Navy’s targets on surge-ready ships, recruitment are ‘stretch’ goals

Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti laid out her top priorities for the fleet in a recently released document — the new “navigation plan” is a compilation of ambitious goals the service should be able to meet by 2027.

To achieve the strategic goal of being ready for the “possibility of war” with China in exactly two years, Franchetti wants the service to prioritize nearly a dozen targets, including getting sailors off waitlists for housing, operationalizing autonomous systems, and sustaining surge-ready forces. Each target has an accountable official assigned to it.

Each target, however, is a “stretch goal,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti told reporters, meant to drive greater effort.

“Like all the goals in the NAV plan, every one of them is a stretch goal. Every one of them has a single, accountable individual that’s responsible to me. I’m responsible, but I’m holding them accountable also for getting after the goal,” said Franchetti at the Defense Writers Group event on Wednesday.

One of the targets is to achieve an 80% surge-ready fleet.

“Combat surge readiness is a crisis force generation term, and it’s really identifying units that can be made ready through tailored training and certification to go out and be deployed to do a mission outside of the [Optimized Fleet Response Plan]. Normally, we have a pretty lockstep process: train or maintain, train, certify, and deploy. This is outside of that process,” said Franchetti.

“Think back to 9/11. We know that all of a sudden, we need to get ships underway to do different missions, to go somewhere and do something. We want to be able to have a process through each one of our communities, aviation service and submarines, that they can certify a ship as combat surge ready and get it out the door on the timeline that it’s needed. That’s what I’m thinking about in terms of combat surge ready.”

Franchetti’s vision for surge-ready forces is a shift from previous service leaders’ approach, which primarily focused on reducing maintenance overruns to improve overall readiness.

Franchetti said while the 80% figure is ambitious, it will “push people harder to get after that.”

“How do they get to that 80% right now, how do we get that across every other type, model, series? How do we get that out of our ships and how do we get that out of our submarines?” said Franchetti.

Franchetti also wants the service to fill jobs in the active and reserve components to 100% and man deploying units to 95% of billets.  

Additionally, the Navy will reach 100% recruiting shipping fill and a 50% delayed entry program posture, according to the plan. 

But the service has had several tough years — in 2023, the Navy missed its recruiting target by thousands of sailors. While there are signs of improvement on the recruitment front this year, senior leaders were initially preparing themselves for a grim outcome — they projected the service would be thousands of sailors short in the fall.

“Having those stretch goals, having those  objectives that we really need to reach for — that’s going to drive more effective performance and our ability to measure ourselves along the way, to make sure that we’re either on plan, off plan, ahead of plan and what we need  to do to make sure we’re going to meet those targets,” said Franchetti.

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