* submarines deploy for 3-6 months at a time, often-times rarely pulling into ports. Imagine being stuck with 130-150 of your closest friends for that period of time in close quarters. It gets weird.

* Law of Conservation of Happiness: Once you're submerged, happiness can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be taken from others. Easy for the CO/XO to be happy: they run drills & have cleaning days for the crew. But everyone learns other crew members' weaknesses and ruthlessly exploits them if necessary.

* Fatigue. I understand it's changed but when I was a submariner the boat operated on an 18-hour cycle: 3 sections of 6-hour watches. Humans aren't meant to operate on an 18-hour day, and so within a day or two of getting underway you just get into this permanent semi-fatigued state.

As for me, looking back on my time I enjoyed it and learned a lot. (Maybe more importantly, I learned a lot about myself.) That said, while I was on board it was a lot more difficult experience - it's a challenging life.

We were dropping the trash and one requirement is that an officer be present. I was told to go get an officer. I found the Chief Engineer sitting in his room reading his Bible. I asked if he could come and be the required officer. He said, "sure."

When people saw the Chief Engineer behind me they mocked, "Hey! Couldn't you have gotten someone more senior?"

I didn't know that "officer" in this role meant to go find an Ensign or Lieutenant JG, not the officer who's 3rd in command of the whole boat. Folks got a lot of laughs out of that one.

Overall, though, life on a submarine is infinitely better than a surface ship. I served on a fast attack sub and a frigate. The people on a submarine help make life better because most of the jobs on a submarine are advanced and require clearances that people can't get if they're on drug waivers or dropped out of school.

As the Soviet trawler swooped in to claim their floating prize, the Peterson crew was at the fantail laughing at what their reaction would be when they opened the bag up. Yes, they trolled the Soviet Navy.

[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/encyclopedias-almanacs...

[1] No classified material was in them - it was mostly to keep the surface of the ocean clear and prevent it from washing up on shore. These days only degradable garbage is thrown overboard. Trash is compressed and stored until the ship makes port.

100% agree that submarine life is better than a surface ship. I personally would have had a much harder time with the officer/enlisted relationship on a surface ship, in particular.

Maybe it's different now, but I spent a week riding an SSN as an NROTC midshipman, when I had orders to nuke school a few weeks later (I was commissioned right after first-class cruise and had already gone through The Interview with the KOG; long story). In nuke school I switched to surface, asked for and got sent to the Enterprise, and was pretty happy to be there at the center of the action with great port calls. Standing OOD underway on a carrier — the officer on watch who's in charge of the entire ship, and de facto of the task force — was the most rewarding thing I've ever done professionally, especially during evolutions such as night flight ops. And you deal with (and learn to lead) sailors of all educational levels and from all walks of life, not just the cream of the crop as on subs.

You make a compelling case - OOD on a carrier has got to be a hell of an interesting job! Personally I liked the smaller team on a sub, getting to do TS missions, etc. But I can definitely see where you're coming from. (And frankly, I still think submarine life is better than traditional non-nuke SWO life, still.)

I had a time when I'd flown out to fix our satellite terminal, it was literally the only thing holding up this patrol boat from deploying, and the CO (commanding officer) came and asked how I was doing and then went and got me a Coke from the galley himself! There was absolutely no annoyance and anger at me because our company's equipment was holding it up, just "what can we all do to get this working as quick as possible". Another time we had to replace a large part of a gimbal on a frigate, with myself and a tech from our company and a couple of low-ranked seamen, and the top WEEO (Weapons Electrical Engineering Officer) happily jumped in and helped us drag a big crate up the side of the ship.

Of course it's different being a contractor coming in than being one of the lower ranked enlisted people, but on all the ships I've been on it always seemed to be pretty good relationally. Of course, I'd usually be on just before deployment so a few weeks or months later things may not have been so rosy either!

This is an example of the weirdness you were referring to because this is something your crew came up with to cope. Every crew has it's own coping strategy and culture, which I learned when we combined Gold and Blue crew before heading into dry dock. The nukes on my Gold crew were almost universally nice and supportive of each other, save for laughing at the guy who had his girlfriend break up with him at 40 words per week.

edit: I was enlisted, not officer but nukes at least blurred a lot of those lines

This is literally my worst nightmare. Highschool bullying 2.0 except with no escape. I know for sure I'm not military material.

Submarines are pretty unique places in that every person is pretty critical in an emergency. So while it can be brutal at times, it's also pretty collegial.

You do end up getting a spidey-sense for when it's too much for people, though. That quickly gets escalated to the CO/XO and people get transferred off the boat. (That's rare, though.)

I will say that it's much easier to believe that the studies are somehow flawed and people don't get seriously impaired by 8000 ppm than it is to believe that we've gone nearly seventy years without noticing that the people who are supposed to launch nuclear strikes in the event of WW3 have been retarded all this time.

