"For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.
But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.
“The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen.
After 2003, each young officer was issued a set of 21 CD-ROMs for computer-based training — jokingly called “SWOS in a Box” — to take with them to sea and learn. Young officers were required to complete this instructor-less course in between earning their shipboard qualifications, management of their divisions and collateral duties.
...
In recent years, there’s been a push to re-energize SWO training. And on paper, they’ve got a course for every level of SWO — all the way up to the commanding officer level.
Young SWOs now get about nine weeks in fleet concentration area classrooms. Generally, these new officers report to their ship first and then get a seat in school within the first couple of months on board.
But, Parin said, “only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills. The rest is damage control and other material division officer-specific training.”
Another eight weeks of school comes between an officer’s first and second division officer tours. They are taught more advanced skills, but still, the professional mariner instruction isn’t what it should be, Hoffman said.
That’s still just a fraction of the original training."
As a former naval officer, I was shocked to hear they didn't still require conning officers to plot and track the closest point of approach of all contacts on paper. To rely on a computer or radar system to do that for you is craziness. Sure, the commercial ships do that, but then in this case they should have avoided hitting Navy ships, but they are rather stealthy and weren't broadcasting their positions, so it's up to the junior officers on watch. Doing this on paper keeps you alert and reduces boredom, believe me.
It is possible to get into a "Kobayashi Maru" situation coming into a busy shipping channel with contacts coming in from all sides, similar to the iPhone game "HarborMaster" which always ends with a collision. But there are rules to follow along the way, whether it's adjusting course to avoid a close approach, contacting other ships on bridge-to-bridge VHF radio, waking the captain, blasting the ship's horn, making evasive maneuvers before you get "in extremis". None of these happened. This is what I found so hard to believe in these two cases, but it makes perfect sense when you're relying on imperfect automated systems and essentially driving asleep at the wheel.
I'm just an amateur sailor but I had an incident in the Atlantic on a racing yacht where I came up top just prior to a shift change and said "isn't anyone concerned that we're going to go right into the side of that tanker." The guys up top (including the watch leader) said the skipper was on it. I pointed it out to the skipper downstairs and he said "it's alright, I can see it on the radar." I replied "I think you'll find that's a squall, that's the ship". Rather sobering!
I do know that most or all of our Navy ships are highly computer controlled/integrated, so maybe the following would be moot today, but...
...wouldn't it be prudent for officers to have the skills to plot and do things on paper in the event that during combat or for other reasons the ship sustains such damage that limits or eliminates the ability to use the computer systems to do that same task?
Again - maybe it's one of those things where if the computer systems are down in such a way that you can't do the task, it is likely that you have bigger problems to worry about. Even so, I would think this would be a critical skill to have, if a "just-in-case, cover-yer-butt" scenario presents itself where it could mean the difference between life or death, survival, rescue, etc.
By that logic we'd never have single engine or single seat attack aircraft. In a lot of situations, you _have_ to rely on the technology in order to most efficiently spend your resources, even considering the potential failure modes. In many situations you're better off perfecting one mode of operation than in maintaining two redundant modes.
Seems the best reason to teach these things isn't because we expect them to be used to any substantial extent in combat, but because they're critical and necessary exercises for honing and maintaining the skills needed to wield the high-tech tools, much like in bballard's example. Learning and regularly applying the fundamentals is often critical to understanding the problem space. When you're commanding a naval ship I imagine the problem space is immensely complex, much more so than most other roles in the military, or anywhere else for that matter. If you can't foresee or recognize the problems quickly, you certainly won't be able to respond in a timely manner no matter how fancy the tools.
That's how our codebase evolves at a large internet company. A new shiny product is desired by sales, and to cheer us up into building it they promise we'll be allowed to delete the crappy old stuff when done. Rinse, repeat, 10 years later we have 10 legacy systems to support. Makes me think of "The Girl Who Sold Matches" whenever one of these comes up...
