That and there's also a pretty hard limit on the number of people that can be packed onto any particular ship just due to space, can't just double the number of people on board to go from 100 hour weeks to more reasonable 50 hour weeks. Even with hot bunking there's feeding them and having somewhere/something for them to do with the newly freed time.

Honest question from someone that has no idea: Does training in these shitty conditions help performance in case of war, where those conditions might be necessary?

The life on board in wartime navy shouldn't be that different. In peacetime maneuvers you need 24/7 staffing of all key positions; in wartime maneuvers you need the same.

Driving the ship around is the exact same activity that takes the same amount of work. Keeping all the gear running takes the same effort. If you've not been hit, you have the same people doing the same things; and if you've been hit, you're either dead or swimming towards the shore in a much smaller boat.

What if it's a long war and the whole Navy is just shorter in personnel?

It's not a realistic scenario.

US navy is much stronger than any navy in the world. A long war with a minor power, or a limited war with a major power is not going to cause meaningful casualties to US navy and it's not going to result in a Navy that's significantly shorter in personnel.

A significant war capable of significant damage to the navy as a whole (as opposed to a lucky strike on some ship) essentially requires an open, high stakes war with a nuclear power; and due to MAD such a war can't really be long - if the problem is so irreconilable that it escalates to large scale open hostilities with significant casualties, then that also escalates to nukes, and then it'll be over in a single day.

No, they are there to break people and get them to rebond as a temp family. You really get to learn who is what kind of guy/girl doing repeated 100 hr weeks

> "No, they are there to break people and get them to rebond as a temp family."

- I'm not sure if this is the primary point of the 100hr+ work-weeks. In my case, our submarine was going through an Engineering Refueling Overhaul in Norfolk so we were just incredibly busy.

Failure to staff adequately is a managerial failure to plan, which is sometimes used as a cost-cutting measure.

100-hour work weeks not only save direct worker costs (you get 2.5x the labor at the cost of 1x), but also in managerial and other costs (you get 2.5x the labor for the cost of managing a 1x headcount).

That is correct. It is also a pipeline issue. The Navy has to recruit, train, and certify a certain number of nuclear trained personnel to account for shore-duty rotations and personnel leaving the Navy altogether. On a couple of occasions, our engineering team was short a few personnel in each of the three nuclear-trained jobs. We were able to pull from some of the other boats at the base, but they were not qualified (a.k.a. useless) so the workload wasn't distributed any better with the additional personnel.

I seriously doubt you get 2.5x as much work done, working people for 100 hours a week versus 40.

You wouldn't think so, given how easy it is to burn out a regular white-collar worker by overworking them, but people in the military are sort of the "high-spec components" of humanity: there's been many layers of selection pressures applied to find the people that can be pushed far past their "tolerance" without breaking. Everyone that can't, washed out a long time before you got your hands on them. (At least, that's the thinking. In reality, it's maybe 50% that, and 50% everyone hiding their weaknesses and covering for one-another's failures to give off the image of this. But good officers know that, and only expect 150%-of-tolerance rather than 200%-of-tolerance. :P)

Judging this as a civilian employee of a business that does some government contracting, you end up with about 110% as much output as people working 40 hours a week. That's 125% from working 60 hour weeks, plus a random negative productivity averaging out to -15% from the hours worked beyond that.

But each individual is super proud of being able to give a 280% effort. It's just that after that long on the job, you are no longer capable of detecting when the math no longer adds up. And they are "high-spec" components--most people drop to 0% efficiency long before that 60th hour worked in a week. But there are no supermen in real life. Nobody on this planet can produce positive value in the 112th hour worked in a week, even if there are people out there willing to try, and also resilient enough to bounce back from it regularly.

It often boils down to the thoroughly debunked yet oft-echoed labor theory of value. In some people's minds, a person that works 60 hours in a week is 50% better than someone working 40. And if everyone in the organization works that hard, then the whole organization is that much better. The harder you bust your asses, the prouder you are of it, and the more you can ignore any objectively measurable outcomes.

In reality, this just gives the military completely unrealistic ideas about how actual productive labor happens, and how much it costs in time and money, and contractor businesses of the military-industrial complex gleefully take advantage of that.

Even if their assumptions that some people working 100 hour weeks were 2.5x better than people working 40 hour weeks, where do you go when war happens?