Here’s a good summary of some of the data from a hacker news comment a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863319

Standard would be something like dividing the crew into two shifts, and the day into two 12hr blocks. One shift would be on-duty and the other off-duty during each 12hr block. For normal peacetime operations. 12hrs per day of rest time should be sufficient to prevent fatigue on long deployments.

Elevated would divide the crew into three shifts, and the day into three 8hr blocks. 2/3rds of the crew would be on-duty during any 8hr block, and 1/3rd off duty. 16hrs on and 8hrs off for every crew member. For operating in hostile areas or similar.

And of course there would be the already-existing third operating tempo, General Quarters, where the whole crew is awake and at battle stations, for imminent combat.

Then design ships and subs around this concept, with sufficient automation for Standard to be viable with minimum possible crew, and extra redundant control systems to utilize the extra crew during Elevated and GQ (and to still function with battle damage and crew loss if necessary).

You know how nuclear war starts?

You get an ELF ping to come to comm depth to receive launch orders. Or you get a torpedo barreling towards you because the other side got their orders first and had an attack sub shadowing you.

Why? That seems incredibly stupid. It's unnecessary and counterproductive and the stakes are high. So why do it?

So X / 3 = watch duration

24 / 3 = 8 hours, which does seem long to be kept on hair trigger while performing physically and/or mentally taxing tasks.

I'd like to think the military did studies on performance with respect to watch duration. Or they could have just pulled them out of a hat.

Also, it seems like they might have indeed switched to 8-hour shifts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchkeeping#US_submarine_sy...

This article focuses on the fact that the US submarine experience special because everyone is expected to have a working knowledge of every system. That is different than the rest of the US military where people remain very specialized. But mandating generalist knowledge is actually a norm in other countries. The Brits/Canadians tell a joke about US soldiers: Whereas each member of a british or canadian gun crew is expected to understand and perform all the jobs associated with firing a gun, an American is likely to respond "I pull the rope." Such hyper-specialization just doesn't work in a submarine because people are not able to physically move around. The environment, the submarine, dictates the culture.

> But mandating generalist knowledge is actually a norm in other countries. The Brits/Canadians tell a joke about US soldiers: Whereas each member of a british or canadian gun crew is expected to understand and perform all the jobs associated with firing a gun, an American is likely to respond "I pull the rope."

For instance, the Marines encourage a lot of cross-training. First and foremost, it shoots operational cost to the bottom if you have, say, a Corporal that's formally trained in electronics, but also knows their way around MEPDIS gear, HVAC, guns, and troop movement. The reason you'll hear the most touted though: "What if someone dies; who can take their place?" It's like a right of passage in a way. Green Berets, Navy SWIC, and SEAL/S work in under similar lines of thought from what I know. This all aligns to their mission though: seizing forward positions.

The line company Army, however, focuses on specialization. The reasoning is pretty simple: their mandate is to occupy. imo, the way people organize around knowledge is based on the challenges they perceive in the mission ahead. I've yet to figure out how to replicate this in software.

Operational costs yes, but not training costs. Make that general knowledge a minimum standard and you have to train the people in all manner of things before they are useful. The marines, from my outside perspective, are still very specialized in terms of basic riflemen training but are open to cross-training once someone is at an operational unit. Each marine doesn't need a sniper qual from day one, but the corps will certainly help them get it later. The navy submariner is different because of the number of mandatory quals before you are considered usable on a boat.

1. Bootcamp. You're learning all the basics, from history to troop movement, and basic weapons qualification.

2. Infantry Training Battalion. A primer on top of bootcamp for navigation, shooting, troop movement, and weapons qualification. (These are required of every Marine in order to join "The Fleet")

3. Primary/Secondary school. This is your a-billet training (your primary job).

Where most of the other training occurs is once you're in the fleet, which occurs in your first unit after Step 3. There's a moderately high attrition baseline to get to the fleet, which signifies a minimally deployable Marine.

> …two phases…

> proceeds to list 1… 2… 3…

while substantially different in nature (defined by mission), both marines and army have the same principle: it’s your job to learn the job of your superior (because if they die, you need to be able to take over) - a principle that applies at every rank.

I think that applies quite well to SWE.

I think tech companies are pretty good about this though, since the whole meme around "bus factor" is well understood and broadly discussed.

The Marines, subs, and the other examples you give are smaller units, and simply may not have that size-based redundancy.

As a quasi-related aside, at a startup I worked on a DARPA contract where the Marines were the theoretical end customer (FANG / Adaptive Vehicle Make). There are few cooler people in the world to chew the fat with than Marine warrant officers. YATYAS!

I don't know that much about submarines, but culture of following orders and not showing any initiative is so hardly entrenched in Russian military that it might be the other way around: culture influencing boat design.

On different occasions after doing some casual war history reading, I ended up with the diffuse belief that the ability to delegate initiative to low ranking soldiers was one of the key attributes of the winning side ( for example during different israelo-arab wars ).

