Jun

4

The ratio of crew to tonnage is changing again. In Nelson's Navy a 3500-ton ship of the line needed a crew of nearly a thousand sailors. ("Needed" but rarely got.) The dreadnoughts that started the industrial arms race in the last quarter of the 19th century (the race that the world is still running) were 4 times as large but had slightly smaller crews. The switch from wood and sail to steel and steam meant that countries could spend more of their wealth accumulating weapons and less paying for meat puppets in uniform. (The popularity of mobilization/conscription was that it allowed armies to keep up with navies; if serving was a duty rather than a job, then the Navy's enviable stuff to payroll ratio could be emulated.)

But, after WW I the switch to steam and steel stopped having any effect on crew ratios. The current U.S. nuclear carriers have 57 sailors per thousand tons of ship, very little change from the dreadnoughts' ratio of 62 sailors/ton. This is a problem. Sailors in the modern Navy cost $100,000 a year; a carrier crew runs a tab of half a billion dollars a year. And that figure does not include the tail costs of military retirement, including VA medical care. Something will have to change. The present hope is that packaged weaponry can somehow bring the container revolution to the Navy (McLean's magic boxes have reduced crew and longshoreman staffing levels per ton of cargo by more than a hundred-fold since the 1950s). The new LCS type is supposed to require only 25 sailors/ton; the hope is, according to StrategyPage, that "advances in automation, as well as the introduction of the combat UAVs in the next decade" will allow carriers to operate with only 20% of their present crews. That would be a ratio of 10/ton. If that happens, then we will see the same kind of explosion in ship-building that produced naval wars in South America and the Panama Canal.


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