MSC commander envisions a sea base with air express service into the war zone

Sea Power, May 2003

After 33 years in the Navy, Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III, does not want to climb any more mountains. He wants to make them disappear. The military services' entire logistical operation was embarrassed during the 1991 Desert Storm conflict by what many called an iron mountain of supplies that piled up in Kuwait. Comprising thousands of containers, many of them unlabeled, the mountain was a nightmare for logistics specialists unable to track the contents of each container. Lumbering commercial vessels and foreign crews that balked at making deliveries to a war zone added to the problems.

Today, Brewer commander of the Military Sealift Command (MSC), beams when he talks about MSC's 19 fast, new roll-on/roll-off ships that can carry 1,000 Bradley fighting vehicles and traverse the Atlantic at 24 knots. "The speed of the commercial ships we had to use in Desert Storm was about 13 to 14 knots," he said. Like all MSC ships, the new fleet is manned primarily by civil service mariners on the MSC payroll, not by Navy crews. During the buildup prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, on-time delivery was "well over 95 percent," he said.

Brewer has commanded the USS Mount Whitney, the Second Fleet flagship, and the tank landing ship USS Bristol County. He also has served as Special Assistant for Equal Opportunity to the Chief of Naval Operations, commander of Amphibious Group Three, and Vice Chief of Naval Education and Training.

Brewer envisions a future with much of the military's logistical support based at sea. All equipment and supplies would be tracked by bar code, ordered by "visual signal" from war fighters, retrieved on demand by robotic logistical systems and, when necessary, air-expressed from the ship and "dropped into the zone...that technology is available today. We have shown it to the Navy," he said. He discussed MSC's future with Editor in Chief Rick Barnard.

Sea Power: What are your top priorities for 2003?

BREWER: We're looking at taking over more of the Navy's support ships: the submarine tenders, the salvage ships, and we have been asked to look at operating the flagships. We just completed a study on the USS Coronado, the Third Fleet flagship, at the request of Vice Adm. [Tony M.] Bucchi, commander, U.S.Third Fleet. We can save the Navy $7 million to $8 million a year in personnel costs, and that's a conservative estimate.

On just one ship?

BREWER: We will be able to operate that ship with between 90 to 120 mariners. [It now has a crew of 545.] One of the things unique about Military Sealift Command is that I can very rapidly increase or decrease the size of the crew depending upon what the ship is doing. And that gives us a lot of flexibility and additional savings.

That would be a fundamental change for the Navy.

BREWER: Absolutely. And being an ex-flagship commanding officer, I had problems with that at first. Of course, the flagship missions would remain under the Navy and we would just operate the ship from the standpoint of engineering, supply, and navigation.

We have approached the submarine community about taking over operations to a certain extent on the submarine tenders. In a 1997 study, the submarine community tasked us to look at the tenders. At that time, we were not prepared, frankly speaking, to meet their requirements in terms of being a nuclear repair facility. We're now prepared to that.

In a recent speech, you said you could save money and manpower by taking over more of the logistical functions of the Navy. Does this imply a requirement for more and more mariners? And are they not hard to get?

BREWER: Yes. Right now we're at 4,044 civil service mariners. If we were to assume responsibility for the additional ships that we're being asked to take, we could easily have a civilian force of 6,000. That does not include contract mariners, which we keep in a separate category.

We're also being driven by another initiative that I have called "Increasing Shore Leave." Our civil service mariners today earn only about two days of shore leave per month, coupled with two days of federal annual leave because they are civil servants. [MSC needs to] align them more closely with their commercial counterparts. The minimum amount of shore leave that the commercial mariner receives is two months for every four months at sea. Some receive as many as four months leave for every four months at sea. So, my initiative would basically give our civil service mariners up to 2 months for every 4 months at sea. That will require us to hire an additional 700 mariners in order to provide the pipeline for those mariners to stay ashore that long.

You want to make the civil service mariner's positions more attractive?

BREWER: Absolutely. Basically we have to do something extreme. So we're now involved in a recruiting blitz. We signed a recruiting contract with Media Cross, Inc. [St. Louis, Mo.] last June and since then we have had 400 net accessions. So, we're getting healthy very rapidly.

How many slots are open?

BREWER: Lots. We will assume control of USNS Rainier [a new Supply-class fast combat support ship] in August. Next year we will assume operational control of another, USNS Bridge. Each one of these ships has a requirement for 177 civil service mariners. That doesn't include pipeline. We would need at least 200 mariners to satisfy that requirement. We've also got to take over the T-AKE [a new class of three cargo and ammunition ships] that will come on line in 2005. Over the next few years, we have to grow from 4,044 to over 5,300 civil service mariners, without any new initiatives. So if I take over many more ships that would clearly drive me to 6,000.