Then I stumbled upon a military evaluation of how the german army performed during WWII. It spent time stressing the point that german officers were constantly encouraged to show initiative and independant thinking, more so than other western european armies. Supposedly, it was a cultural trait dating back from the prussian army. It shattered my cliché view of the german army as first and foremost an organization built on discipline.

So here is my question: Is is possible there is a tendency/bias to simply view ourselves as more independant and any adversary we face as more "drone" like ? ( The same way ancient kingdoms would simply label their opponents as savages ? )

Example: A platoon sergeant may know that the platoon has been ordered to be at X location at Y time. They can do lots of interesting stuff to make that deadline. But they don't have eyes on the entire reason for being at that location because they weren't in the planning meetings at the HQ. The LT was. The LT may "show initiative" by deliberately being late/early to the location because he perhaps sees that the operation is progressing more slowly/quickly than anticipated. The sergeant's job it to know everything about his subordinates in order to get them to do what is needed. The officer's job is to understand everything about how his platoon fits into the larger picture and, occasionally, adapt orders to support that vision.

Basic takeaway is this - yes, everyone wants to run their army using (googlable keyword) Auftragstaktik. But that's very similar to saying that everyone in software business wants to run their software company like Netflix, Apple or Google at it's best - with responsible senior engineers that own their mistakes, show initiative, are skilled and don't let performance or power spats influence their ability to achieve goals.

But the reality is, that shaping such an organization (or company!) is exceedingly hard and requires massive culture shifts within people of the organization (which bring their own baggage from outside) and incentives. It's easy to say you want to be Apple, but hammering a 3rd tier company filled with backstabbing juniors into a highly performing machine is going to be an impossible task.

That's what many nations are facing when shaping their armies into better performing units - command-oriented hiearchies can be more effective when your people are poorly skilled and not culturally prepared to work together. Even US had some famous massive fails in WW2 where generals let many Americans die due to their dumb branch power struggles and egos.

(Disclaimer: I have not done any military service) The Swedish military had an educational course, now licensed to private companies, named UGL (Utveckling av Grupp och Ledare (Development of Group and Leader)). I took this course as part of a management position at a company and it focuses heavily on theoretical knowledge and practical exercises with regard to Susan Wheelan's work and research on group dynamics, i.e. what are the characteristics of different team 'levels' (1-4) and ways/prerequisites to get the team to the next level.

I've seen exercises and mentions to this model at other companies I've been at (it's quite popular and Wheelan is as I understand it an authority in this field), too, as well as various distilled forms from motivational speakers (e.g. 'being in the zone').

Very few teams rise to the highest level (before dissolution) and it takes tremendous work and good leadership, but from what I've learned it's hardly impossible. Of course, addressing the culture of backstabbing juniors is part of that process, so I guess you're right that it is impossible without change.

While on the subject, I wonder how many armed forces throughout the world have curriculums containing inter-personal relationship courses and group exercises pertaining to this. From what little exposure I've had to this subject (TV and movies, mostly US such) it seems to be something being taught naturally and 'the hard way', but maybe it's just something that doesn't come naturally to us Swedes so we need extra education in these sort of things.

Just wanted to share that the US military spends a whole lot of effort on trying to understand group and leadership dynamics. One of the things that led into Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel winning research was an attempt to predict future leadership capability among new recruits that utterly failed. Whatever leadership is, it's not easy to predict before it emerges by other traits.

There's a gap between how the US military is portrayed in movies, etc, vs its actual nature. It's the US's largest and most diverse employer, where the bulk of the staff are young people from a low income or otherwise marginalized background. They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.

Yeah now that I think of it in hindsight I'd imagine most armed forces have this in one way or another, after all functioning as a group and solving different tasks in unison is pretty basic/mandatory for a successful unit.

>They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.

They (armed forces around the world) must be doing something right. I don't know if it's the x years of coherent training and purpose or some forced epiphany, but anecdotally speaking I usually find people with military backgrounds -- even if only 10 months of conscription service -- to be generally more adept at overcoming hardships and have a generally more pragmatic stance toward life, as opposed to many young adults that haven't done any such training and live with a sense of loss, inability to cope with certain things (e.g. boredom) and are generally 'later' or missing out on personal development. Most people I've talked about their military service with have said it was both their worst and best time of their life simultaneously. Of course, YMMV and I'm not taking into account extremes on either side. Just makes me wonder if maybe we should have some kind of mandatory self-exploration journey after school that would benefit people.

Discipline is not orthogonal to creative thinking. Wartime activities are not like they read after the fact. As the saying goes, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy". This means that junior officers and NCO's and even soldiers are expected to assess their changing situations and needs in order to satisfy (or retire from) the mission.

What kind of discipline is needed to start following the platoon sergeant when the platoon commander is down? It's even more critical at this point.

Fielding troops in a fight where they have incomplete knowledge requires empowering them with the authority to act in order to fulfill their potential.

Then there are militaries militaries where officers are chosen by some system of prestige (like a watery tart lobbing scimitars). These require absolute adherence to structure so as not to undermine the authority of those with the divine right/political connections.