US military expenditure is a stealth job creation program. It's politically untenable for any American government to announce a $1.5 trillion dollar scheme to create 100,000 skilled manufacturing jobs in the rust belt, unless that scheme produces a fighter aircraft. It's a woefully inefficient job creation scheme, but that inefficiency means that a lot of different stakeholders can get a slice of the pie.
Everyone would be better off if that money was spent on clean energy or healthcare, but the American electorate are far more willing to sign a blank check for defence.
I was obliquely referring to the F-35 program, which is forecast to cost ~$1.5tn and is estimated to have created ~100,000 jobs within the services and via contractors, subcontractors and suppliers. The F-35 is a dreadful aircraft that is grounded indefinitely because it keeps trying to suffocate pilots, but it has kept a lot of factories busy and made a lot of senators happy. Lockheed Martin proudly trumpet the fact that there are suppliers for the F-35 project in 46 states - that's a lot of pork to go around.
The US defence budget is lousy with pork-barrel projects. The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless. The services might be facing deep sequestration cuts, but there's been no let-up in the procurement of expensive and unnecessary hardware.
> The Army Chief of Staff has repeatedly asked Congress to stop buying new Abrams tanks, but the tanks keep rolling off the production line nonetheless.
Wow. One has to wonder when some of those tanks will eventually reach regular law enforcement, like lots of other military hardware tends to.
Nope. Pensions (technically, retired pay and retainer pay) come out of the MILPERS budget. Military retirees are still military personnel, and generally exist within one of three statuses within the reserve component of the last armed service in which they served. For Navy personnel, for example, they are on the Retired List, the Retired Reserve, or the Fleet Reserve.
Unfortunately the way that it gets handed to the service components, they can only spend the money on what it's budgeted for. This leads to situations where training budgets are very tight but you have a huge office supply budget. So units buy $1000 chairs but can't afford to send their troops to training
>only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills.
couple of days :) ... couple of years during middle school that i spent going to "Young Sailor Club" (USSR version of sea-skill oriented Boy Scouts) half the time was my specialization - electronics, half the time - the generic maritime skills, navigation, sailing, classic communication (Morse, flags), firefighting, actually going out on a [small training non-armed] Navy ship, etc..
In the US, this is the Sea Scouts. Almost nobody knows about them, but anyplace near big water likely has several ships (same as a troop). It's a great program, we were involved when my son was a teenager - they (group of teenagers) literally ran a 100 ton, 95 foot former USCG Cutter. It's great for boys and girls, I'm convinced they get more training than the Navy does. :-)
As a transoceanic sailor I'm still shocked by how little our Navy knows about seamanship. Complete disregard for colregs, disregard for other vessels in confined spaces, and just general lack of knowledge on navigation. From talking with other sailors our Navy is like the elephant in a china shop. An angry, armed elephant deathly afraid of little mice.
USCG on the other hand are pretty great. Ocean rescue gives way to drug enforcement so I know not everyone has a good experience with them. My few interactions with the Coast guard have been courteous and uneventful.
The difference there is the level of detail in annual or semi-annual colregs certification exams; In the navy you have a multiple guess exam. I have been told, in the coast guard you answer the question and then write the full rule or applicable paragraph of the rule longhand.
Sounds like I had more instruction on water navigation in my HS drivers ed class than some officers in the Navy are getting. Not a good place to be when piloting large vessels in potentially tight and dangerous conditions.
It's actually much worse than that. At sea, those with operational responsibilities don't work a normal day or week. Not only are you working over 100 hours, but you destroy your circadian rhythm. While it shows 23 hours of sleep in every 72, that's under optimal conditions when things aren't breaking and operations / drills aren't interrupting everything. This is what my full 72 hour rotation looked like in 5 on / 10 off:
DAY 1:
0600: Wake up, shower/shave, breakfast, make rounds to Engineering and Combat to get situational updates, head to bridge for turnover.
