Transforming Coalition Naval Operations by Using Human Systems Integration to Reduce Warship Manning: Lessons Learned from the United States Navy DDG-51 Class Warship Reduced Manning Study

The need to transform the U.S. military is a top priority of the Department of Defense. President Bush emphasized this in his National Security Strategy when he noted that "The major institutions of American National Security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed." Transformation is a challenging imperative, especially in a service as rich in tradition as the U.S. Navy. Two generations ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, frustrated with how slowly the U.S. Navy was changing, famously said "To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching." Unlike the Navy of President Roosevelt's day, today's naval leadership is committed to transforming the Navy and ensuring that the Navy of tomorrow is a critical component of the Joint warfighting force. Navy leaders have known intuitively that a smaller, better-trained, more stabilized crew could mean a more capable, more professional warfighting team. The ongoing DDG-51 Class Reduced Manning Initiative undertaken by the Naval Sea Systems Command PEO Ships addresses the policy, processes, culture, tradition, and technology aspects of achieving this reduced manning posture on U.S. Navy ships. This paper will address the full breadth of this Manning Initiative, but will focus primarily on the use of technology to better engineer combatant ships in a way that enhances warfighter performance by identifying Sailor tasks and skills, allocating them to hardware, software, and people, and reducing workload. This paper will show that the discipline of Human Systems Integration (HSI) is a key enabler for achieving effective and appropriate technology insertion in U.S. Navy ships. Thirty-nine briefing charts summarize the presentation.