[genkimind]

I spent 5+ years on a ship in 7th fleet and am all too familiar with what was described above.

I would attribute it to a few things. Mostly the over-extension of resources and people. The operational tempo in 7th fleet is absolutely ridiculous, so everything that isn't "mission accomplishment" gets pushed to the wayside. Training, making sure equipment is properly fixed.. our days were so jam packed full of bullshit that this important stuff suffered.

I considered myself lucky if I got 5 hours of unbroken sleep a night while at sea, and most of the people I worked with were the same way. Walking around functionally drunk doesn't lend itself to good problem solving skills. Do you know after these incidences there was massive effort to train people about the importance of sleep? Guess what, this mandatory training forced people to interrupt their sleep to attend.

All in all 7th fleet suffers badly from undermanning based on the operational requirements. Ask anybody. AMA I guess.

[CydeWeys]

Were you doing such essential tasks the other 19 hours of the day that it made sense to only get 5 hours of sleep, or was much of that 19 hours wasted on bullshit?

Personally, I'd say that if there's so much work to do that between work and eating everyone is up for 19 hours, then you're undercrewed.

[genkimind]

Excellent question. I'd love to go into detail to paint a clearer picture but I don't think it would be prudent. So let's work with this thought experiment which is definitely not out of the ordinary: We're in a condition where half of the watch team has to be standing watch at a time. As a result, we have a rotation of 5 hours on, 5 hours off, 7 hours on, 7 hours off. In addition to standing watch, training has to be conducted, the ship has to be swept, maintenance of equipment needs to get done. As a result during your 5 hours off you try to get this all taken care of so you can sleep during you 7 hours off.

But wait! According to the 3M Navy planned maintenance system you have a spot-check with the Captain in the middle of your 7 hours off. Too bad. But wait! The XO has recently been displeased with the cleanliness level of the ship, so as a result during sweepers all people not on watch have to be sweeping the passageway. Too bad. But wait! The berthing has been dirty lately so when your people are supposed to be sleeping they are being woken up by the cleaning. Too bad. But wait! Half the team is on watch, and conducting flight operations requires us to realign a vital system on the ship. Too bad, looks like the people who are supposed to be sleeping are going to be woken up. But wait! We have to have a division-wide meeting and training for reason X, Y, and Z. Ideally you would schedule this at watch turnover but if it's something involved we can have our watchstanders being distracted so just do it in your offtime.

You get the idea.

[nadinno78]

Been there. Knew my time with the Navy would be coming to an end after three straight nights of 2 hrs sleep. Followed by a maintenance evolution. Finally got a chance to get some decent sleep, but was racked out again because I had left a small discarded tube in the work area. I think back and wonder how the Navy was able to function at all with all of the chaos going on during a normal work day. So much of the chaos was self inflicted.

[scott00]

How common are scenarios where there are multiple ships within visual distance? From reading the account of the collision, it seems like everybody relied primarily on one radar to make navigation decisions, and that radar was either broken, or its operators didn't know how to use it. It's hard for me to understand how they didn't realize they weren't getting useful data from that radar and switch their primary navigation driver to the other radars, lookouts, the commercial position broadcasting system, or the infrared camera, all of which seemingly worked. Unless of course actually navigating around other ships is pretty uncommon.

[genkimind]

Navigating with other ships in close proximity is pretty common -- mostly when transiting into port, out of port, and through shipping lanes.

It is pretty silly that they didn't seem to realize that the radar wasn't tuned correctly. I wasn't a surface watchstander so I can't comment on the radar aspect in more detail. Normally inputs are taken from a variety of sensors, not just one busted radar.

[scott00]

So is it like a every day kind of thing or like a few hours every week or two weeks?

[pdonis]

It depends on what the ship is doing. When a ship has to transit a high traffic area it generally takes at least several hours, and possibly many hours. This will happen every time the ship goes into port or comes out of port (the USS Fitzgerald was coming out of port), and it will happen whenever the ship has to transit a high traffic area to get wherever it's going (the USS McCain was transiting the Straits of Malacca, one of the most crowded shipping lanes in the world, when it had its collision). Those things are probably happening more often nowadays than they did during the Cold War, because more of the jobs Navy ships are being asked to do are close to shore instead of out in the middle of the ocean.

