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.
