship. In my opinion 95, for a vessel the size of
>DD21, is below that point. I don't think that number will stand, or if
>it does, it won't be the number five years into the life cycle. Of
>course then you get a ship designed for 95 trying to berth and feed
>150.

I am not *certain* that 2/3 lower manning is practical, but I also think
the fleet has way too much inertia in the throw-people-at-it approach
and has not yet learned at a gut level that the world changed in terms
of design and systems capabilities.  Fire in particular is the big ship
killer, and is very very much easier to fight if you design excellent
redundant sprinkler systems in, insulated fire barriers within the ship,
chose fireproof materials more extensively, etc.  It costs more to build
it that way, but is worth it.  The additional cost and weight for dual
redundant automatic plus manual activation sprinkler systems with backup
non-ship-power seperate engine pumps so you can run it all if the main
engineering space goes boom totals up to a percent of hull weight maybe
and a few million dollars at most.  Trading 100 people for that seems
to me to be a good lifetime tradeoff, and will probably increase the
overall vessel fire resistance in normal and extreme DC conditions.

What they should be doing with DD21 is doing a series of X and Y-boats.
The fleet will buy into it if the concepts are proved at sea.  Test out
half the ideas in the first test ship; some will still be being debugged
in the second, add in half the remaining ones, and then the last in the
third hull etc.  Expect those hulls to be testbeds primarily and that
they may well end up being prematurely mothballed or scrapped if parts
don't work out.


-george william herbert
gherbert@retro.com