Interesting article, the ship designed and built to be operated by a civilian crew training the coasties while underway:
Because the Coast Guard acquired and commissioned Storis so quickly, there was no traditional six-month training pipeline. Instead, the cutter deployed with two crews: about 45 Coast Guard members, mostly E-5s and above—and 22 ECO civilian mariners who knew the ship inside and out.
The civilians impressed their military counterparts with their professionalism, deep knowledge, and endurance, standing 12-hour watches compared with the Coast Guard’s four.
Lt.j.g Sofia Scott, who’d served on the CGC Polar Star since graduating from the Academy in 2023, was usually paired with a third mate. “We’d stand watch together and they would basically teach me everything,” she said. “I couldn’t believe all the information they had to know about engineering to hold that qualification.”
Early on, Chief Petty Officer Mike Underwood remembers how Coast Guard members reacted too quickly to an alarm on the ship and caused a blackout.
“It’s so ingrained in us that if you hear an alarm you need to do something to fix it right away,” said Underwood, a machinery technician with five years on the CGC Healy, a medium icebreaker. “One of the training challenges was to change that thinking, to learn to wait 40 seconds for the ship to correct itself. We had a pump fail on a generator that was overheating, and we never actually lost power because it just switched another generator online.”
I was wondering how the Coast guard crew would become proficient and how the transition would play out. Having spent some time aboard her years ago I agree with some of the statements made in the article.
That said, it was disappointing Petty Officer Libbing had to be concerned, as a female, about the ECO civilian crew because they weren’t “Coast Guard vetted”. It struck me as a preconceived opinion of mariners who work on commercial ships.
Based on the articles coming out about us the last 5 years I can’t say I blame her. Midshipman X and Y didn’t exactly do any favors for the industry in that regard.
Sure, but does that magically make the other ones disappear? If all you know about any industry or group of people is articles that’s what you’ll base your initial opinions on. She’s in the USCG, so she can form her own opinions from her own experiences.
Also just to point out, US merchant mariners are literally Coast Guard vetted by definition. I don’t think that goes to “preconceived opinions” so much as general national ignorance of our industry.
Early on, Chief Petty Officer Mike Underwood remembers how Coast Guard members reacted too quickly to an alarm on the ship and caused a blackout.
“It’s so ingrained in us that if you hear an alarm you need to do something to fix it right away,”
On that subject, it’s an interesting topic around how commercial vessels, especially in O&G, build in redundancy in automatic systems, but military vessels seem to rely on redundancy in manual systems and manpower. To me that maybe made sense before advances in automation, but in today’s world it is surprising that the military still designs around large crews doing specialized tasks.
Wouldn’t it be more militarily useful if in the heat of battle the crew didn’t have to worry about manually changing over equipment due to an alarm, it happened automatically? Still have a manual back up of course, but the reliance on human factors seems nuts.
My first ship out of school was on a Supply Class T-AOE, which the Navy ran as a USS ship with 544 crew, but we ran as USNS ship with 176 crew. I still cannot to this day fathom what all those navy sailors were doing on there.