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Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

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Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#41

Post by kryogen1c »

crooked-v wrote: post #21
lainga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"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.

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.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#43

Post by mlb_hn »

lainga wrote: post #17
genkimind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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)

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#44

Post by genkimind »

lainga wrote: post #17
genkimind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#45

Post by genkimind »

CydeWeys wrote: post #40
genkimind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#46

Post by genkimind »

Diederich wrote: post #27
genkimind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#47

Post by Datenstrom »

genkimind wrote: post #44
lainga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Can confirm this is a problem in Naval aviation also.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#48

Post by danso »

jessaustin wrote: post #28

Regardless of other problems, TFA makes it clear that LTJG Coppock failed really hard between 0120 and 0130. Although her subordinates probably should have detected the Crystal sooner, she had ten minutes to save the lives of her crew, and she should have done so. Navigating out of danger might not have been possible, but an emergency stop like that executed by LTJG Breau a month earlier would have worked. The really…

The story notes that the ship's crew was overworked and overstretched due to the expedited schedule and crew cutbacks. On the night of the accident, there was only one person qualified to be a lookout, and was expected to watch both sides of the ship. The allocations of time and resources such that the USS Fitzgerald could never find time to make repairs or have adequately trained staff, at a time of increased patrolling to deal with North Korea, are factors that involve people higher up in the chain.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#49

Post by genkimind »

jessaustin wrote: post #28

Regardless of other problems, TFA makes it clear that LTJG Coppock failed really hard between 0120 and 0130. Although her subordinates probably should have detected the Crystal sooner, she had ten minutes to save the lives of her crew, and she should have done so. Navigating out of danger might not have been possible, but an emergency stop like that executed by LTJG Breau a month earlier would have worked. The really…

Not sure about the firing squad... people make mistakes, I can certainly see how she was focused on trying to avoid a collision and forgot to sound the alarm. There must have been at least 5 other people on the bridge who could have done it as well.

There were multiple failures that allowed the situation to get this out of hand. Ideally, she would have had forceful backup from the CIC.

Of course it should go up the chain, it should go as high as the people making the tasking to the ship Captains when they know the ships aren't ready to execute. Blaming the crew in this situation is discounting the factors that force the crew to operate like this.

Re: Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy

#50

Post by mysterydip »

smacktoward wrote: post #2

A dozen or so [maintenance issues] were considered more serious. They included problems with the ship’s primary navigation system. It was the oldest such system among destroyers based in Japan. It was running on Windows 2000, even though other ships had been upgraded. It could not display information from the AIS. The broken email system had a “major impact” on the ship’s day-to-day operations. Microsoft Outlook did…

Most of those systems probably had upgrades or fixes, but due to a combination of availability, funding, or politics, did not get implemented.
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