With the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford en route home from what has become the longest U.S. Navy float since Vietnam, the service is reconsidering how to sustain a wartime fighting force.
That’s according to Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman, who addressed service needs and quality of life concerns at a forum hosted by Military Officers Association of America this month.
With the back-to-back operational demands of the military intervention to capture and extract Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January, followed by the airstrikes on and subsequent naval blockade of Iran, and amid ongoing drug interdiction operations around South and Central America, older force generation models are proving less effective, he said.
“So, one of the things we’ve learned is we’re going to have to come up with a different force generation model,” Perryman said. “… And so we think we can do better in our force generation model to generate the readiness that we know the department is going to consume. And so … let’s take a step back and really evaluate what that should look like.”
Throughout his career, he said, the force generation model had largely been based on a peacetime mindset.
“It’s like this conveyor belt that’s very prescriptive, and it executes on time,” he said.
For example, Perryman said, carrier strike groups deploy on three-year centers, meaning they cycle through training, deployment and maintenance every three years.
As recently as 2020, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday defended this structure amid proposals for change from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, saying the Navy had “made and are projecting into the future to continue to meet every commitment, every deployment that we’ve been directed to do.”
But the deployment of the Ford, which will have been deployed for more than 330 days when it’s slated to pull into port in Norfolk, Va., at the end of this month, has reopened the debate about how the Navy, which has historically had five- to seven-month pumps, should structure deployments and time at home, Perryman said.
The Navy, he said, was considering challenges ranging from acquiring enough spare parts, to building in appropriate time for reset and training.
“So really that’s what we’re taking away from this. And we’ve started to do, I think, some pretty transformative work in that area,” he said.
The Navy in late April marked a first in more than two decades with three aircraft carriers operating simultaneously in the waters surrounding the Middle East.
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Perryman’s comments advance a proposition by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle in late April at the Modern Day Marine Symposium. Caudle suggested transitioning amphibious ships, also on a 36-month deployment cycle, to a 50- or 52-month cycle that would incorporate two deployments.
By getting two deployments out of the same training and maintenance phase, Caudle suggested the Navy could “reduce the overhead … [and] gain some efficiency,” Breaking Defense reported.
Army, Air Force reevaluate demands
Other senior enlisted leaders who spoke alongside Perryman also described the difficulty of adapting to operational demands and an uncertain timeline.
Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer said his service was working to develop “true readiness measurements” while also “trying to manage the current op tempo.”
At home, he said, the Army was working to modernize training ranges and align training more closely with current threats.
Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe said months of air sorties had left the service with “tired folks out there and some tired equipment that needs our attention.”
“Another thing we’ve learned is that when you put the resources and the parts forward with the aircraft, the aircraft fly at an amazingly high rate, right,” he said.
“So we’ve got some work to do in that department with, you know, stable and predictable budgets and making sure that we’ve got the parts and the resources that we need in the places that we need them,” Wolfe added. “We need to do a better job of that in garrison, when we’re getting ready for whatever is to come, whatever we’re asked to do.”
But all the enlisted leaders emphasized their troops were performing well. The senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, David Isom, said the number of troops who had returned to duty after combat injuries was “off the charts.”
Isom added that he’d visited the sailors onboard the deployed carrier Ford and found them “motivated, excited, mission-focused.”
“I think that kind of inspiration keeps people coming back and inspires the next generation,” he said. “And we do see a lot of propensity to serve.”