How much time are sailors away from home? Navy records leave gaps

U.S. Navy leadership warned last month that sailors should expect deployments of 10 to 11 months for the next couple of years, rather than the traditional six to seven months. Yet a ship’s deployment is only one measure of the time sailors spend away from home. The Navy has a system for tracking individual sailors’ personnel tempo, or PERSTEMPO. Rather than recording every instance in which a sailor is away from home, the system tracks qualifying deployment and non-deployment events under categories established by Navy policy. Deployment events include operations, exercises, unit training and mission support or temporary duty. Non-deployment events include certain training, home-station duties and other specified activities. Although both categories are recorded, non-deployment events do not count toward the Navy’s high-deployment thresholds. Although a ship’s deployment schedule provides a timeline for the vessel, it does not necessarily describe every qualifying PERSTEMPO event an individual sailor experiences. The Navy’s own guidance acknowledges a potential source of data inaccuracy. MyNavyHR says PERSTEMPO data accuracy can be improved by closing expired events and warns that numerous events are opened and never closed. The guidance says commands can identify expired events through reports available in BUPERS Online, and the instruction also assigns the Navy Personnel Command PERSTEMPO Program Management Office responsibility for monitoring field operations, compliance and data accuracy. Military Times asked the Navy how that office monitors unresolved events, verifies the accuracy of individual records and tracks the number of sailors spending time away from home. The Navy’s response described measures to support ships, including real-time material-condition assessments, forward technical support, voyage repairs, advance materials and schedule coordination. The response did not address questions about PERSTEMPO oversight, record verification or unresolved events. The Navy also did not provide aggregate PERSTEMPO figures for fiscal years 2024 through 2026. The limits of the record The Navy’s recordkeeping responsibilities and its corresponding gaps are not new. In fact, a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found significant gaps in Defense Department data used to track service members’ time away from home. GAO found that Defense Department records were missing PERSTEMPO information for at least 145,000 personnel who had deployed between fiscal years 2014 and 2016. The Navy also identified about 13,000 personnel who spent more than 220 days away from home in fiscal 2016 but were not accounted for in the department-wide data. Defense Department officials could not explain why those personnel were missing. GAO recommended that the Defense Department improve its PERSTEMPO policies and data collection. The department concurred, and GAO subsequently marked both recommendations as implemented. Actions included updated Defense Department guidance and, in September 2023, the publication of procedures intended to improve PERSTEMPO data processing and address data-quality issues. A 2004 CNA study examined the relationship between PERSTEMPO and first-term reenlistment decisions using Navy personnel and ship-employment data from the 1990s. Researchers analyzed reenlistment decisions from fiscal years 1988 through 1999 and found that a 25% increase in nondeployed underway time was associated with a 0.6-percentage-point decrease in reenlistment. The study also found that quick turnarounds between deployments were associated with lower reenlistment, while deployments longer than eight months were not associated with lower reenlistment than typical six-month deployments. Recent deployments of the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS George H.W. Bush illustrate how operational schedules can change after sailors have left home. Without current aggregate PERSTEMPO data, however, it remains unclear how those extended deployments fit into the broader picture of sailors’ cumulative time away from home.