Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils to Help Avoid Collisions at Sea
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"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."
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.
1 500 000 000 000
----------------- = 15 000 000
100 000
Like any old organization, they have legacy costs: healthcare and pensions for former and retired servicemen are phenomenal.
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.
http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-approves-useless-mil... http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...
Wow. One has to wonder when some of those tanks will eventually reach regular law enforcement, like lots of other military hardware tends to.
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..
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 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.
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.
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.
That's the far more important solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: Had friends in Med School some years ago.
Here's are a couple of data points though:
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/02/02/46524860...
Here's the original source: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1515724?query=fea...
Unfortunately the definition of a good filter is going to vary as much as workflows from hospital to hospital.
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.
It's obviously statistical. It exists, yes, but to a lesser extent.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
And that is why a lot of my former shipmates got out after their initial enlistment and went into the contracting business.
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
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/5/ash-carter-sa...
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
2200-0200: Watch
DAY 2:
0200-0700: Sleep (5)
0700-0800: Breakfast
0800-1100: Work
1100-1200: Lunch and rounds
1200-1700: Watch
1700-1800: Dinner
1800-1900: Intel brief
1900-0100: Sleep (6)
DAY 3:
0100-0200: Coffee, rounds, more coffee, turnover
0200-0700: Watch
0700-0800: Breakfast
0800-1200: Work, maybe nap (3)
1200-1300: Lunch
1300-1600: Work
1600-1700: Dinner, turnover
1700-2200: Watch
2200-0600: Sleep (8)
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).
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 reminds me of the old joke "smart-phones are good at everything except at making a phone call".
All this is appalling.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If shipping lanes were like roads that might be possible, but they aren't and it isn't, because COLREGS don't work like that.
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...
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.
See also: http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back...