The CO and XO shouldn't be sleeping while their ship is crossing a busy sealane full of behemoth freighters driving on autopilot in the dark.
The Navy deliberately understaffs their vessels to meet unrealistic budgets. Overwork, fatigue, mistakes, and catastrophe are the inevitable consequence.
The only thing more predictable is the scapegoating of ship personnel and the untouchability of those who create the conditions which guarantee eventual disaster.
I always suspected this was partly because lots of sailors means a big navy base, and a big navy base means a booming local economy in that congressional district.
If that also helps politically that is a bonus.
Source: I once talked to some dude who was both important and in a Navy.
Most current sailors I talk to are overworked, training gets gundecked, following safety procedures and impede advancement - what's reworded is a "can do" approach that takes large risks.
I don't know anyone currently serving, in any command, who says they have too many people.
It's not so much that we were doing "unnecessary" work, but rather that many tasks which required a dedicated person were so trivial that any reasonably competent sailor could easily handle two or three of them at once, or the task could be even more reliably automated.
One quick example is the fathometer operator: When we were sailing in shallow or uncharted waters, a sailor had to spend hours doing absolutely nothing but watching the depth gauge so he could give a verbal warning if we were in danger of running aground. This is not a job that requires a person's full attention even in the most challenging undersea terrain.
To some extent it's necessary to break jobs down into simple repetitive tasks so that they can reliably be done in a high-stress environment, but the navy really took it to an extreme. The end result was the overwork and fatigue that others are referring to.
If you don’t believe a warship needs that many personnel on duty, that is different. Most of the crew aren’t there to sail. Cargo ships, for example, have a dozen crew at most. And their duty is to sail the ship from one port to another.
Why aren't these people "the best of the best", to quote the trite line from Top Gun?
According to Wikipedia, the US Navy has 282 deployable combat vessels. It employs a total of 325,673 active duty personnel plus 270,265 civilian employees.
So out of those 600,000 people, they can't find a few thousand who are willing, able, and capable of commanding a destroyer? The US Naval Academy alone graduates 1000 people a year. Where do they all go? What do they all do?
Really? I'm serious. My understanding is that the absolutely most prestigious military assignments are in "command" positions. Those assignments are the key to climbing the promotion ladder.
This whole thing makes no sense to me.
Surface warfare officer is not the most desireable job for most people.
And it sucks so bad most people have much better options and leave after the initial five year commitment.
According to Wikipedia, the US decommissioned its last battleship in 1992. Even then, the US Navy largely forswore battlehsips after WWII, and battleships were decommissioned and recommissioned twice during the Cold War. The last time two battleships ever fired at one another was the Battle of Surigao Strait 74 years ago.
This was from a younger Navy guy and older Navy guy swapping stories. The older guy was horrified.
Really, the advent of military aviation made them more or less obsolete in WWII.
There were almost no ship-to-ship battles involving battleships in WWII; they were used almost exclusively to shell inland targets close to shorelines, but there are much more efficient ways to do that and those ways aren't limited to striking targets within gun range of the shoreline.
So it's pretty much carriers and destroyers as far as combat ships on the surface these days. (Not sure the term "destroyer" is used much these days, but the non-carrier surface combat ships are roughly comparable in size to what would have been called a destroyer in the old days)
And then of course you have the many amphibious assault ships, support ships, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currently_active_Unite...
1. IN WW2, US Navy admirals learned painful lessons to trust captains who manage subordinates well, not the superiors.
When US was suddenly pulled into WW2, the submarines of US navy in WW2 did not achieve much at beginning. For months, US navy submarines failed to sink enemy ships. One big factor was faulty torpedoes. US navy had recently finished developing a new type of torpedo with a magnetic detonator. It was supposed to be a very effective weapon. But due to budget restrictions before WW2 (in the Great Depression), not enough testing was done. If I recall correctly, after spending the precious budget to develop a new type of weapon, not one complete torpedo with live warhead was actually fired in a realistic manner. But I digress.
The real reason US submarines did not achieve much initially at beginning of WW2 in the Pacific theater was the captains on the submarines. A captain in a WW2 submarine disproportionately influences how well or badly the submarine's crew performed. The captain's aggressiveness, skill, carelessness, excessive cautiousness, and etc all directly determined what the crew in the submarine achieved. When the US submarines in Pacific theater finally began to sink Japanese ships at a satisfactory level, it was discovered not a single (or very few) US Navy captain who had reached the rank before the war was still in command of a US submarine. They had failed to achieve results, and were replaced with proven captains who knew how to actually manage the crew below him on the submarine, not manage the higher officers in officers' club.
