Navy’s surface readiness groups expand waterfront influence

In 2016 and 2017, when Capt. Gilbert Clark was at the helm of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer The Sullivans in San Diego, he managed to complete maintenance ahead of schedule and under budget—a rarity in the U.S. Navy, where delays are commonplace. Drawing from his experience, Clark now oversees maintenance and basic-phase training for all surface ships based in San Diego, including the Surface Readiness Groups, implementing the best practices that led to his previous success.

The Navy in December stood up a network of Surface Readiness Groups, or SURFGRUs, to put proven leaders in a position to focus solely on getting ships through maintenance and basic training on time, before turning them over to operational squadrons.

Clark leads a SURFGRU Southwest staff of 90 in San Diego, initially overseeing 17 surface ships. That will eventually expand to about 200 personnel overseeing 36 ships in maintenance and basic training.

In Norfolk, Virginia, Capt. Bryan Carmichael — who led amphibious assault ship Bataan through a complicated on-time, on-budget overhaul when he served as commanding officer from 2019 to 2021 — leads the SURFGRU Mid Atlantic that has 10 ships today and will increase to a comparable size as its West Coast counterpart.

The Navy has or will have smaller SURFGRUs in: Everett, Washington; Mayport, Florida; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Yokosuka, Japan; Rota, Spain; and Manama, Bahrain.

The surface navy has worked for years to dig out of a ship maintenance backlog and get ships out of the yards on time.

“We can keep doing what we’re doing, and we keep telling ourselves we’re going to try harder, but it’s probably not going to work,” Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, the commander of Naval Surface Forces, told Defense News. “We’re going to need a new approach, and we’re going to need a different way of measuring it and holding ourselves accountable. This is that way.”

McLane said the Navy knows best practices for ship maintenance, but it’s impossible for a first-time ship captain to know and implement every lesson learned.

That’s where the SURFGRUs come in, he said, to serve as coaches and mentors.

He offered an example of a returning carrier strike group: the destroyer squadron commodore might have a number of ships going into maintenance on a staggered schedule, and everything could be perfectly planned from the start and all the material on hand when the first ship arrives at the repair yard. But, that first ship may on Day 1 have an assessment of its intakes and uptakes; if the yard realizes the ducts are corroded and they’ll have to replace them, for which the material is not on hand, that first ship may on Day 1 be looking at a 45-day delay.

When the second ship comes in, the exact same thing might happen again.

Technically, McLane said, the intakes and uptakes assessment cannot be done until the ship is in the yard and all the insulation can be peeled off. But an experienced leader knows there are ways to do spot checks beforehand to look for signs of corrosion. But if the ship captain, the destroyer squadron commodore and the project manager at Naval Sea Systems Command are all leading their first maintenance availability, they would likely make this common but costly mistake.

In his example, the destroyer squadron commodore might realize this by the third ship, after putting the first two ships behind schedule. But “I don’t want to spot them two ships all the time,” McLane said.

Now, the SURFGRU commodore and their senior staff will know these types of tricks, McLane said, and be in a position to mentor ship captains and squadron commodores about what to watch for and how to stay on schedule. Those officers, then, will succeed in their maintenance availability and also take those best practices on to future jobs.

A new approach

Clark and Carmichael told Defense News they’re still in standup mode, trying to bring on more staff and establish relationships across the waterfront.

Clark said today he’s looking for base hits, to use a baseball analogy: can his team find a part that a ship was struggling to get that was holding up its maintenance; can they find the right sailors to temporarily fill a manning gap that’s preventing a ship from getting underway for training.

Eventually, he said, the home run and the proof the SURFGRU idea is working will be fewer maintenance delay days, more ships completing maintenance on-time and on-budget, more ships on the waterfront being classified as mission capable, and ships receiving higher scores from the Board of Inspection and Survey.

To get the word out, Clark said he’s made some “winning hearts and minds” office calls across the waterfront, chiefly with commodores and strike group commanders. He also plans to meet with general managers of the nearby private ship repair yards who maintain surface ships.

Success in this endeavor “is driven by those relationships, but at the same time we’re looking to build those processes … that will just live past the personalities that are in the seat now, because we’re learning how to do things better, more effective,” Clark said.

Carmichael noted the work that’s going into another facet of the new job: the SURFGRUs will also serve as the area commander under the Navy’s new command and control structure for in-port fires and other emergencies. This change came about after the investigation into the 2020 Bonhomme Richard fire showed confusion about and discrepancies in the previous roles and responsibilities during a fire.

Carmichael and his staff have been working with Norfolk-area leaders from the base, the Navy region, the local repair yards, and even local, state and federal emergency response offices. After some drills and certification events, the SURFGRUs will formally take on this role in mid-April, McLane said.

A third role the SURFGRUs will play, in addition to the area commander and ushering ships in their homeport through maintenance and training, will be supporting deployed strike groups who may be having manning or maintenance challenges.

Rather than ask a carrier strike group commander who’s operating in the Middle East to divert attention to a nagging maintenance challenge on their cruiser, the network of surface readiness groups will eventually be able to take over and help troubleshoot or otherwise support these deployed surface ships.

West Coast ships would be supported by the San Diego or Everett groups while in local waters, then by Pearl Harbor during transit and Yokosuka once in the Western Pacific, McLane said. East Coast ships similarly would be aided by the Norfolk or Mayport groups, and then by the Rota or Bahrain groups once in theater.

This role — supporting ships during the advanced training, deployment and sustainment phases of the force-generation cycle — is a key difference between the surface readiness groups of today and the readiness squadrons of the Cold War that were stood down in the 1990s.

“A lot of people say, ‘well this is just the readiness squadrons coming back’ — well, yes, but it’s more,” Clark said. “It’s the entire [force-generation cycle]. It’s global. There’s always going to be a SURFGRU commander ready to jump on man, train, equip issues for a ship, no matter where they are in the world.”