Now, while this is all idealized, there comes a rank, above which promotion tends to be political as well as about success. The German military certainly had their issues with this, where there was a very real fear that went beyond merely not getting promoted.

They eventually got buried in numbers (Russia) and buried in materiel (US). The US also eventually got around to allowing the same independent thinking, and the German independent thinking got eroded as Hitler meddled more and more in the war.

Also, While the soviets were overall outnumbering the germans , Operation Bagaration is another example of superb strategic and tactical out maneuvering. The domination was total and the entire army group center was anhilated, in such a way that the mere numerical superiority couldn't really account for.

And even when local numerical superiority favored the germans, the soviets were able to win.

Plus, the "hitler overruled his generals" is another very persistent exaggeration that mostly came from post war nazi generals memoirs. As you might expect, those memoirs were very self serving and were a convenient way to wash away responsibility and incompetence. In reality, most of the bad decisions were taken by the army command, and hitler only became more dominant after the German army had already suffered huge defeat. And even at that point, he wasn't exactly overruling the brightest plans. Most of those generals in the army command didn't even support the plans that ended up being massive victories for the nazis, like the invasion of france for example.

Worth mentioning as well that German forces were poorly laid out, prepared and concentrated in Normandy right from day one. The German high command and even Hitler leaned more towards Pas de Calais as the landing area and on the day of the invasion itself, many German commanders and some forces were in fact on leave, aside from the general understaffing of the Normandy defense areas.

Also, while the German generals wrote extremely self-serving memoirs after the war about how they were thwarted by Hitler's orders, the dictator did indeed increasingly override them in many catastrophic ways. There is a mountain of clear documentary evidence of this. His orders countermanding military logic were mostly written and well preserved later (unlike his much more secretive, almost entirely verbal instructions for the orchestration of Nazi genocides during the Holocaust).

Don't read too much into my answer. I'm not an expert, and I hadn't even thought about the question until my first reply on this thread. It's an off-the-cuff impression, not a well-thought-out position.

That said - the word on initiative and discipline is right. Prussian military tradition gave German officers very wide latitude to make their own decisions, until it interfered with the political state or their superiors commands.

That said, even great officers can't win against overwhelming odds and opponents with dramatic material superiority.

In Russia it's definitely not the case. Mindless, drone like military mentality is very well-known and entrenched in the culture.

This is possible, but the US tries to keep an accurate (or even slightly overinflated; see prewar predictions of Russia's combat effectiveness) idea of how skilled potential adversaries are.

As other comments have pointed out, Auftragstaktik (also known as mission tactics) is an ideal many armies try to reach for. It's possible that it's the ideal form of command and control, but that's not guaranteed. Mission tactics is sorta kinda not really Agile for the military (in the sense it was originally intended by the Agile Manifesto). This can work, or it can result in something like Google where promotions are tied to going off and making something new, not maintaining what you already have.

This sort of thinking is particularly dangerous in war though, because war is a continuation of politics by violent means, and therefore strategy and tactics _must_ be tied to the overall international politics of the state. Individual initiative can result in somebody finding a brilliant new strategy or coming up with a genius plan that would've never made it through an overbearing top-down command structure, or it can result in something like the Japanese military in the Second World War or the German military during both World Wars.

The Japanese military of the Second World War was essentially the head of a military dictatorship, with the added complication that the Army and Navy hated each other. Japanese grand strategy was largely driven by the actions of junior officers who'd go out and do something ridiculous, like when a Japanese lieutenant tried to destroy a rail line and blame the incident on the Chinese, giving his superiors a pretext to invade China, as in the case of the Mukden Incident. Japanese officers, empowered to make decisions for the nation by their own individual initiative, were ultimately responsible for the massive unnecessary loss of life by their continual refusal to even consider negotiations, even far after it was clear to everyone involved on both sides that the Japanese couldn't win.

The German military's descent into individual initiative madness began after Napoleon beat what was assumed to be the most powerful army in Europe at Jena-Auerstedt. Clausewitz, who formulated the "war is a continuation of politics by other means" line above, essentially saw the battle as proof that it was impossible to plan a battle from the top down due to the inherent friction and fog of war of military operations, which the German military refined into their concept of Auftragstaktik. After the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian Wars, the German Command Staff was convinced they'd found the key to key to winning battles by empowering their subordinates. Unfortunately, they also applied that principle upwards and worked to lessen civilian oversight of the military.

Of course, the tangled web of alliances, treaties, and mobilization timetables made the First World War somewhat inevitable, but what's striking is just how little effort went into preventing it at all: the German military was convinced that once the die was cast there was no point in trying to stop the war. The civilian government, convinced by the military that the best way to operate was to give the military an objective and then stay out of their way, let them. I want to be clear: there's many instances throughout history of the military gaining control over the government, but in Germany's case the military didn't gain control over the civilian government, nor did they want to. They simply wanted the civilian government to have as little power as possible over them. Later in the war the government was absorbed by the military, but it didn't start out that way.