Basically, before WW2, a US navy officer who was competent enough, projected image fit for a captain, AND managed his superiors well got the promotion. Well ok, previous statement is my own assumption. But the fact is when a shooting war began, it was discovered the officers who got command of a submarine prior to the beginning of WW2 couldn't find the enemy or shoot straight when it really mattered.
US navy finally began promoting officers who knew how to manage the crew below him well and had a killer instinct, not the ones with superior social skills. US navy brass learned that the enemy did not care how good a US Navy officer was at self marketing/promoting.
2. My own managers who moved onto bigger firms.
I've been in US tech scene (IT), about 15 years. Of the managers I had during that time, 2 managers (at separate firm/time) who were above me went on to work at globally well known tech/entertainment firms in tech VP roles. I mean really well known firms. Not Google or Facebook but older, established firms. Top of the heap. Because I worked in small companies with these managers, I got to observe them in close proximity.
What I remember the most of them 2 is how incessantly they visited/chatted/hung-out with the CEO. Sure a lot of it was work I'm sure, but I also know it was a lot of befriending, kissing up, using one's social skill. I as a staff member was given slices of their time, but nothing like the attention given to the CEO.
And sure enough, both firms were closed down. Of course a LOT of it was beyond their control. But it also shows they as managers couldn't find the right project to tackle or manage their subordinates effectively so the company could make $ to survive. Well, maybe or maybe not.
But I do know they spent a lot of time and energy befriending the higher-ups above them. And, I trust the hard lessons US Navy admirals in WW2 learned, that were paid for with lives. The lesson that you should avoid those who spend much energy at self promoting, as they don't actually deliver when it matters.
For a domain (tech industry) that is supposedly dominated by facts and numbers, there is a lot of promotion and hiring based on such mysterious feelings, not based on actual facts and numbers. Culture fit?
In the Star Trek reboot Kirk goes straight from Academy sophomore to commanding a capital ship in a matter of days.
It is not like that. It takes many years. Only a small percentage of Academy graduates will ever get there. And many have no ambition to either, there are lots of other challenging and prestigious jobs in the Navy. You could be a fighter pilot or a SEAL platoon commander, neither of those career paths leads to commanding a destroyer.
I think some really big fights and even a bit of an ass kicking has some rejuvenating powers for big military apparatus. The military likes to really teach from mistakes, they make lots of noise about what does and doesn’t work after a big fight, they change. I’m not saying the navy hasn’t seen action but they definitely have t seen WWII style battleship to battleship action in 70 years, we don’t even have battleships anymore...
The question isn't why one person is asleep, it's why there's nobody filling the role.
Either they're slacking or there aren't enough, and you can fix either problem with 10 quality candidates per ship.
That was certainly how it worked 40 years ago aboard the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not the starship). Day or night, the CO would always come to the bridge whenever another ship got to within about two- to four miles and was predicted to come within one mile. And in traffic, e.g., transiting the Strait of Malacca, the skipper would be on the bridge pretty much continuously. (Not the XO; his full-time job was basically running the ship's internal operations.)
Or, as the broader lesson goes, taking a risk without it blowing up doesn't necessarily mean the risks are less. It might just mean you were lucky.
I'm not asking rhetorically -- honest question.
And to be sure, it's not quite apples to apples. An aircraft carrier normally spends most of its time in the open sea: To launch and recover aircraft (other than helos and vertical take-off and -landing aircraft), the carrier needs miles and miles of room to steam at high speed into the wind without having to change course for traffic. (If you're steaming into the wind at, say, 30 knots, the aircraft being launched or recovered get a head start in staying above stall speed.) Depending on the circumstances, even in peacetime a carrier might have one or more weapons-loaded aircraft in alert status, ready for launch on comparatively-short notice as a combat air patrol (CAP). When that's the case, the ship would need to be away from traffic, in case it had to quickly turn into the wind to put up a CAP. That's why, except when entering or leaving port, or transiting, carriers usually stay away from highly-trafficked areas.
If the CO and XO are so critical that the ship needs one of them during normal operations I think there is a bigger problem.
What happens in a conflict that lasts more than 24 hours? They alternate schedules and just don't talk to eachother much?
What happens if one of them is incapacitated? The ship is ineffective for half of every day?