It seems perma-fatigue could be a serious problem on a warship. Any idea why the Navy doesn’t restructure the working/waking hours to better optimize crew alertness and focus?
It's a pervasive and substantial problem in the US Navy atm. The various collisions, groundings, and sabotage in recent years indicates that. The root of it is the navy is being operated at a tempo that it has insufficient ships and sailors to properly maintain. But congress and leadership keep this mess going.
I have no experience in the Navy, but I wonder if ships and subs couldn’t maintain three different operating tempos, something like Standard, Elevated, and the already existing General Quarters.
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).
The problem with ballistic missile subs (and to a lesser extent ships) is that the entire world, except home port, is a hostile operating area.
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.
It has been a serious problem, you read in the news about some warship crash every few years! It's likely that the Navy hasn't restructured things because they simply do not need to and have no incentive to do so. We're not exactly in a peer conflict.
Because until an admiral gets fired, nobody takes some minor fatigue-related mishap like a destroyer running into a container ship (killing a few sailors on board, putting the ship out of action, and causing XY million dollars in damages) seriously.
We learned in Navy boot camp, guaranteed 1 hour of sleep per day. I think it was not really a guarantee. Everything from the first day forward is from that perspective.