If the whole system is being redlined when it's peacetime, then it only takes one thing going wrong, a single casualty, some damage to the ship, anything really to make the whole system collapse

> Nobody on this planet can produce positive value in the 112th hour worked in a week

There are a few people who do this, for whom "being awake" is basically the same as "working". Generally these few people are not employees, but part of the entrepreneurial world. However, they're outliers, and don't really counter your point.

> "...and contractor businesses of the military-industrial complex gleefully take advantage of that."

And that is why a lot of my former shipmates got out after their initial enlistment and went into the contracting business.

I've done work I could do 100 hrs a week without burning out. Not saying I'd be happy doing it, but I wouldn't burn out. Moderately physical, some moving around, some sitting, a little variety, hard thinking not more than a minute or two an hour, interacting directly with the people who need me to do what I'm doing? I can keep that up a long time. 12 hours like that leaves me feeling less worn out, drained, and generally shitty than sitting indoors programming all day for 8ish hours.

Is that an official reason, or speculation?

Probably more along the lines of a ship requires X number of crew working 24 hours a day to run properly and the ship can only hold a crew of less than 3X (8 hours shifts, 7 days a week). It's not going to be a simple 9-5 job for everyone on the ship but there should at least be some scientific justification behind whatever shift scheduling the Navy decides on. Do people work better when doing long shifts with long breaks in between or short shifts with short breaks? Can people doing day shifts work longer than people doing night shifts? Do people work better with regular shifts or with ones in different lengths? It's obviously going to be different for every position, anyone making critical decisions shouldn't be overworked but the guy cleaning toilets isn't going to do too much damage being tired. It all boils down to how much can you work someone until it becomes an issue.

Not all crew jobs have to be performed continuously, 24 hours per day.

Obviously, someone has to be in command on the bridge at all times, but it does not have to be the captain the whole time. That's what watch commanders are for, right? The guy cleaning toilets does not need two more guys backing him up for the 2nd and 3rd shift. Dirty toilets wait until he rolls out of his bunk, or until the captain eats a volatile burrito, and someone wakes the toilets guy up to deal with that specific problem outside of regular duty hours.

Command staff already needs to have enough redundancy to operate the ship if an unlucky hit takes out the entire regular command, just as a requirement of being a war vessel. In theory, that Junior 2nd Lt. should be able to limp back in to port after everyone else in the chain of command is killed, so the Navy can send it back out with a fresh crew.

Surely, there's a person whose function is to alert person X when situation Y happens, so that person X is not expected to be awake and alert and staring at green lights for N continuous hours, and then exhausted or asleep when one of them turns red?

> "The guy cleaning toilets does not need two more guys backing him up for the 2nd and 3rd shift. Dirty toilets wait until he rolls out of his bunk, or until the captain eats a volatile burrito, and someone wakes the toilets guy up to deal with that specific problem outside of regular duty hours."

That isn't how it works.

So there are all kinds of functional roles in the Navy (and I'm going off of submarines since that it was my experience was in), roles having to do with operating the sonar equipment, IT/comms equipment, torpedoes, and the engine room. So these people will be on watch (hourly logs, monitoring system conditions, etc.) and then after they are relieved they'll do whatever maintenance and cleaning they are assigned to. There is not a "clean-the-toilets" job role.

I know that's not how it works in practice on a naval vessel, but that's how it works in abstract economics world.

In AEW, specialization rules everything, so the toilets are cleaned only by a specialist toilet cleaner, and specialist toilet cleaners only clean toilets. If you try to shoehorn AEW onto a ship, you only need one toilets guy, because having clean toilets is important, but not so important that it has to be done 24-7.

It is an open question whether it would be more efficient to have 3 radio operators providing 24-7 coverage on the radios during their duty hours and doing other jobs when they are off watch, thus giving them 16-hour workdays divided up into 8-hours of "important" work and 8-hours of "grunt/scut" work, or to have 2 radio operators on watch 12 hours each, and one specialist cleaner taking up that extra 8 hours in that bunk, cleaning toilets 12 hours a day. Is that last 4 hours of work squeezed into the day okay if it requires no dedication or focus?

