Sunday, 13 Oct at 1700/5pm (Eastern U.S.) the podcast “Midrats” will air  Episode 197: Sea Swap & Small Unit Leadership

If you catch the live podcast, you can join in the online discussion, but if you miss it live you can still hear the archived version. It will last approximately an hour.

The topic is the Navy’s version of crew rotation. The guest speaker will be LT Hipple, a surface warfare officer and graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He is author of a July 2013 US Naval Institute Proceedings article, “Sea Swap – Its a Trap” and Director of the Center for Maritime Security’s  (CIMSEC) NEXTWAR blog and hosts the Sea Control podcast.

The Navy does have even stronger motivation for crew swaps than the Coast Guard since it is desirable to avoid the long transit from homeports in the US to distant operating areas.

We’ve discussed crew swaps here before:

• Multiple crewing for Fast Response Cutters

• Multi-crewing, Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

Basically I favor other forms of augmented crewing that will retain some sense of ownership, provide more days away from homeport for the ship, but retain the current approximate 185 days away for the individual crewmembers by a combination of leave, temporary assignment to support facilities ashore for crewmembers, and temporary relief for critical crew members by personnel with recent experience in the type, from a personnel pool, perhaps in the form of a squadron staff.