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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.