It is his job to ensure that surface ships across the fleet are in fighting form. He directs the Navy's “surface enterprise,” comprising the modernization requirements, training initiatives and operational concepts necessary to keep the surface fleet fine-tuned for the global war on terror, littoral operations and the capabilities requisite to counter any “blue-water navies that may develop in the future.”

Etnyre's post was created in 2000 in a major realignment of the service's air, surface and submarine “type commanders” to bring more coherence to the Navy's fleet, staffs, systems and processes, thereby improving combat readiness. To achieve that end, he is bolstering unit-level training, giving commanders more tools to measure readiness criteria and looking for ways to bring together the myriad organizations that spend Navy money on surface forces.

A naval officer for 34 years, Etnyre has been commander of the cruiser USS Arkansas and the destroyer USS Lynde McCormick, and commander, Naval Surface Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Today, he wears a second hat as commander of surface forces in the Pacific Fleet.

Currently, a primary focus is integrating the LCS into the fleet. Undaunted by the ship's numerous critics, Etnyre told Seapower Editor in Chief Richard C. Barnard that “what makes people uncomfortable” with the LCS “is that we did not follow the old paradigm.” Demand for the ship by Navy fleet commanders is “huge,” he said.

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What is at the top of your “to do” list?

ETNYRE : No. 1 is the introduction of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) into the fleet. In the development of the LCS, we have gone from concept to a complete introduction in about six years. That is pretty fast. We've never done a program like that before. The Aegis program was very successful, but it took about 15 years to get through [development and production] and get one ship into the water.

So we are doing what we call spiral development: we're introducing the ship knowing that development will continue.

The Navy is criticized from time to time because it supposedly does not have an idea of why it needs LCS and what it wants LCS to do. Do you agree?

ETNYRE : No. What makes people uncomfortable with the LCS acquisition program is that we did not follow the old paradigm. It came along very quickly. We had a concept of what we wanted the LCS to do. Our Navy, in the last decade, has transitioned from a blue-water force to meet the Soviet threat at sea to a force with littoral capabilities that is still able to counter blue-water navies that may develop in the future.

Littoral warfighting comes with a different set of operating parameters. Most of the accessible populations of the world live within 15 to 100 miles of the coast. There is shallow water, there is a submarine threat, a mine threat, a surface threat. And they're not all present at the same time. There will be conflicts that may initially start out with some mining. You need to clear mines and transition into a capability to handle antisubmarine warfare. So we needed to be able to reconfigure the combat systems on the LCS.

Also, we did not want to wait 15, 20 or 30 years [for a ship], and we didn't want the ship to be a complicated, multimission type of Aegis cruiser. If we don't have a concept for LCS, then we're doing a pretty good job of selling it, because I've already got a huge demand for that ship. Fleet commanders and combatant commanders are saying they want it as soon as they can get it in their area of responsibility.

You have other priorities?

ETNYRE: I need to take an enterprise look at the surface Navy. There are lots of people and lots of organizations that spend resources on behalf of the surface Navy. Sometimes I have no voice and don't even know that resource decisions have been made. Sometimes I get asked, and other times I am fully engaged. It's not consistent. What elements in the Naval Sea Systems Command are spending resources on behalf of the surface Navy? What about the new Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education organization? What elements at the fleet level are spending resources on my behalf?

What one organization may be doing is great. What another one may be doing is great. Working together, they might be more effective. So that's what I'm trying to do: Go across those organizations that spend money and other resources on behalf of the surface enterprise. I want the leaders of those organizations to be a part of my board of directors, for lack of a better [term], and look at how we get the most efficient expenditure of our resources to produce that effective warship.

By 2007, the Navy will have 345,300 active-duty people, a cut of 36,900 from the 2003 baseline. What is the effect of that reduction, in your opinion?

ETNYRE: The personnel reductions are based upon the number of people we need to man the ships, in my case the surface force ships. We've gone a long way toward getting the ships optimally manned. In our manning experiments, our DDGs are now down to 275 from 325.

I think there is still room there to take advantage of how we use technology. In an experiment aboard [the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer] USS Milius, we went all the way down to 237, and the members of the crew felt good about it. They still feel good about it today. People who've been aboard Milius tell me how excited the crew still is about what they're doing and how they're operating. They're out in front, leading the charge.