0700-1200: Watch
1200-1300: Lunch, maybe some personal time
1300-1700: Work, maybe catch a nap for an hour (1)
1700-1800: Dinner, or skip it for a workout
1800-1900: Intel Brief
1900-2100: Work, personal time, or nap
2100-2200: Coffee, round for watch, get to bridge early to adjust eyes
The problem is that increasing manning doesn't really contribute to the military industrial complex...so there isn't a real incentive to make room in the budget for additional personnel. When I was in the Navy we routinely had 100hr+ workweeks while in port and the older guys said it was the same back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know, but least doctors have a reason for 30 hour shifts: continuity of care improves patient outcome. If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch.
> If they are rested but keep switching doctors, every shift you get a new doctor who's got to read up on you from scratch.
Every time my wife or I or my kid have been in the hospital, we've been there for more than 30 hours. So the problem still exists - someone still has to read up on our situation. I'd much rather those notes be written down by someone who isn't on their 26th hour awake.
I understand the issue with continuity of care, but to be honest that sounds like a communication problem at its core rather something that absolutely can only be addressed with aggressive scheduling.
It is a communication problem, but it needs a good filter because you can generate so much information through the EMR and other systems feeding into it (even plain-text sentence generation which just string-interpolates data -- naturally this takes time to read and it builds up quickly). Plus, multiple people can contribute to the medical record simultaneously.
Unfortunately the definition of a good filter is going to vary as much as workflows from hospital to hospital.
Can you share your sources for that? I've heard from medical residents that longer shifts do not result in better patient outcomes. The first paper I Googled agrees - it shows longer shifts for surgeons are not safer (longer shifts had 9.1% rate of complications/death and shorter shifts had 9.0% rate): http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724
What the literature consensus largely shows is that there's a roughly equal swap between more sleep/shorter hours resulting in more mistakes due to hand-offs, and longer shifts resulting in more mistakes due to exhaustion.
People in favor of longer shifts (read: docs who are long out of training and hospital admins that rely on residents as some of their most cost-effective man-hours) argue this shows that shorter shifts do not provide patient benefit, so fuck it.
Those in favor of shorter shifts (read: pretty much everyone else) argue that if it's all equal for patients, we shouldn't be torturing residents (they're people, too), and that what this really shows is that the hand-off process is shit and needs to be improved upon.
More sleep and better hand-offs are the road to better patient outcomes and happier (or at least sane) residents.
And it's worth noting that the fight for sane hours has, thus far, only extended to first-year residents. Second+ are still dogmeat.
...and that's the literature position. From first-hand experience, though, I can tell you true horror stories. Mistakes due to hand-offs can be reduced; mistakes because one of my colleagues had a dissociative episode during a way-too-long period without sleep is harder to catch. But no one discloses lapses in sanity during these studies.
Thank you! I kept hearing this "doctors need to be on call 30+ ,40+, 50+ hours because of handoff issues." Rarely has anyone mentioned they need to fix the handoff issue instead they prefer to keep the status quo.
You also have to look at the baseline in these papers. Many of these studies do daft things like compare 24 and 28 hour shifts, neither of which is likely to be anywhere near optimal performance.
Hand-off also seems like a thing that could be improved in many different ways, while fatigue is driven by fundamental limits of human physiology.
Seems like a patient handoff/briefing is something technology could improve, with automatically generated digests, AI-flagged indications, and well-designed infographics, whereas no machine on Earth is currently capable of getting 8 hours of sleep for you.
Technology doesn't help because many of the issues that are "lost" in handoffs exist only in a physician's head. And since digital documentation is both (1) incredibly inconvenient and (2) a legal liability, it's likely to stay there.
The issue with hand-offs comes down to trying to transfer too much information, too quickly. Fixing this is primarily a funding issue - everything else is trying to make up a fundamental resource scarcity with operational improvements.
It's amazing what a human can do while effectively sleepwalking. Life tip: (politely) ask how long your doctor has been awake, perhaps disguising the question as how long the shift has been.
Yeah, we know this one. No, we will not tell you we've been up for 28 hours. It creates issues, both of the liability type and the shifting-work-unto-your-coworkers type.
