Pags, thanks for the detailed response.
I think manning being aligned with the deployment/maintenance cycle is a feature and not a bug, especially where pig boats are concerned since you can't COD/VOD guys off in the middle of a deployment like other ships and squadrons can. This way, you train your crew through workups and everyone is a cohesive unit. Then you come home and head in to the yards for SRA or whatever subs have and the ship gets cut open. When the sand crabs are doing their work the ship doesn't need "warfighting effectiveness" and even if experienced Sailors weren't rotated out, they'd just be sitting around collecting a paycheck while doing nothing or being given make work jobs for the yard period. Their proficiency, currency (foreign language to boat guys), and experience would be lost while they sit in the yards so the unit would not be as effective as it once was when it returned to see after the yard period. Rotating in new Sailors affords them the opportunity to get up to speed during the IDTC and to be fully trained and ready once it's time to go to see.
Here's the thing: of the incident reports we had to study during quals, almost every single one...every one... pointed to watchteam inexperience as a root cause to a mishap. So we're talking about inexperience costing the taxpayers
hundreds of millions in repairs, loss of life, and loss of operational readiness.
Does it happen often? Thankfully not. But aside from the cost of training sailors to replace ones that are already trained, and the pain of making the crew work extra hours to get proficient at the bare basics, we have incurred the cost of mishaps that, according to the IG investigations, would not have happened had the watchteam had more experience. You get phrases like 'the OOD was qualified for 6 months...' as if we're supposed to gasp at an officer who has apparently been onboard doing a job for 18-22 months is supposed to be incapable of driving the ship without the CO standing over his shoulder. Where the IG stops short is that they don't acknowledge that there is no one else that is more experienced. Boats don't have super JOs to stick on watch when doing a tough strait transit at PD. On ustafish we had one officer (who was not the XO or CO) who had deployment experience standing OOD on mission. He can't be on watch 24/7. I would argue that it takes more than a deployment to get proficient at taking a ship out on mission, especially when (in my case) the CO was a guy who spent his DH and XO tour on boomers. And it's not just the submarine force - there are plenty of threads on here where the peanut gallery comments that SWOs are not as good at ship driving as they ought to be. But that's all we get at each stage of our career, if that - one deployment and it's time to go to the next career milestone. If you don't make the cut then you are shown the door.
My overall point is that I think the Navy can benefit from having JOs and DHs who can competently handle driving the boat instead of pushing everything up to the CO. The Navy could benefit from having COs who have done more than a deployment in command at sea. The job isn't the hardest in the world to do, but I don't think it's so easy that 6-12 months of deployment experience before taking command is enough.
On the subject of sand crabs: I think that we ought to turn the ship entirely over to the shipyard, and the crew goes to man whatever boat is coming out next. There is very little, if any, added value to having the crew onboard while the ship is in a depot availability. If anything, we get in the way and cost hundreds of thousands of lost man-hours to workers who actually get paid for working overtime.
So, on a personal level I'm a 2xFOS guy who was shown the door after 11yrs of service. But I didn't leave with some sort of secret sauce recipe that the fleet could truly benefit from...
Again, I'm not coming from the argument that one guy is so fantastic that the service can't afford to lose him. I'm not even coming from the 'gain and maintain the best and the brightest.' I'm coming from the argument that it is a poor use of resources to replace him just because the systems says so. I would like to just retain the average Joe who is content to be a MM3 or LTJG for 20 years and can be relied upon to handle an engineering casualty because he has been doing the job for 10, 12, whatever years.
I will counter your anecdotal evidence with one from my brother who serves as a police officer. He recently took the sergeant exam but said he didn't want the promotion. I naturally asked him why not. He said that a promotion would lead to him being transferred to another precinct beyond his control, which could be up to 2 hours from where he currently lives. He could be put on straight midnights. He will go from being on the street to mostly sitting behind a desk getting pinged about the few officers who think they can show up without shaving and read the paper for 8 hours. In short, he likes his job, his precinct, and is satisfied with his pay. He doesn't need stripes or railroad tracks to feel good about himself. So that's where he is staying. No one is going to say 'it's civil SERVICE, how dare you look out for yourself' in response to him expressing a desire to stay put. At the end of the day it is his career and he gets paid to do it.
So why is it not possible for the military to do a same thing? If you're happy being a division officer and want to stay put, why not? Being an integrated part of a local community makes the deployment pill easier to swallow when it comes to wife and children. The biggest reason not to that I can think of is that when the bullets start flying then there needs to be a system to keep the flow of people (and ships) coming. So the lazy solution is to artificially mandate attrition so that the system can handle it in wartime, similar to how the government pays to keep production facilities open just in case. But I think that there's a better way to do it that would cost the taxpayer less money and make us more effective in the long run.
