As I understand it, damage control is the main reason a naval ship has such a large crew. Commercial ships as large or larger than the largest warships manage to operate the vessel just fine with a mere dozen men, or sometimes even less.
But then, since you have all those men on board anyway, you might as well find other things for them to do for when you’re NOT taking damage.
If the Stark was engaged in an active battle situation, it would have had its defenses active. In this case a Captain of a Frigate compounded the problem by pretty much doing nothing. The Phalanx CIWS should have been made active at very least with the contact of the unidentified jet.
If the Russian Cruiser Moskva did not have its defensive systems on while engage in active combat; that makes the Stark’s Captain look like a genius in comparison.
Damage Control is practiced pretty often at sea. The Navy did get a little lax in the 70s but really emphasized it in the 80s. In the Damage Control Lockers, even the pencil pushers were trained to man hoses and overhaul fires and assist in repairing and saving the ship.
The Engineering Crews are large with a lot of redundancy. I know by the end of West Pac we had over 50 electricians qualified for switch board watches. I was rather proud of that as the division training petty officer. (that was for 8 electrical switch boards)
They sure can drink any US-sailor under the table.
The main reason Putin got his job way back in 1999 is because he was the only one sober. He still can’t hold his liquor.
See, I feel like you might have it backwards. Warships have a lot of people (relative to merchant ships of comparable size) because they have all manner of weapons and sensor systems that a commercial ship doesn’t. They also have propulsion plants that do not get the benefit of operating for long periods of time at a steady speed: it’s not simply that they go faster (and in fact many modern merchant ships can rival or match a warship for speed), but that propulsion plant conditions vary more often. Sometimes a warship wants to just troll around at 5 knots getting passed by fishing vessels; other times it wants to go thirty knots to get somewhere quick, to take evasive maneuvers, to generate relative wind to launch/recover aircraft, etc.; and of course its most efficient speed for crossing the ocean will be somewhere in between
That said, people can only sit so long at a radar console. Even in 8 hour shifts (which is itself too long to maintain peak awareness and responsiveness) that leaves three times as many people on board as you need to operate all these systems at any given moment (and of course many of the actual combat systems are still not manned at any given moment, and will only be fully manned if the ship were actually in or expecting to be in combat). But… since you have all those people on board, you might as well train them all in damage control and assign the extra bodies in combat to be ready to respond to battle damage.
While actual damage control needs versus ship operating and mission performance needs may get blurry on smaller ships, it’s very obvious that all those hundreds or thousands of people are not on board for damage control on a ship the size of a carrier. It does not take 5000 people, or even 1000, to respond to damage on a carrier. And yet, depending on whether the air wing is embarked, between 3000 and 5000 people will be on board. Those people are so detached from the specter of damage control requirements that I once actually saw a hangar full of sailors literally cheer when a fire was reported and the few dozen sailors on the ship’s ready response “flying squad” had to run out of the hangar to combat it, like cheering on a local sports team taking the field. Having previously served on a destroyer, I was like… “WTF are you people cheering for? The ship is literally on fire!!!” SMDH.
I note that the UK’s latest carrier HMS Prince of Wales manages with a crew of 700, increasing to around 1,600 with aircraft on board. All crew members train for several jobs besides their own speciality: Firefighting, man overboard recovery, first aid - you name it,
Well, obviously a carrier is a special case, since aircraft are very manpower-intensive. But for non-carrier ships, OK, you need someone manning the radar, the helm, and the comms at all times, and so you need three times as many people on board as are actually needed to man those at once… but not so for the offensive weapons systems. There, you can get by with one person per job, and just wake them up when you’re about to enter combat. And today’s navy has a lot more automation than they used to. But they still keep lots of sailors on board, because you can’t automate damage control.
That is still a smallish carrier compared to the Supercarriers of the USN.
The USS Nimitz is actually over 100,000 tons. Crew size is over 5000 at sea and sometimes as high as 6000. (This is our oldest carrier still in service)
The Prince of Wales is under 50,000 tons.
The USS Gerald R. Ford is the latest Carrier and is about 100,000 tons. Crew size is closer to 4500 with some modernizations over the Nimitz.
Chronos is correct, the actual crews of the carrier are kept large for redundancy in battle and damage control. In a pinch a Navy ship should be able to keep up operations with 2/3rds of its crew out of action. They can sail home with even less but I would think anything that wiped out that much crew would have the ship dead in the water at best.
Fun fact, The Nimitz was delivered to the Navy in 1975, and commissioned by President Gerald R. Ford. So the namesake of the new class commissioned the lead ship of the prior class.
I mean, granted, I’m no longer in the Navy and so not attuned to all the latest developments (it was 3 whole years ago that I was retired, but all of the ships I served on—ranging in size from minesweeper to aircraft carrier, not counting the patrol boats in Iraq—are still in commission, so there’s that), but I think you overestimate the level of automation and underestimate the need for large-ish crews just to maintain and operate systems under routine conditions.
However, as I noted and perhaps in line with your thinking, the line gets blurry as ships get smaller. Probably the closest example of what you are imagining would be US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (both types). They were originally envisioned to have small crews of, if memory serves, about 40 (in spite of being close to frigate size, with frigates normally having crews more in the range of 200) and it is true a lot of people expressed concerns about survivability and damage control in the event of a combat damage situation.
