Departmental Overview

A warship can be thought of as a self-contained floating city whose inhabitants all work at diverse tasks to keep the city running and developing. Like in any city across Canada, the citizens require certain basic needs fulfilled in order to flourish. These needs include shelter, food, protection, communications and public works services, just to name a few. To accomplish all this, expertise in all of these various disciplines must be maintained. However, with only 240 people in the community everybody must be able to perform more that just their basic function, otherwise the community could not survive, regardless of whether the ship is at sea or alongside in port. Organization is the key to ensure the city thrives.

As with any ship in the Canadian Navy, Fredericton is divided into two basic organizations - the fighting and functional organizations. The fighting organization is designed to conduct operations at sea, including combating any threat as well as damage control should an attack against the ship occur. In contrast, the functional organization is designed to deal with administrative and maintenance issues common to any unit in the Canadian Forces. Within the functional organization the ship is divided into departments such as Combat, Combat Systems Engineering, Marine Systems Engineering, Supply, Air and Executive. These departments are then divided into several smaller sub-sections by occupation to ensure the necessary expertise is on board for all situations.

The ship's hull provides shelter from what many describe as the cruel sea; the supply department provides meals and provisions; the combat department controls the weapons systems that provide protection, as well as the communications systems that allow us to talk to the outside world; the deck department ensures that the ship itself is well maintained, as well as providing the means for replinishment; the marine systems engineering department provides propulsion and the hotel and public works services required to keep the ship running effectively; the combat systems engineering department maintains the weapons and communications systems; the air department runs the airport; and the executive department looks after medical, police and administrative services.

In the following pages you will learn more about how the departments work, and how they are further organized to ensure that Fredericton is able function as an effective warship.