If you don't want an exhausted doc, you have to tackle it at the policy level. There are advocacy groups working on this, and the proper targets are your legislators and state medical societies.
patients are similarly well aware that doctors will lie to us to cover their ass. possibly why so many of us resent paying you exorbitant sums to do poor work?
Leaving aside he topic of money, as I've no intention of going down that rabbit hole of bs:
People have no idea what the quality of our work is: bad, good, or in-between. You have neither the expertise nor the information by which to judge. The Chief Quality Officer (and former anesthesiologist) at (major academic medical center) once told me, "I have access to more quality data than absolutely anyone else in this hospital ... and I still have no idea who the good surgeons are and who the bad ones are. I haven't known that since I left working in the operating room every day, when I actually saw them all work day after day." What he doesn't know, you certainly do not.
You know all those posts here about how managers have unrealistic expectations, and constantly misunderstand what software devs actually do? It's like that, only moreso.
That’s an abysmal rate with either system - nearly 1 in 10. I assume that hospital does some fairly heroic things, but a quick google didn’t reveal anything special.
Being on call for 30 hours might as well be the same. All it takes is one patient that has a few emergencies in a short time frame for the sleep to get messed up. We have better regulations for train engineers and conductors - all for safety. My uncles do it, and my brother did for a while. Always on call, but once their shift starts, there is a strict limit on how long their shift is and a strict limit to how long they have free to sleep.
there have definitely been cold, calculating, studies done on the cost/benefit of doctor sleep to shift changeover ratios, and I don't know if it's 30 hours, but i do recall that it does not comport to your 'feel good' notions of how much a doctor should sleep.
Yeah, and when we had a newborn, we could "sleep when she sleeps". Guess how well we felt, and how capable we were of anything but the most routine tasks?
Just about the time I graduated (BS, not MD), the hospitals in Dunedin NZ had junior doctors on shifts of that long as a bare minimum, and they were on call for 72 hours following their shifts. They were supposed to get a few days off after that.
The 30-hour on-call shifts did start out as just on-call. However, it has long since become the case that it was effectively 30-hour straight shifts, with maybe an opportunity to catch a 20min nap.
I don't understand how that make sense. What if you have a patient who comes in at the end of a shift. Wouldn't it make more sense to have more overlap in order to transition patients? I think doctors egos wouldn't handle that well.
This is brought up in every such discussion. Is it really true that US and UK hospitals have better outcomes than EU/Scandinavian ones where the EU working time directive is taken at least a bit more seriously?
FWIW, I caught up with a SWO buddy the other day and his take on this was that there are two ultimate culprits for the recent collisions:
1) A "check-the-box-and-cover-your-ass" mentality with regard to the implementation of annual training. The basic gist is that the (very necessary to some extent) training designed to get young sailors to not get DUIs, manage their finances properly, not beat their spouses, etc has gotten more and more onerous every year, with more mission-focused training being sacrificed in order to make hours available. By my friend's telling, there has been something of an arms race in that every fleet-level commander has to do something quantifiable to put as a fitness report accomplishment (eg, "restructured and implemented DUI awareness training; liberty incidents fell 13% during tenure in billet").
2) The tracking systems that Navy ships have turned on in peacetime started getting turned off 10-15 years ago and the original impetus was the IGRC using this data to antagonize Navy ships (ie get position/speed/bearing of a destroyer over horizon, then send a couple of speedboats to cross its bow 300 meters ahead at 40 kts). This was briefly mentioned in article as something that is getting reinstated following recent collisions.
Interestingly he said that the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time (analogous to the concept of learning much more in your first 4 months as a junior engineer than you did during your senior spring semester as a CS student).