[genkimind]

It depends on the ship, but given the underway scheduling for DDG's in Japan, generically and loosely:

Repeat every 3-8 weeks randomly with gaps of 6 months every 2-3 years:

    2 hours of leaving port

    1-3 weeks later: 2 hours of entering port

[pdonis]

> How common are scenarios where there are multiple ships within visual distance?

In a main shipping channel near a busy port? Very common.

> It's hard for me to understand how they didn't realize they weren't getting useful data from that radar and switch their primary navigation driver to the other radars, lookouts, the commercial position broadcasting system, or the infrared camera, all of which seemingly worked.

Or the old standby, the Mark One eyeball. As I commented elsewhere upthread, the thing that jumped out at me was not having a lookout on both bridge wings (port and starboard). Even with a ship that's shorthanded, that's the last place you should give up personnel, especially when navigating in a crowded shipping channel at night. They should have made up the shortfall from somewhere else.

[lainga]

Would you say this is primarily a resource problem? A culture problem with the 7th Fleet? A culture problem in the USN overall?

[crooked-v]

"Every enlisted man in the Navy only gets 4-5 hours of a sleep a night" seems to be a common anecdote service-wide, including from people I know personally who served.

[kryogen1c]

Also, "nights" are not a real thing, not in the biological sense. In the surface ship nuclear power plant world where there is no air conditioning, you can't stand watch for more than 5 hours, which means 4 5s and one 4 hour watch. Think you stand the same watch every day? Nope, not enough people. You normally stand 1 on 2 off (5 and dimes) or one on 3 off (5 and 15s). This puts your sleep window at different spots every night.

Subs are air conditioned, so they can stand either 6 and 6s or less commonly 6 and 12s. Their lives are generally worse in every way. Except they all like smelling each other farts and sharing beds, so it works out.

[mlb_hn]

DOD issue, if not USG. Army had (has?) the same issue as well, 2015 whitepaper on sweeping everything under the rug until it breaks (https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/pub1250.pdf)

[genkimind]

I think the high operational requirements expose a culture/procedural/values problem of the shipboard Navy overall, it's just particular visible in 7th fleet because of the unsustainability of the workload.

[vkou]

I obviously haven't done an A/B study, but I would figure that having periods of crunch time (long or short) with periods of sane time would both keep military units in practice for when they do need to be up for three days on four hours of sleep AND let them train/maintain/not crash their ships into other ships.

But I doubt that the culture described in TFA, and this thread evolved in any way but organically.

[Datenstrom]

Can confirm this is a problem in Naval aviation also.

[nadinno78]

Cultural Problem IMO. My boss likes to say that the military takes their young officers and train the common sense out of them. Personally I blame the service academies for what amounts to 4 years of legalized harassment. First three years are all about getting harassed. The last year is about dishing out the harassment. Then they get a degree to justify the whole thing.

[DoofusOfDeath]

IMHO the responsibility properly rests on the POTUS, who is commander-in-chief of the military, and on the Congressional armed-services committees.

It's their job to make sure the U.S. military is functioning well, and they're apparently not doing it.

[metta2uall]

I really don't understand why the operational tempo is so high given that it is peacetime?? Surely some "missions" can be sacrificed as the Navy was clearly not coping. It sounds to me like one possibility is that senior "leaders" wanted to keep increasing the tempo to make themselves look better on paper..?

[EliRivers]

If it's anything like UK Forces, it's not so much the leaders wanting to look better on paper as the powers that be simply always ratcheting the tempo up, and conversely training, maintenance, downtime, personnel numbers and budgets down.

Senior military officers self-select for being the kind of people who say they can do it. The system deselects people who say it can't be done.

Keep going and going until disaster hits to make everything reset; traditionally, a big war does this. At that point, people do start saying when things can't be done and it gets very hard to sweep failure under the rug when it involves being occupied by foreign powers and people's children never coming home.

[Diederich]

Could you hazard a guess as to what percentage of the 7th fleet's operational work would need to be curtailed to get it back into a more reasonable, sustainable position? Thanks.

[genkimind]

Operating as it does currently? I think we could probably sustain operations at 70% of what we do now.

I think it's tough but doable to sustain it at the 100% level, but that would require a whole overhaul of the way the Navy does business.