The worst material condition ship I ever served on was a Cruiser. Fun fact: was not commanded by an aviator at any point.
There’s something to be said for inherent knowledge in maintaining a ship, but the principles between maintaining a ship and an aircraft are actually not that different. 3M is also the worst maintenance system I have ever seen, and was not at all optimized when I interacted with it. Dudes were chipping paint off of things to inspect welds for corrosion that should never need anything other than a visual inspection at the O-level when they could have been fixing the damn deck machinery.
A lot of it comes down to CO’s that punt or put off maintenance to meet operational requirements, or pad their own fitreps with numbers from the operations side. A couple CO’s do that in a row and a ship is in a tough spot… not unlike the aviation side.
I agree that 3M sucks but I disagree on the supporting details.
It starts with the mentality in your post that we (royal we) are smarter than the engineers, and you don't actually have to do that annual clean and inspect once a year. Nothing bad will happen if you defer it.
So from there we get into the 'put off maintenance requirements.' Not because someone wants to pad a fitrep or doctor numbers, but because we think we're smarter than the engineers. The last thing you need is to have to pull off station because someone gronked a bolt on a hydraulic filter that was perfectly fine, and now you can't use a tactical system. This has a second-order effect of breeding a culture of 'the CO says we can't do maintenance' and many sailors stop giving a shit about the program. Something something broken windows effect.
And sometimes, it's just not operationally appropriate to do the maintenance.
But let's peel one step further - why does a mechanic want to do an annual clean and inspect on month 2 of deployment? It's because SKED 3.2 sucks at actually scheduling maintenance. The program is meant to be sailor-proof: you do maintenance, enter the check, and it auto-schedules the next event in the future. It even
locks the sailor from scheduling it outside of that window. It doesn't even have a calendar function like SKED 3.1 (or the reactor plant maintenance program that is still done with pen and paper). There's some buttonoloy to do a workaround and trick the program into allowing you to short-cycle PMS checks, but it is not well known and is akin to using MS Word to paint pictures. The program is designed for the crew to be passive bystanders in the scheduling process.
What right looks like is that the crew knows the ship is going to deploy and makes an intelligent decision on whether to short-cycle or defer maintenance on a case-by-case basis. When they enter a pre-deployment maintenance period, they use forecast features for what is due in the next 3-6 months and pull items left. But this rarely happens in practice because the tools we give people are not user-friendly to account for ship's operational cycles. The forecast feature exists, but the output is an eyesore of a spreadsheet of PMS checks. Oh, you mean you don't know what WLKJ-BAEWR S-2 is? Neither does your WCS.
Also don't get me started on the process to one-line PMS checks. There's absolutely nothing to audit against someone's deletions. Some WCS or Chief just 'knows' they don't have the equipment onboard and that's sufficient. If there's a piece of equipment in piss poor repair that looks like no one has touched it in years, there's a good chance it's because it's been erroneously deleted in someone's SKED deck.
But then we go even one step further... why is so much planning around the ship's operational cycle necessary? Why do we need a 24 year old WCS to comb through hundreds of PMS cards and determine what should or should not be moved? Why aren't there just sufficient, routine pierside upkeeps to get this stuff done? It's because we (royal we) signed out the optimized fleet response plan back in 2013, and since then have been running ships into the ground with inadequate pierside intermediate and depot repair periods. Things like SPRUCE avails - where you are supposed to spend 2-3 weeks doing painting and preservation - went away. If we were to follow the philosophy that we schedule PMS during pierside avails, a WCS of a larger work center will be scheduling dozens of PMS checks into what amounts to 12-15 weeks of pierside upkeeps throughout the FRTP (the last week before an underway is typically 'off-limits' for anything that isn't daily, monthly, or quarterly). For those workcenters, the idea that you're going to short-cycle your entire PMS deck to deconflict it with deployment would exceed the man-hours the division has, even if they worked 24-7 because the Navy manning system does not account for compressing 52 weeks of maintenance into 12 (if you're curious, each person in a maintenance center should have about 20-24 hours combined of scheduled preventative and corrective maintenance to perform per week... and I'd imagine a mechanic on a CG would scoff at that as much as an A-ganger on a 688).
I actually submitted a white paper on the topic many moons ago because the sub force was all like 'wtf, why aren't boats doing K-MRCs.' Well, part of it is you put the fear of god into COs that thou shalt not have lost Ao from doing infrequent (semi-annual or less) maintenance on deployment. But part of it is that there are deep, underlying structural issues to how maintenance is scheduled throughout a boat's FRTP and the tools we give sailors to manage the program. Sprinkle some 'shore duty, bruh' on top from the guys at PMT. Fast forward to today, and 7th fleet is constantly being briefed on optempo waivers due to material issues from subsequent deployers. I can only imagine the problem is worse for larger and more complex ships. Glad to see it was time well-spent. (/s)
Our ships are, for the most part, doing the best they can do under the current policy and resources allocated to them.