> the end of the SWO course had little to do with the accidents and that the main reason the Navy ended it was that junior SWO feedback was saying that they would learn more just being on the ship for that amount of time
My experience when I went through the SWO course (never mind how long ago that was...) was that there were useful experiences in there, but a lot could have been cut. The most useful experience I remember was actually driving YP craft (YP stands for "yard patrol") from Newport up to Massachusetts Bay and back, with us junior officers taking turns manning all of the bridge crew positions, including those that are manned by enlisted sailors on a combat ship. That's something a junior officer won't get to do on a combat ship, and it was quite an eye opener for many of us. It also let us encounter a lot of situations similar to the ones that caused these collisions (we transited the Cape Cod Canal, both ways, which is quite narrow and quite crowded, as are the approaches to it on both sides) under the supervision of experienced sailors and officers.
It's absolutely ridiculous military vessels, that should have excellent awareness of their surroundings, would collide with a very large piece of metal that was not designed to be stealth in any way.
You are assuming these collisions occurred because the Navy crews didn't know the other ships were there. My understanding is that the US vessels knew the other ships were there and did not react properly.
It was probably similar to what happened when the USS Porter collided with another vessel in the Strait of Ormuz. You can hear how confusing the situation was from this audio recording. Apparently, the work environments can be extremely stressful and that can lead them to become toxic.
That the crew does not know how to avoid a collision and/or of what their ship can and cannot do is still pretty unbelievable. That they didn't evacuate the compartments that would be crushed indicates that either they didn't know the collision would happen or didn't know where it would impact and how bad it'd be.
> A Government Accountability Office report from May said sailors were on duty up to 108 hours each week.
... and people are wondering why accidents happen. If one sailor on the bridge is overworked, there are his fellow sailors to correct the mistakes that are bound to happen, but when the entire bridge is next to collapse from sleep deprivation, that's next to impossible.
Something's going to have to give here. Between budget and scope, one or the other will have to change in order to increase staffing, sleep, training, and maintenance and reduce errors like this. It's only going to get worse in the future, too. China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing. Procurement of the F-35, Columbia SSBNs, FFX frigates, and Ford class carriers (and that's only the Navy!) means that there's going to be less budget to go around too. Something is going to have to give.
> China is interested in the South China Sea, Russia is interested in Eastern Europe, and North Korea may come to a head soon, so scope of operations won't be decreasing.
Maybe it's time to realize that the global imperial ambitions of a country of 350 million people are not sustainable in the 21st century.
Oh, who am I kidding, of course that will never happen.
Counter balancing those "threats" wouldn't be a problem if the U.S. was't constantly engaged in warfare in the Middle East. But the fact that 1) conservatives are more interested in shifting attention back to Iran than dealing with North Korea, and that 2) both conservatives and liberals criticized Obama's restraint in Syria, tells you everything you need to know about the ultimate, unfortunate fate of American foreign policy.
People criticized Obama for drawing a red line wrt chemical weapons in Syria and then flinching. But IMO his decision to flinch is probably one of the greatest acts of presidential leadership we've seen in generations. Obama's mistake was drawing the red line, but that's something every American president does almost habitually, paving the way to normalizing the bombasticism of Donald Trump. Not only did Obama realize his mistake, he resisted making an even larger mistake just to save face and supposedly preserve our deterrent (as if it wasn't obvious we were already overextended), despite universal advise to do otherwise. In many respects it's on par with Kennedy's decision to cut a deal with Khrushchev, though the optics are less flattering this time around.
The atrocities in Syria are morally repugnant. But while most European allies criticized Obama for not getting the U.S. more involved, precisely none has chosen to get more involved themselves. The situation is fundamentally intractable given the politics and level of commitment that could be sustained. Obama stood up, _alone_, to make the hard choice.
It took Obama years to develop that kind of spine. It's a shame he had to go because that's something we sorely need when it comes to North Korea. Like Syria, North Korea is a losing proposition every which way, except with greater global consequence. Either 1) there's a major war with hundreds of thousands or even millions dead (including tens of thousands of Americans) within days or weeks, 2) global nuclear proliferation as North Korea exports nuclear technology, or 3) a momentous quid pro quo with China that shifts the balance of power in the Pacific to them in exchange for regime change in North Korea. The best outcome for both America and the world is #3, but there is no mainstream American leader willing to even conceive of that bargain, let alone provide the leadership and intelligence necessary to negotiate those waters.