This separation of concerns led to the "stab in the back" myth after the war, where the Germans believed that the army was unfairly tampered with by the government. The causes of the rise of Hitler and Nazism involve more than just Auftragstaktik writ large, but the concept of giving subordinates an objective and letting them go certainly didn't help. In particular, the Nazi state was marked by constant infighting by independent agencies: the military had numerous intelligence agencies with overlapping responsibilities who competed for information for example.

Now it may seem a bit of a leap to blame small-unit tactics for Fascism, but in the same way war is just politics extended into warfighting, doctrine is just culture extended into warfighting. The success of FAANG companies and startups is often attributed to the development of modern Agile-type software development practices, which shape the workflow, leadership style, and culture of successful companies, while toxic Agile practices are often blamed for the death of others. In the same way, the indoctrination of military leaders that the best way to lead is to empower subordinates, and the reinforcement of that principle throughout the leader's career all the way to the top, is responsible for, for example, the brilliant success of the first Gulf War, and the mediocre quagmire of the second Gulf War.

Returning to your original question, yes, the US and the West in general tends to view individual initiative as better than other systems, and we like to believe we're better at it that other militaries, due to the great success of mission tactics throughout history. But at the same time the West, in particular Germany who's had particularly bad experiences with mission tactics gone wrong, try to limit just how empowered the military can be, by ensuring the military stays under strict civilian control. As you might be able to guess from my general interest in military history, I'm a strong supported of a powerful military, but despite that I'm an even stronger supporter of a civilian controlled military.

And the German government should have wanted to keep the peace: for one, the Schlieffen plan was so aggressive because the German Command Staff knew they were weaker economically than the Allied Powers, so their hope was to defeat the Allies before they could bring the full force of their economy to bear. For another, even Field Marshal Schlieffen was increasingly less confident in its success as time went on. It wasn't really even an exact plan to be followed in the first place; it was essentially a thought experiment about what if Germany went to war, and as more intelligence about the modernity of France and Russia's militaries came in, Schlieffen kept revising it to be the best it could be, but viewed the entire strategic situation as unlikely to give Germany success.

But the German government wasn't interested in diplomacy anyway because of the military's political power. In the popular conception, it was the military that had won against Austria and France, and even though it was Bismarck's diplomacy that granted Germany great power status, it was always thought that was on the back of German military power, an impression Bismarck was happy to reinforce. German Emperor Wilhem II was brought up in a militaristic culture, and threw out Bismarck shortly after assuming the throne. It was all downhill from there, as he assumed military officers were the best at essentially any job, infusing the entire government culture with a deference to the military.

Essentially, by the 1910s the German civilian government didn't view diplomacy as useful once the possibility of war was high. They believed the military would probably win any fight they got in, lessening the impact of diplomatic failure. The military did nothing to change their minds about that either. They interpreted Clausewitz's "war is a continuation of politics by other means" to mean that war replaced politics in the event of conflict. They were strongly in favor of the idea that it didn't matter how the war started, what was important was how the war was won.

The German military's insistence of initiative on the part of subordinates led them to disregard of higher non-military concerns: if the captain's concern was with taking orders from his colonel and disseminating orders to his lieutenants, why worry about what the generals thought? They didn't have any idea what was going on on the ground, which is why they stressed individual initiative so much in the first place. If the generals' concern was to take orders from the General Staff and disseminate orders to the colonels, why worry about what the emperor thought? He had delegated the task of making war to the Staff, and they had given the generals orders and guidance to go about making war. If the chief of staff's concern was making war, why worry about what the other parts of the government cared? The emperor had given him a directive to plan for war, and his job was to break down those orders one level for his generals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Machinist's Mate AKA Mechanic: Often the burliest, but also on my boat the MMs had the highest percentage of WoW players. For reference, this was during BC and WotLK.

Engineering Laboratory Technician: A subset of the Mechanic, they're the ones who handle the water chemistry of the reactor, and monitor radiation levels. They're generally hated by mechanics since although they technically are capable of doing their job - and thus could/should be supporting their watches - they usually claim the need for independence. They're also generally liars.

Electrical Operator AKA Electrician: While in theory their job is to run and maintain the electric plant, in reality their job is anything that other people don't want to do/can't manage. They're masters at adaptation. I have personally assisted the Electrical Leading Petty Officer (as Reactor Leading Petty Officer) in troubleshooting and repairing the diesel generator control panel, various sonar equipment, heaters, etc. What also infuriates the electricians is that due to weird rules, while they're allowed to babysit the reactor while it's shutdown (called, appropriately, Shutdown Reactor Operator), they can't operate it at power. This, despite the Reactor Operators frequently being of lower intelligence and ability.

Electronics Technician AKA Reactor Operator / Propulsion Plant Operator: Basically God's gift to mankind, except for the dumb ones. Definitely the twitchiest of the bunch, and a solid amount of us are almost certainly on the spectrum. The job alternates between utter boredom (as it turns out, nuclear reactors are extremely stable at steady-state conditions), excitement (drills involving recovering the reactor following an emergency shutdown), and hatred (any maintenance activity involving the steam generators).

