How About Cutting Back on the Officer Corps(e)?

The lead ship of the Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers, will be short staffed by 500-600 crew because of recruiting shortfalls.

By way of perspective, there are 333,896 active duty personnel in the navy.

I don't know the breakdown for this year, but in 2020, it was 286,337 enlisted men, and 55,659 Officers, 5.1 men per officer.

By comparison, in 1945, there were 3,005,534 enlisted men and 323,755 officers, about 9.3 men per officer.

One were to split the difference, to 7.2:1  to account for the increased technology, you would have about 14,000 extra enlisted men in active duty, and you would be paying a lot less for them, and they actually make the US navy work.

In the face of a massive shortage of Navy sailors, America’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), has downsized, cutting the crew aboard by hundreds of sailors.

The cuts appear to be deep and dramatic. Over the past six months to a year, some 500 to 600 sailors have left the USS Ford and not been replaced. In fact, the USS Ford has shed so many crew members that the ship’s company (core crew members that operate the vessel) is now below the Ford-class Carrier Program’s original Acquisition Program Baseline objective of 2,391 billets—a goal set back in 2004 that many observers considered unrealistic.

In an emailed statement attributed to the commanding officer of the USS Ford, Captain Rick Burgess, the carrier is now “home to approximately 4,070 sailors: 2,380 ship’s company, 1,550 assigned to Carrier Wing EIGHT, and 140 embarked with Carrier Strike Group TWELVE and Destroyer Squadron TWO staffs.”

That represents an enormous reduction in the carrier’s workforce.

The services massively missed their 2023 recruiting goals.  The generally good job market probably had a lot to do with that, though I think that the refocusing from counter-insurgency to near peer opponents might have something to do with that as well.

I'm not military, but I would suggest that reducing the number of officers in each service, and redirecting that money toward improving the lot of enlisted personnel, might go a long way toward fixing things.

Otherwise, we will be stuck with trillions of dollars in high tech fighting equipment that we can neither maintain nor operate.