The US Navy hasn’t got the ships and hasn’t got the men

Descending spiral of gapped billets, overwork, poor morale and low retention

To keep pace with an expanding Chinese fleet, the US Navy is still clinging to an ambitious – but so far unrealised – plan to grow its front-line fleet from around 290 warships to at least 350.
But the Navy doesn’t have enough sailors to fully man the ships it has already – to say nothing of the extra ships it wants. Equally troubling, the manpower shortage means fewer sailors are doing the hard work of keeping ships in top condition during deployments. That could shorten the ships’ service lives, further delaying any fleet expansion.
Yes, the Navy has a hardware problem. But its people problem is far more vexing. 
The Navy’s 2024 budget, which – incredibly – is still awaiting Congressional approval, authorises the service to have 347,000 active-duty personnel. But as of January, the service actually employed just 324,599 active-duty sailors – 269,628 enlisted and 54,971 officers. That’s a shortfall of more than 22,000 people, or seven per cent.
The manpower gap means more ships with incomplete crews. It takes 84,400 enlisted sailors to fully man all the fleet’s vessels. As recently as November, however, there were just 70,700 enlisted sailors at sea – a 16 per cent shortfall. 
“We found that across the fleet, the Navy is assigning fewer personnel to positions than required,” the US Government Accountability Office explained in a September report. Ships’ crews with too few sailors struggle to perform routine maintenance at sea: patching hulls, fixing machinery, keeping computers running smoothly. 
“The Navy risks not being able to maintain equipment and not achieving the equipment’s expected service life,” the GAO warned.
And where captains do perform all the required maintenance, they often do so by overworking their too-small crews. “According to sailors on the ships we visited, increased workloads can lead to fatigue risks to readiness, and low morale,” the GAO found. And low morale can drive sailors out of the fleet at the ends of their enlistments, further exacerbating the manpower shortfall.
It’s a mess. And the Navy is scrambling to fix it as it awaits much-delayed Congressional action on its 2024 and 2025 budgets. As an expedient, the fleet deliberately neglects entire classes of warships that are scheduled for imminent retirement. The fleet’s few remaining Ticonderoga-class cruisers – 1980s stalwarts that have struggled with outdated and unreliable hulls and machinery – are sailing with practically skeleton crews.
Altogether, the 11 cruisers need 5,100 enlisted sailors. But according to the GAO, they actually have just 3,900 – a gap of more than a third. 
How the Navy got into this predicament is complex. The COVID pandemic interrupted recruiting. Post-COVID, the US economy quickly recovered to nearly full employment, with monthly unemployment rates hovering around three percent. Less slack in the labor market means fewer young people finding their way into military service.
Moreover, one key demographic – young men – is less enthusiastic about joining the military. Navy Times cited a study that found just 11 percent of men between the ages of 16 and 21 were interested in military service in 2021, down from 22 percent in 2014. 
The Navy’s not alone in its struggle to hire. With the exception of the Marine Corps, all the US military services – even the quasi-military US Military Sealift Command – have fallen short of recruiting goals in recent years. Even the Navy’s industrial base is grappling with a labor crisis and, as a result, falling behind on the production of new ships.
To solve the manpower crisis over the medium term, the Navy is assigning more sailors to its recruiting command – and boosting enlistment bonuses and educational benefits. But arguably the biggest factor in the naval enlistment shortfalls – competition from well-paying civilian jobs – is entirely outside the Navy’s control. Enlistments will improve when the economy worsens.
In the meantime, the Navy plans to cheat. The service expects to ask for nearly 15,000 fewer funded billets as part of its 2025 budget: in essence, eliminating jobs it can’t fill. But where the billets will come from is critical. If fleet leaders reduce at-sea manning without actually redesigning ships to function with smaller crews, they’ll just paper over the manpower problem.
Ships will still break while underway … or wear out years ahead of their planned decommissioning dates. And the Navy’s ambition for a bigger fleet will continue to founder.