(Also: how do you pronounce "coners"? Does it have an etymology?)

Let's say they took a sample of the primary coolant, saw that pH was going to get very close to the lower limit, but also that they were going to be relieved of duty in 12 hours. Eh, just write it down a little higher and don't bother adding.

Now the next person takes their sample, and finds that pH is now out of spec. They probably suspect that the previous person lied, but they can't prove it, and anyway if they reported the numbers accurately, there would be a huge investigation, lots of audits, generally not good. So they'll just report that it's low and they need to do an addition, and then lambast the person when they see them next.

But its spelled differently. The correct spelling is `conr` for Can't Operate Nuclear Reactor.

And this was out of a division of ~5-6 people. So...

What I HAVE experienced is working under an engineering manager/CTO/CIO that WAS a submariner and experienced first hand how a submariner manages a clouod-scale engineering team...

+ & -

-=-=-=-=-

He was reall sound, technically, and a good person. But an overbearing asshole when he was convinced he was correct, even when he wasn't.

Which was OK, because he would admit when he was wrong, but when he was in the moment of being wrong, was an asshole.

The funny thing was, this was my manager at two different companies, spaced abut ~10 years apart between when we had worked together.

He is a great guy and a great manager - (he's an EVP at Cisco now (again)) -- but you can REALLY see the submariner attitude come across in tense stand-ups in the morning if we have an issue...

Imagine a submariner engineering manager yell at a (not me) - blue/green-dyed-mohawk, gay steampunk engineer who wears vibram five fingers and a top hat and vest and sits on an inflatable ball during standup in sanfrancisco's mission district about scaling AWS spot instances...

Yeah... that was a time.

I love submarines, but submariners are weird.

A few years ago I worked with another reactor operator and saw some similar personality traits. Exceedingly calm, independent and quirky with an engineering/problem solving-oriented mind.

I've always been fascinated by submarines and knowing both of those people only deepened the fascination.

That said, I would never make it on a submarine myself.

And nope, I would never make it on a sub either. Two years of ROTC pretty much ruled out any military service for me - let alone on a sub. But I’m grateful for those who are willing and choose to serve in those roles.

> "Rising between levels in the missile compartment, 24 large orange trunks fill the nuclear ballistic submarine like an apocalyptic orchard."

Probably (wiki) these are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II

Each probably (wiki) carries four of these independently targeted warheads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88

Now, if you want to basically wreck human civilization with one nuclear submarine, drop one of each warhead over each of the 100 largest nuclear reactor sites on the planet. Fukushima for example had six reactors and >1500 tons of fuel rods on hand at the time of that disaster.

This will cause a complete meltdown and aerosolization of much of the fuel, it'll go into the atmosphere and rain down for thousands of miles downwind from the site, creating no-go conditions for human beings (unless you want massive radiation poisoning and birth defects etc.) Multiply that by 100x around the planet and you can see what a mind-boggling disaster it would be.

Now, that's just one nuclear submarine; there are many in operation. Plus the land-based and bomber-based nukes. And this is all done because otherwise, every single international conflict since Hiroshima would likely have escalated into the kind of crazy WWII tank battles and aerial bombardments of cities that took millions of lives. Probably has prevented full-on land/air/sea battles between India and Pakistan, for example. And yet... all it takes is some accident, some breakdown, some misunderstanding and the nukes start flying.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Some people will argue that this is why there are no alien civilizations, they all torched themselves once they reached our level of technological development.

Cann the blast from a nuclear warhead realistically be positioned such that it would aerosolise significant amounts of nuclear fuel? And given the location of nuclear reactors, would it matter in a full nuclear war? Your comment sounds like a good fictional story, but does it actually make any sense?

So, a 500kt blast over a reactor site will destroy all the surrounding infrastructure, evaporate the water from the cooling ponds, and while perhaps the steel reactor containment shell itself might not be completely obliterated/vaporized at once (or it might), the whole zone is going to be unapproachable, and the kind of heroic efforts employed at Chernobyl (notably a graphite core reactor that burned, Fukushima having no flammable graphite) and Fukushima are not going to happen. So, total meltdown of reactor core, hydrogen explosion, venting to atmosphere, some fraction of the core liquifies the rest vaporizes. The spent fuel in the ponds, all the water flashes to steam, they burn / melt. Nobody comes rushing in to manage the situation, it's full-on runaway.

So Chernobyl IIRC lost about 1% of one of its reactor mass to the atmosphere, and that was one of four reactors at the site. This resulted in significant fallout across Europe and a 30-km radius long-term exclusion zone. Now let's say instead oh, at least 50% of each reactor mass + spent fuel goes into the atmosphere, the rest melts into the ground... I don't know how this would scale. A 300-km radius exclusion zone perhaps at minimum? To get accurate estimates you then have to do a bunch of modeling, atmospheric fluid dynamics, etc.