Over the past decade, we have introduced new technology that should have enabled us to reduce manpower, but we didn't immediately take advantage of it. The earlier ships I served on didn't have a lot of the automatic firefighting systems that we have today. We had to man up repair parties -- sailors with fire hoses -- to go down and try to put out major fuel fires. Today, we have systems that can be initiated automatically and put the fire out almost instantly. But we never changed how we manned and organized our repair parties as a result of those changes.

Now we are taking advantage of new technologies and new ways of operating. We're trying to recapitalize, but 60 percent of every dollar goes to people.

Does Sea Swap bring added value to the Navy?

ETNYRE: Oh, sure. Sea Swap's a concept that's been out there for many, many years. Leaving a ship on-station in a place where it's needed and swapping out the crews enables you to increase the availability of the ship. We experimented [in the Pacific] with the [Spruance-class destroyer USS] Fletcher, and we're now running another experiment with the [destroyer] USS Gonzalez out in the Fifth Fleet.

This time, we set up a very rigorous data collection process in the areas of material conditions, quality of life issues and costs, so that at the end of this experiment we will have a complete set of data that tells us all we need to know about the Sea Swap experiment. I believe that data is going to show us that Sea Swap is the thing to do. You can do more missions with the same number of ships.

We will probably be multicrewing the LCS. Leave it out there on-station and get more utility and operational availability out of it.

How is the readiness of the fleet?

ETNYRE: It couldn't be better. I've been doing readiness for about 34 years, and I have been on the waterfront and nuclear trained. All of my command jobs were associated with training and maintenance, and I don't think I've seen the force in as good a shape as it is today. It is really doing quite well.

That has not always been true. Why the change?

ETNYRE: One reason is we've modernized our ships. There are different kinds of systems to maintain. We used to have very maintenance-intensive steam propulsion plants, for example. Now we have gas turbine plants. I think we've gotten smarter in understanding the elements of a good maintenance process.

We've been on that journey for about two and a half years. We looked at how we were planning [ship] availabilities and realized that we were not doing it very well. We were doing planning at the last minute, creating a lot of churn. We were paying high premiums to get things done at the last minute. So we've put some discipline into our maintenance process, and we're doing it more efficiently. That means I get the same amount of wrench-turning, if you will, for less dollars. I can take those dollars and attack other problems in maintenance, such as making machinery alterations that improve reliability.

What are your concerns about readiness?

ETNYRE: There is nothing that's really broken. There are things that we're not doing very well. One of those is main propulsion diesel maintenance. Industry and the Navy's Military Sealift Command are spending a lot less than I am for better operational availability. I've got to ask myself why. And I'm sure that if you come back and ask me a year from now, I'll tell you that the reliability of the main propulsion diesels has significantly improved and I'm spending less money on them.

What's in your future file? What are you working on today that the Navy will need 20 years from now?

ETNYRE: The LCS is going to bring a revolution in how we operate ships, man ships and train people. The core crew of the LCS will be 45 to 50 people. That's a very small crew. That crew is going to be tasked in different ways; they'll be trained to do more than one thing. In fact, we call them hybrid sailors.

On the LCS, there is a billet called the Total Ship Computing Environment Billet No. 11. The skills that sailor needs will include some of the skills of our present-day fire controllers, information systems technicians and electronics technicians. None of our sailors today has all of the skills needed to do that job. So we looked at the resumés of specific sailors and selected the individual with the best resumé for this billet. We are giving him the training needed for the specific skill set for this total ship computing environment manager.

That is a different way of sourcing a ship than we've ever done in that past.

There are other challenges. These 45 crew members are going to go out on operations, stop at a foreign port and sample some of the local cuisine. And perhaps half a dozen will come down with food poisoning for five days. The ship may not be able to carry out its mission. In the past, the destroyers would just sort of blink and get underway. The jobs of those six crew members would have been filled by some of the other 275 people on that ship.

But today, each of those six individuals who are sick are critical to the operation of the ship. I have to have people that can come onboard in a reasonable amount of time ready to take the watch. You can't give them two weeks or two months or whatever to train up.

The DDX [future destroyer] will be a 14,000-ton ship with a crew of 150 people. So you've got the same issues. So I'm dealing with the future today, as we introduce LCS into the fleet.

How are you going to handle the maintenance ?

ETNYRE : A lot of it is going to be done by shore support, or by distance support. I like to think of the guy on ship with the video camera on top of his helmet and he's hooked up the oscilloscope. He's got a subject matter expert back in San Diego or Norfolk looking at the O-scope trace. And they collaborate and figure out you need to replace a capacitor. So there is going to be a different way of doing trouble shooting, as well.