I too was in subs, the problem here is that you will not always have enough people to man a three section rotation. People cycle on and off the boat very frequently I spent 4 years on the same boat with a crew of on average 160 people. In my time probably 300+ people rotated through, routinely many divisions would have only 2 qualified individuals for a watch station putting them on 12 hour shifts with having to get up in your off time to give a food and bathroom break. The issue is the military goes through periods where a certain rating is undermanned so they encourage the recruiters to take as many people for that rate as possible. Since recruiters have quotas they must fill they take people who are quite frankly useless. Those people end up not able to advance due to several factors and the Navy can only have so many people in a rate at the same pay grade so they either don't let them re-enlist or if they want to stay make them change rates to an under-manned rate. Now not all those who re-enlist will advance due to the same issue so often they just cut there looses and move or they reach higher tenure and can't re-enlist leaving an under-manned rate and the cycle repeats itself.

Most watch stations take months of training to not only get qualified but also for the command to have enough confidence in you to stand the watch. I myself stood a regular 12 hour rotation during times we where on the surface because we had only 2 qualified operators and the rate that actually owned the equipment was undermanned so they could not provide bodies. There are very rarely extra people to do grunt work you do that in your off watch time when you are not studying, qualifying, or doing maintenance. Very frequently commands will care about filling the watch bill over a person not just being qualified but also competent enough to stand a watch, thus accidents happen due to negligence and ineptitude.

When I was in, we had a 6-on 12-off schedule to allow for 24hr coverage with only three watches. Effectively, each of our "days" was an 18hr day, with 6 being on-watch, 6 being used for maintenance/drills/training, and 6 being for sleep. Rarely did we get a full 6hrs of sleep per 18hr "day."

That sounds like the worst possible compromise between 16+8, which gives you a normal "on" work shift and a normal sleep period, and 8+4, which could give you biphasic sleep, or triphasic with 4 hours base sleep and 2 x 2-hour naps.

Even so, it's still 8 hours of sleep per 24 hours, which is adequate, even when only being able to take 6 at a time makes it somehow seem worse. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it only exists because the Navy found that sailors were useless after the 12th hour of working, so decided to set the workday to 12 hours, and just make the whole duty cycle 18 hours. I'm guessing that people on that schedule stop being very effective after just 9 hours of wakefulness. But I'm no somnologist.

The 12-on is composed of a 6-hour operator shift, followed by 6 hours of maintenance and training. I think the 12+6 is based on maintaining full awareness over a 6 hour period, and in that sense it basically works. If you eat when you wake up, and after your operator shift, then that also works out to two meals per 18-hour day, and gives you a normal-ish 12 hour gap between your last meal and waking up.

That is correct. The 6 hour on-watch period is based on maintaining full awareness. With a 3 watch-section crew and "18hr days," you'll have round the clock coverage for all watch stations. Like you said, we'd wake up, eat, go on watch for 6hrs, get relieved by the next watch section, eat, do maintenance/training/etc. for the next 6hrs, and then sleep for the final 3rd of our "day."

I've always felt that this was the case. They break you so they can rebuild you and your instincts for war times. So that everything you need to do is completely second nature.

Does manning need to increase for headcount in these particular positions to increase? I always figured there was a certain level of "bloat" positions in peacetime militaries—the military equivalent of middle-managers—who certainly went through the same boot-camp as everyone else once upon a time, are still required to pass regular physical exams like everyone else, and so could simply have their duties extended/rebalanced to have them do more man-on-the-spot work as well as their clerical duties. That's what happens when a war starts, no?

There's also a good chunk of personnel who, even in peacetime, end up injured or disabled on the job (such as my friend the CPO with a sudden heart condition) who are required by doctor's orders to not do some tiny part of their job, and then regs dictate that they just not do that job at all—so they're either honourably discharged (and now receive VA benefits), or they're kept, but desked. In a more "efficient" military, these people (who are mostly still able to do 99% of their jobs) would just have their duties adjusted, with the one part of their workload they can't handle reallocated to their peers, so they can continue converting payroll into duties performed, rather than chairs sat on.

My perception when I was in was that the Navy was very "top heavy," staffed with useless academy grads that did little and stayed in for the cushy shore-duty [1]. My views are definitely biased (and anecdotal), since I was "lowly blue-shirt," but there was always at least one unfilled billet in my rate yet there never seemed to be an unfilled role for the officers.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/5/ash-carter-sa...