History

Headquartered in Newport, Rhode Island, with a staff of over 400 professional instructors and educators worldwide, Center for Service Support (CSS) provides Sailors in the Naval Administration, Command Support Program Management, Logistics, Maintenance Coordination, Media, and Security Management communities the necessary professional skills, knowledge, and education to support the fleet’s warfighting mission. CSS also develops and delivers General Skills Training (GST) that builds personal and professional growth and development.

CSS was established in February 2003 as part of the Naval Education and Training Command’s (NETC) “Revolution in Training” initiative to streamline the business of delivering required training. One of NETC’s first steps was to establish learning centers focused on specific areas of naval training. Each learning center was organized around its functional area and schools were aligned to the appropriate center. The learning centers became the connector between fleet training requirements, planning for and resourcing training, and the conduct of training in the school houses.

NETC assigned CSS responsibility for training in the logistics, administrative, and media functional areas with oversight of 14 learning sites including the Navy Supply Corps School (NSCS), Naval Technical Training Center Meridian, Mississippi, and the Culinary Specialist (CS) School. CSS was originally headquartered in Athens, Georgia, with a diverse geographical span covering the continental United States and Hawaii to match its functional diversity of training for 16 enlisted ratings and 12 officer designators. CSS planned and executed five Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) events including the relocation of CSS headquarters and NSCS to their current locations in Newport, Rhode Island, and CS School from Great Lakes, Illinois, to Fort Lee, Virginia. Further mission realignments, base closures, and rating mergers resulted in a CSS footprint of only seven highly diverse learning sites.

In July 2018, NETC realigned the GST mission and 11 GST learning sites to CSS to develop and deliver education and training opportunities that build personal, professional, and instructor competencies to achieve fleet readiness. This included overseeing the curriculum and program management for LifeSkills which is delivered at “A” school locations to all Sailors between graduation from Recruit Training Command and the start of their technical training pipeline. Additionally, the Navy General Military Training (GMT) was realigned to CSS to develop content and host all approved GMT lessons on MyNavy Portal and Navy eLearning websites. In October 2018, the Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy realigned the Security Education, Training and Awareness (SETA) Naval Security Manager Course (NSMC) and two additional SETA learning sites to CSS to develop military officers and civilians to serve as managers for command security programs. In March 2019, the GST and advanced Administration and Logistics training missions consolidated into a single command subordinate to CSS - the Navy Service Support Advanced Training Command (NSSATC).

CSS is part of the Navy Total Force Enterprise and reports directly to NETC but maintains stakeholder relationships across all the Navy Enterprises. Maintaining a continuous connection across many stakeholder paths is a challenging but critical piece of the CSS mission. As changes in organization, policy or system implementations occur that affect work accomplished in the fleet, the changes must be clearly understood across all perspectives from the change originator through the training instructor. This constant communication ensures CSS can properly define and resource any required changes to training.