U.S. Military at Sea

This book is an overview on "crew rotation" which is the practice of using more than one crew to operate a single ship. This practice has attracted growing attention in the Navy in recent years. Under conventional crewing concepts, one crew is assigned to each naval vessel and operates it on all deployments and training cruises. Individual personnel join or leave the crew as part of their normal career rotations. The purpose of crew rotation is to increase the amount of time that a ship spends operating overseas, providing "forward presence" as compared with conventional single crewing. This book describes the different approaches to crew rotation that the Navy uses today, has experimented with, or plans to employ. It also analyses the forward presence and force-structure implications of using or not using crew rotation on the Navy's surface combat ships. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.