But you know what? They’ve effectively had to double the crew sizes because it turns out, damage control or not, automation or not, you just can’t maintain a ship that size with a crew of 40. That wasn’t an increase in crew size for damage control, mind you, but to both man watch stations and to maintain equipment. When the Navy came up with the idea for LCS, senior leaders (not for the first time) insisted it would not need a larger crew because the Navy would fund all kinds of shore support infrastructure to take care of infrequent but routine preventative and corrective maintenance. But you know what? That costs money, and the Navy is bad with allocating funds for such dull and uninteresting things as shore support staff and maintenance. So instead they started upping the crew sizes to keep existing crews and equipment from breaking down.
Point is, even on some of the newest, most automated, and smallest ships that can still be called “ships” (as opposed to boats) crew size has developed (and expanded) around what it takes to actually maintain and operate the things under routine conditions, not damage control.
ETA: I will also add that on the smallest ship I served on, a minesweeper, one of the most manpower intensive tasks was… sweeping and hunting mines. Literally what it was designed to do. Granted, it was an older ship class designed before extensive automation was possible, but then so is (or was) this Russian vessel that just joined the seabed.
Just wake them up when you “enter combat” when the alarms go that someone is attacking you? That doesn’t sound very safe.
Just out of curiosity, what do people mean by “damage control” outside of putting out fires? Plugging leaks? Bailing water? Rebooting computers? I’ve never worked on a ship, so outside of firefighting and maybe closing hatches and turning on bilge pumps (which I assume most of the crew can do), it’s not clear to me what’s “fixable” in the event a ship is hit by a missile.
I assumed large warships have large crews to support 24 hour watches (so…3x?) and so they don’t have to go back to port to fix every little maintenance issue.
Damage control is first for fire: when you have a lot of explosives, fuel,…aboard, fire is worst. But if you take fire out with water, then you have a water problem… so pumping the water out before the ship capsize will be your second task. You will also have to close any gap in the hull (reef, torpedoes,…) and isolate/weld shut some sections, and many work on the hull from the outside. And ventilate to evacuate nasty gases, and letting enough oxygen for the sailors to breathe, but not to much or the fire will go “whoosh”. And maybe repair all the electrical, electronic and mechanical systems that communicate or regulate everything.
Also, Russian Navy ships are notorious for poor maintenance by the crew.
ill-trained, unmotivated conscripts skimp. Officers simply do not trust Enlisted Men. No professional NCO corps.
This is why their Navy has multiply redundant weapons, often requiring a hooraw’s nest of support systems.
At least one will (usually) work.
I suspect Moskva’s systems were not working.
Note that I said “offensive weapons”. Like all those big missiles on the Moskva: There’s no way you’re going to be launching those without plenty of advance warning that you’re going to, because anything that can attack you that quickly is going to be something those missiles aren’t effective against.
This confuses the hell out of me. I find it hard to believe. In the US & UK at least the Navy’s backbone is the NCO corps. Hell most officers are nothing more than managers and not actually skilled crew. (Plenty of exceptions of course).
They say Sergeants run the army; well Chiefs run the Navy. Petty Officers do most of the skilled work and Officers shuffle paper.
And yet it’s been that way since early Soviet days.
The logical inference, then, would be that the Russian navy lacks backbone. Which appears to be consistent with the observed facts.
So, one of my first jobs in the Navy was on a destroyer, in charge of the guys who launched tomahawks. Took way more than one person to actually launch those missiles. In fact, as with actually sweeping or hunting mines on a minesweeper, launching a missile strike was one of the most intensive operations for the strike division aboard a guided missile destroyer. And, as with everything else, there was lots of maintenance.
I think that’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate about modern weapons systems. In fact, I suspect that lack of appreciation explains the delta between what intelligence analysts expected the Russian military could do, versus what it actually did do. There was, I suspect, some baseline expectation of good faith on the part of subordinates that surely they were doing their jobs and accurately reporting the condition of their equipment. We should have been–and I frankly have been–skeptical, of both the Russian military and the Chinese military for that matter (who I strongly suspect would perform similarly if it tried to invade Taiwan), and their claims or representations that they could maintain and operate advanced weapons systems equal to or better than our in terms of advertised capability, and yet do that with a largely conscript force. Because that’s one of the major reasons for opposition to a draft within the US military: not some moral stand grounded in notions of liberty so much as a sense that as difficult as it is to maintain our systems now, it would be nigh impossible to do that with conscripts who don’t ant to be there at all and will not be there for long in any event.
For a loosely analogous proposition, consider the expected versus actual observed (in post-war assessments) effectiveness in terror bombings in subduing the Axis powers. On the one hand, there was this assumption that terror bombing would, in due time, turn the targeted population against their own leaders. On the other, there was clear evidence of just the opposite happening to affected populations on the allied side. As different as people are, they are fundamentally the same. By extension, if we are hard pressed to imagine how the Russian or Chinese militaries could possibly do all the things they do (or claim to be able to do) while relying on a largely conscript force, maybe the conclusion isn’t that authoritarian regimes are so much better at managing conscripts than we could be.
It can be argued that the WWII US Navy was a mostly conscript force and I recall the USN topped out in damage control in WWII. Now we made it a top priority so I’m sure that helped. But that would indicate that China could be doing OK on that front. I’ll admit to knowing almost nothing about the Chinese sailors.
The US Navy has, for the bulk of its existence, been an all volunteer force. WWII was the aberration, not the norm. The peacetime draft that followed, too, was the aberration, not the norm. And we got away from it for a reason. Were there, for instance, still mutinies (or “riots” if you prefer) aboard aircraft carriers when you were in? For example:
That’s what a conscript Navy can get you in an unpopular and unnecessary war.
ETA: Turns out that might not be the best example as it was just after the decision to transition to an all volunteer force. Anyway, I stand by my main point: the draft was the aberration, not the norm.
Not really. It was an all conscript force of men who wanted to be conscripted.