Instead we're likely to get #2, which will merely provide more fodder for American chickenhawks to pursue fanciful military expeditions around the world. Nothing is more certain to lead to the swift end of the American era.
Option 4: Contain North Korea like we contained the USSR until they collapse, while maintaining a soft blockade and trade sanctions to limit global nuclear proliferation.
Not possible. North Korea shares a border with both China and Russia, and neither would agree to the type of embargo required. They haven't even enforced the embargoes they agreed to. The last thing they want, particularly China, is a total collapse of the regime and a flood of migrants coming across their border. They also see significant value in having a buffer state between them and American-allied South Korea. Both China and Russia benefit from a situation which exposes the limits of U.S. power. Finally, they have a greater tolerance for nuclear proliferation because, at the end of the day, it's really only the U.S. with a global footprint and a target on its back. They're playing a dangerous game, but however flawed their calculus they seem to think the prospective benefits are greater than the costs.
You'd think it would behoove China to simply replace Kim Jong-un, but for some of the above reasons, and more, they're not willing to try it.
If you track the past thirty years of diplomatic efforts, it's obvious how stark the choices are. Frankly, I'm astounded at how short the memories are in Washington, and how motivated their thinking. Across the political spectrum. It's really made clear to me how increasing partisanship (including reactions to that partisanship) has blinded everybody.
China has actually started partially enforcing the trade sanctions. They aren't in favor of nuclear proliferation either and won't knowingly allow nuclear weapons components through their territory. So containment is still mostly possible. It doesn't have to be an unbreakable barrier, just good enough.
If a blockade strategy were feasible, North Korea would have never gotten the bomb. North Korea has pursued a nuclear capability in earnest since at least the 1990s (EDIT: 1980s according to the Wikipedia timeline), though their desire to obtain one was declared decades earlier. It's unfolded so slowly and so deliberately that the public and many pundits don't even _remember_ all the precipitating events because at this point they don't even stand out. Just look at the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_North_Korean_n...
If China were serious about containment, if the sanctions were effective, then things would have never gotten even remotely this far. Both the U.S. and Israel were on the verge of bombing Iran before they even got as far as North Korea did before 2000.
The situation _inside_ China is complex, but ultimately the reasons are irrelevant because 1) China manifestly has proven that it is unwilling to be aggressive enough even during the periods when they were truly upset with North Korea and 2) there is no evidence that China's fundamental calculus has changed or even might change--the calculus that has allowed North Korea to openly a) begin a nuclear research program, b) refine and breed fuel, c) test nuclear weapons, and d) import, develop, and export missile technology to the point where they're close to e) having a delivery vehicle for a nuclear weapon. At each step China has vehemently (and believably) opposed those advancements, yet they've refused to prevent it. To be sure they've applied some pressure, just as they are now; but North Korea's resolve is too great.
Despite all this overwhelming, indisputably clear history, people are still in denial. It's incredible.
Trump is absolutely correct on at least one thing: negotiation is futile. Fortunately, my guess is that Trump's vanity and preternatural instinct for survival will stand in the way of the U.S. choosing to go to war over this issue. Which is why my money is on North Korea joining the nuclear ICBM club, with all that will entail down the road.
We had a video posted from a merchant vessel not so recently. They have a 4-8 watch, a 8-12 and a 12-4 watch where juniors learn on the 4 to 8 watch, which happens twice daily. This works pretty well compared to the U.S. Navy. I don't hear a lot about merchant seamen needing more training budget or needing to use pen and paper.
This seems like a UI issue more than anything. How do we even have multi million dollar ships that are capable of violating the rules of the sea? It seems like an ideal situation for a driver assistance type package that is able to be removed during combat operation.
They arent, however the rules of the sea are very simple. More importantly a calculation of probability of collision between two slow moving giant metal objects would be easy.
Ever been a skipper manoeuvring in confined waters with multiple vessels around you? I have, and it is at least an order of magnitude more complex than anything I've ever encountered on the road.