I can't imagine there aren't top-secret studies in some military branch or other on how this would all pan out, but they've never been publicly released to my knowledge.

This person makes a point of targeting American dry cask nuclear waste storage sites. It takes out the power plant they're next to and ruptures the casks, resulting in Prolonged Suck downwind of the site. He also targets dams in a cascading manner, so even if we did "win the war", certain major cities would have been underwater for a sustained period of time.

FWIW, when asked where he'd go to hide out he said he wouldn't, that the loss of food supplies, medicine, etc. would be catastrophic no matter where you ended up in CONUS. Re: food, even if the grain fields of the midwest were intact, you've got no transportation, no power to process the grain into food products, no antibiotics to take care of that scratch you got from the combine, no fuel for the combine, etc. Many would survive but it wouldn't be fun. He lives in San Francisco, FWIW.

> "...the staggering radiological consequences of destruction of a nuclear reactor by a nuclear weapon...put the radiologic damage potential of a fair-sized nuclear arsenal into the hands of any nation or terrorist group with a single, ten-kiloton bomb (170)"

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RMI_Brittle_Power...

1. vaporisation of the core* by a small highly targeted terrorist nuclear bomb (most relevant to reactors near large population centres).

2. vaporisation of the core* by a larger nuclear bomb.

A standard meltdown (a la Fukushima or 3 Mile Island) would likely not be a problem (relative to the explosion of the nuclear missile itself). Can a nuclear missile from a sub cause vaporisation of the core or stored spent rods? I am sure the military wonks have the answer, but it is a hard question to answer as a civilian. The book you referenced doesn’t answer that question (it hypothesises some worst case scenarios, and it does not investigate what could be realistic scenarios based on realistic limitations).

* or stored spent rods I presume.

At the same time, the long term danger of nuclear winter was supposedly overstated to scare the politicians into not using nukes.

Surely the one thing you don't want these people to do is to think for themselves about whether they should kill tens of millions of people! (the joke is that I'm completely serious and that's morbidly hilarious)

https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/parks/

600mg Motrin is nicknamed Ranger candy in the US Army because Rangers eat them like candy.

I was told by a submariner that there is only one bunk for every three crew members on board, so you learn to sleep anywhere. When he was unable to make his flight home and his parents drove to the airport he was stuck at about 90 minutes from home, they couldn't readily find him because he was curled up around his bag sleeping under some chairs.

Re: bunking - that's largely untrue. The majority of crew members on board do get their own bunk. But there aren't enough bunks for everyone, so people have to "hot rack" (aka, share). On my boat, this typically meant 3 people sharing 2 beds - if three people that share the same watchstation are hot-racking, at least one of them has to be on watch at any given time, so the other two have a bed if they need it.

Also, a decent number (maybe 10-ish) of the beds/racks tend to be in the torpedo room. Those guys just need to be comfortable sleeping next to big underwater bombs. :)

It's changed a bit, but the thing that made everyone fatigued is that your body is used to a 24-hour day, but your work day was an 18-hour day: 3 sections of 6 hour watches.

8 hour watches could be a bit long, and more problematic is that crew members would always be on the same watch: 0000-0800, 0800-1600, etc. That's potentially even more disruptive.

Does that really matter underwater? After a few days it is just as if you moved to a different time zone. It’s not like one watch would get more sunshine than the other.

For me though 6's were worse. You lose your sense of which direction 'up' is in time.

Thank you for the explanation!

And thank you for updating my apparently inaccurate or out of date knowledge.

It also scratches my itch for tv shows and movies where nukes are actually fired/detonated. If there is a comprehensive list somewhere, I’d love to see it.

[I'm basing this on a reading of Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_Safe_(1964_film)#Lawsuit ]

Watching him play Cold Waters is a delight.

I bet the culture is changing for the worse with the introduction of women to subs which shouldn't happen IMO. It just adds all sorts of tension. Don't tell me I'm sexist I've seen the culture before and after women allowed on certain surface ships. It's just not the same, adds a layer of rigidity and drama. Curious if anybody who worked on a mixed gender crew sub can comment here.

I dont understand this. Is there one and only one radio person, and that person sleeps, and works in the same "office".

Since messages might need to go out at any time, would it not require a shift change? A different nicely rested radio person?

I suppose in most cases when you can send messages is limited and thus scheduled ahead of time. (When the sub is close enough to the surface?) Yet the persons constant presence would indicate that a message might have to go out at any time.

I just feel bad for the person who has to be on guard 24/7.

Also is there then only one radio person per crew? Seems like a role that would require a backup. But then so does docs, and there is only one of that person?

They combined Radioman and IT into one role so you end up managing quite a lot of systems. I slept in the radio shack more often than I slept in my bed while at sea. My crew was 12 people IT/Radio for a 300 person ship. There are so many different responsibilities within this role, satellite communication systems especially, that usually 6/12 people would be glued to one area of the radio shack for hours and hours working or waiting on one system but the radio shack was at least half full at all times.

