Big changes the Navy can expect in the year ahead

[JohnP]

Top 12 for 2009

Big changes the Navy can expect in the year ahead
Times staff
Posted : Tuesday Dec 30, 2008 10:15:50 EST

The coming year will bring new uniforms, missions and benefits to sailors and new ships to the fleet.

1. New uniforms
Jan. 15 marks the beginning of the largest uniform rollout in Navy history. The blue digital pattern Navy Working Uniform will begin its two-year rollout in the Norfolk, Va., area and will be authorized on the whole East Coast by Dec. 31 before heading to the West Coast in 2010.

Meanwhile, the new khaki shirt and black pant service uniform for sailors E-6 and below will continue its rollout.

Also, a final determination will be made in 2009 on whether the service dress khaki test uniforms will make an official return to the fleet, along with improvements to the blue and white crackerjack uniforms.

2. New evals?
In 2008, then-Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (SW/FMF) Joe Campa pushed through an overhaul of chief petty officer fitness reports. He renamed them evaluations and rewrote the performance traits to mirror his “Mission, Vision and Guiding Principals” that he’d rolled out to the chiefs’ mess in 2006.

Now, he has taken his 2007 “Expectations of the First Class” and laid the groundwork to change evals for sailors E-6 and below into two separate forms: one for E-1 through E-3 and the other for E-4 through E-6. MCPON (SS/SW) Rick West has yet to comment on whether he’ll make the change a priority this year.

3. Changing warfare quals
Another Campa idea West may take up is changing warfare qualifications. Before leaving office, Campa wanted to reform enlisted warfare quals, with an eye to making them more like the programs in the submarine force. Campa favored rescinding the requirement that E-5s at sea be qualified before they can compete for advancement to first class. Instead, all sailors should be required to qualify up front in their careers, he said.

4. People perks
Up to 40 sailors and officers are expected to go on sabbatical in 2009. Twenty officers and 20 enlisted sailors will be selected by a board and allowed to leave the service, with a small monetary stipend and full medical, commissary and base privileges. In exchange, they can stay out for up to three years, but upon return, must repay the Navy with two years of service for each year they took off. People are expected to use the program to get advanced degrees, take care of children or aging parents or simply take a break.

In addition, the service will begin a telecommuting test that will allow officers and eventually senior enlisted to live in places like Norfolk and San Diego, while taking a job in Millington, Tenn., or Washington, D.C.

Also, two changes in the Family and Medical Leave Act aimed directly at military families will take effect in 2009, expanding unpaid leave for some family members.

One change allows up to 26 weeks of time off for family members to care for their severely injured service member.

The other applies to families of National Guard and reserve troops, who can receive up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for a variety of deployment-related reasons, including taking time off for vacation if a mobilized reservist gets rest and relaxation leave during a deployment.

5. IA duty, normalized
The Navy heads into 2009 with individual augmentee duty a fact of life. As of mid-December, there were 4,170 active-duty and 3,954 reserve sailors serving on the ground in IA billets in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Djibouti and elsewhere. Another 5,093 active and reserve sailors were under orders or in training to deploy.

Several steps have been taken to normalize the duty, creating “Global War on Terror Support Assignments,” or GSAs, making IA duty a predictable assignment that can be negotiated with a detailer, not last-minute orders.

In September, Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations said, “We’re going to be doing this for at least a couple more years.”

Some 23,293 active-duty and 50,563 reserve sailors have served as IAs since the duty was initiated in 2001.

6. The anti-piracy mission
Back in March 2006, sailors aboard the destroyer Gonzalez and cruiser Cape St. George returned fire from suspected pirates off Somalia, killing one, wounding five and capturing several. Since then, there have been few fireworks courtesy of the Navy off the Horn of Africa.

More than two years later, piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia has skyrocketed, gaining global attention due to several high-profile hijackings. But the fleet has held its fire.

That may change in the new year, with new permission from the U.N. to pursue pirates ashore as well as a nascent court system where captured pirates can be punished. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of 5th Fleet, said a judicial system that can handle pirates, likely in Kenya, will be the “weapon” that coalition navies really need.

“When that happens, we’re really going to move out and aggressively go after this problem,” he said. “And it will no longer be good to be a pirate because you’ll do time.”