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Does Sustainment Engineering have a significant impact on Manpower and Personnel? (1 answer)

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Dec 11, 2012

A short answer, "Yes" is offered but with the following explanation/opinion:
Sustainment engineering can result in changes to the system which result in significant changes to the requirements for both the number (manpower) and type (personnel) of system operators, maintainers, or ancillary support personnel. An analysis of the impact of such changes to the system's Manpower, Personnel, and Training (MPT) requirements is often formally documented in a standardized report, such as a System Training Plan (STRAP), Navy Training System Plan (NTSP), etc.

In general, sustainment initiatives resulting in the modification or replacement of parts of the system can cause isolated or wide-ranging, minor or major, changes to Manpower and Personnel requirements.

Examples of such changes in the Naval Aviation community are numerous; one example being those improvements to the E-2 aircraft that resulted in the evolution of the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye from the predecessor E-2C Hawkeye. Changes to factors such as aircraft hardware/software configuration, number of assigned aircraft, etc., impacted operator and maintainer KSA requirements, workload, and the associated training systems' infrastructure.

Similarly, changes to a system’s sustainment plan which shifts between a maintenance concept based on use of DoD personnel and another with a PBL strategy which outsources the work to one or more commercial vendors will certainly have a significant impact on an affected activity's manpower and personnel requirements.

The list is endless - transitioning from paper to digital records keeping, metal aircraft skin to advanced composite material fuselage, manned flight to unmanned, etc. – many, if not most, modernization/sustainment initiatives will drive some change to operator/maintainer tasks and workload - which may ultimately drive changes to an operational or support unit/activity's manpower and personnel needs.

Navy MPT requirements for a system or fielded capability are documented in the NTSP which is based on rigorous logistics analysis. During sustainment, the entire sytem is reviewed at least once a year to determine if anything (e.g., mission, tasking, hardware, software, etc.) has changed that significantly impacts MPT requirements enough to warrant updating the NTSP. The long-established frequency of this review cycle is an indicator that manpower and personnel requirements are often impacted by the effects of sustainment engineering.

In a volatile environment where the service's capability requirements are continually changing while Total End Strength remains capped - Manpower and Personnel requirements must also continually change to enable not only current Readiness requirements, but also those anticipated as necessary for future Readiness.