We had varying hourly schedules for coverage throughout my 4 years aboard including: 12 on, 12 off - 8 on, 8 off - 6 on, 6 off. In addition to your normal job you must also perform hardware maintenance on your own time and you have a tertiary job related to combat/warfare (mine was firefighter) so you end up doing constant drills/training on top of your actual work. Everyone on my ship lived on Monsters and Pre-workouts.

While on shore every 6 days you have what is called "Duty". Duty is a 24 hour work window where I did my job for 10 hours and then did one or two 4-hour roving shifts. Roving is essentially just surveying the ship with armor and an m-16. Me and a colleague hated these roving shifts so we would purposefully set systems to alarm at opportune times to get us off those roving shifts so we could do our 4-hour duty shifts in the radioshack, where we work on personal projects or just watch anime off an external hdd.

A Submarine's crew is about half the size of my ship so I'd guess they have around 5-6 radioman/IT but I could be wrong.

And yeah, there were about 5-6 people in the Radio division, IIRC.

I am imagining something about the size of a closet, walls decked out with gear, knobs, blinking lights and what not.

One or two big monitors, a keyboard and a chair? All squeezed inside a closet sized space with little movement and problems standing up?

I also got out in 2012 so things might have changed

I was an army dirt pounder, so I know nothing much about ships. but most of the places I found myself did not offer energy drinks.

I presume you have to pay for your energy drinks?

I know/knew several ex-submariners. For them it was an absolutely fascinating job. Of course it won't suit everyone, and most people absolutely should not do it, but for them it was a great way to spend a decade or two.

And then towards the end of their commitment, with a several thousand dollar re-enlistment bonus on the table, most of them would sign up for another 6 years. The bonus would usually be blown in a week on a new vehicle.

Fortunately, I think she's connected enough to find employment worth that much in private industry, disciplined enough to be wise in how she spends the money if she does take it, and rational enough to make a good decision (kinda hard to drive the new Tesla when you're underwater as much as she is), but I can understand how a lot of sailors might look at a number with a lot of zeros and make an impulse decision.

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.militarytimes.com/assets/pdf...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NavyNukes/comments/d1z8s1/nuke_reen...

RAF fast jet pilots have it pretty good, a.k.a. the Chair Force. Why dig in when you can check in?

No, not comfy at all. Too cold, too hot, never just right.

If you’re not joking, that’s a No no topic.

Title abuse is so bad this is worth acknowledging.

i.e. this is clearly a form of advertising.

Which in this particular instance (i.e. the military and the business of killing other people) can be called propaganda without a second thought about it. Someone linked to a Smarter Every Day YT video above which was filmed on a board of a US nuclear submarine, that was also blatant propaganda.

There is a certain arrogance in assuming the only way other people could possibly choose to do this is by being brainwashed.

Military people write about their fond memories of weird situations they have lived in/through that civilians can't relate to. This doesn't make it all propaganda.

This whole article writes like someone trying to explain the weird lives of submariners, and he's just scratching the surface.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Yea, I don't see the agenda, just writing about some memories of the shared experiences of submariners, and trying to explain them to a wider audience.

Both USUK have various motor sport racing teams to make things seem cool, but its also an attempt to boost recruitment and the bleeding obvious is criminals can now sign up and join the forces, so the bar has been lowered, but I'm sure it can be spun another way!

I know there are a lot of less fortunate who took advantage of educational programs and sponsorship, like prisoners get, to further their educational qualifications, and its a cheap way to see parts of the world if you want to travel.

Saving that, you do meet some odd people in the military and PTSD is a big problem.

Thing is Govt's make sure the Military PR is always the best so you never hear about those who have been mentally destroyed by the military, either directly or by being related to military personnel.

Everything you hear Putin or China being accused of, goes on in your country as well, the so called free press are not that free!

Could I get submarine book recommendations please!!

Bewarned however, I've read (listened) to a good few already. ;)

But as you said, at that point, it wouldn't really matter anymore.

It gets a bit tiring towards the later books, but I recall the earlier ones were quite good.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8979.Patrick_Robinson

There's always the classic Hunt for Red October.

I'm told by ex-(Submarine Commander)s and ex-submariners that it's surprisingly accurate, and one even said that it's used in training. If you read it carefully enough you can plot the positions of the boats throughout.

Definitely better than the film, although the film is excellent.

“ Despite his excitement, he is the smoothest Reactor Operator in the nuclear program and can catch a power spike like he’s dimming the bedroom lights next to his waifu body pillow.”

Is this a serious article or not?

Describing them in this joking, colorful way give readers more of a feel of the Reactor Operator archetype than a bland "they were the people who scored highest on the standardized test for the navy". It's trying to convey the feeling that "these are the nerdiest people on boat full of nerdy people".

Compare and contrast with the rest of the Navy.

Attack submarines join the metagame because their job is to find/attack and defend the missile submarines.