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manpower, the term refers to the human requirements that are determined to be necessary for operating the vessel and its embarked systems. Manpower determi- nation calculates the workload that must be performed by personnel in the ship, to include operational requirements, facili- ties maintenance, preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and internal sup- port that must be provided to operate the unit. Requirements determination con- sists of adding up all the hours needed to perform these functions and dividing by the number of hours that a person can be reasonably expected to work in a given time frame, without inducing a level of fatigue that would be detrimental to the ship and its mission. e result is the minimum number of qualied persons needed to crew the ship. Operational requirements represent the workload associated with watchstanding under multiple conditions, while the main- tenance concept for any ship must take into consideration how much will be done by the ships own crew, whether at sea or in port, and how much will be performed by sup- port personnel and facilities ashore. ese determinations, in turn, have an impact on how the crew must be trained to per- form their functions. If all maintenance is to be performed ashore, the crew need only be trained in operational functions. If long-range operations require the perfor- mance of both routine and casualty-induced maintenance, a dierent set of skills, with associated training, will be required. In any case, a distinction that sets the small combatant apart from its larger counterpart is the need for multiple qual- ications on the part of any given crew member. A large combatant may have individuals who are highly trained in the operation of a single system because the ship can accommodate sufficient personnel to enable such specialization. e small combatant, on the other hand, may be required to perform many of the same functions as a larger vessel, with equipment that provides similar capa- bilities, with the difference being that the small combatant must have crew members who can operate and maintain multiple systems. The operational concept for the com- batant will be a prime determinant in the level of operational manpower required for the ship. In a small combatant, one of the rst things that must be decided is whether the ship is intended to be a small, but long ranged, ocean-going vessel. In this case, the operational manpower assigned to the ship will be considerably greater than that required if the vessel is intended for short- range coastal operations of brief duration. A prime dierence is the planning required to ensure that crew fatigue does not become an operational detriment, with loss of eec- tiveness, during the duration of the ships planned mission. Short mission window Depending upon national priorities, in some navies, small combatants take on combat missions that require only limited periods at sea, with sorties as brief as 24 hours or less. Ships operating under those conditions would not have any need for sig- nicant onboard maintenance and support capabilities, and it is conceivable that they would require operational manning that consists of only one watchstander for each designated watch station (continuous bat- tle manning). e fact that a single watch station may control multiple functions in a USS Freedom , a littoral combat ship, was delivered to the United States Navy in 2008. In some navies, small combatants take on combat missions that require only limited periods at sea, with sorties as brief as 24 hours or less. April 2011 www.sname.org/sname/mt