Still; assuming you can get good, real-time estimates of mass, rough shape, position and velocity vector of each of the ships around you, making a system to compute probable collisions sounds like a small undergrad-level project at best. What are the obvious things I'm missing here?
You would need to account for drag and windage. Basically know everyone's hull shape and CFD it! And the seabed under them.
At a distance it's easy - but in confined waters it gets very complicated very quickly. I've seen situations where literally the only solution is, who do I collide with.
In the case of the USN they have a hell of a lot more manoeuvrability than a freighter but they can't escape the laws o'physics...
Back when I did accounting for a few years, I routinely found more than one way to solve the problem at hand. And I cross-checked.
I remember in particular one instance, where I spent a day tracking back to three garbage "test" orders that a development team was injecting into production (our live accounting systems), assuming no one would even notice in the midst of the normal "slop" in the system due to incorrect coding and habituation to "these systems are outdated/buggy/German/yadayadayada".
I find it kind of unfathomable that e.g. a destroyer class ship would not have multiple means of knowing where it is -- founded upon real-world, what you can observe around you and in the sky, situational awareness. And that they would not be cross-checking these as a matter of routine.
You're a war ship. Do you think e.g. the enemy is going to tell you before they take out or corrupt your satellite navigation?
'But we're not at war.'
Well, you spend billions and billions each year on training exercises. How about some of the simplest, least expensive, and most direct training possible, on a routine basis? I.e. run your bridge and crew with a persistent eye towards ingraining the skills before you need them?
Not constant bullsh-t schedules that deplete them and inhibit learning. (How well do you remember the day after pulling an all-nighter?) But skills that will prove critical, and the vigilance to be pro-active in using them.
That includes training for stress -- including functioning during sleep deprivation. But not as a lifestyle.
Anyway, same for me, in software. Cross-check. Don't assume. But a lot of what I've seen around me, is anything but that. Even and especially in our so-called profession.
There are definitely professionals -- I've worked with some. Whether there is a well-defined, high-skilled profession? Yeah, that's a lot less clear.
It seems the navy needs to be asking itself what is actually professional, as well.
What about requiring military ships to illuminate their ships just like merchant ships? (TBH I think but I don't know for sure that the US ship in the singapore collision was unlit.)
I was Army and learned the old school way. Compass, Protractor and Map. Refused to completely trust GPS. It will fail you just when you really need it most. Army navigation is much easier than Navy, but same rule applies.
"For nearly 30 years, all new surface warfare officers spent their first six months in uniform at the Surface Warfare Officer’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, learning the theory behind driving ships and leading sailors as division officers.
But that changed in 2003. The Navy decided to eliminate the “SWOS Basic” school and simply send surface fleet officers out to sea to learn on the job. The Navy did that mainly to save money, and the fleet has suffered severely for it, said retired Cmdr. Kurt Lippold.
“The Navy has cut training as a budgetary device and they have done it at the expense of our ability to operate safely at sea,” said Lippold, who commanded the destroyer Cole in 2000 when it was attacked by terrorists in Yemen.
After 2003, each young officer was issued a set of 21 CD-ROMs for computer-based training — jokingly called “SWOS in a Box” — to take with them to sea and learn. Young officers were required to complete this instructor-less course in between earning their shipboard qualifications, management of their divisions and collateral duties.
...
In recent years, there’s been a push to re-energize SWO training. And on paper, they’ve got a course for every level of SWO — all the way up to the commanding officer level.
Young SWOs now get about nine weeks in fleet concentration area classrooms. Generally, these new officers report to their ship first and then get a seat in school within the first couple of months on board.
But, Parin said, “only a couple of days are dedicated to navigation and mariner skills. The rest is damage control and other material division officer-specific training.”
Another eight weeks of school comes between an officer’s first and second division officer tours. They are taught more advanced skills, but still, the professional mariner instruction isn’t what it should be, Hoffman said.
That’s still just a fraction of the original training."