Can any Navy vets comment or speak to these systems? I really worry about the proliferation of these digital interfaces. I’m curious to know how folks feel about them.
I was forced to be the on-duty electrician from time to time, despite not being an ship's electrician. One of the responsibilities for the on-duty electrician was to cut the right circuits in case of a compartment fire. Despite my repeated protests that I didn't know what I was doing and needed additional training, I was forced to be the on-duty electrician. Mind you, there were no other duties I had to perform, just that one, and just in case of a fire, so it's not like my every-day workload was increased. Determined not to get people killed in the event of an emergency, I asked the actual electricians what I should be doing. Turns out, they didn't know either. Their plan was, in case of fire, kill power to the whole ship. I don't think I need to tell you, this is exactly the wrong move to make.
There's an ever-growing number of electronic systems onboard ships, and an ever-shrinking number of sailors to run them. Qualifications are a joke in pretty much every department, at least in the surface fleet. Ships are in a constant state of disrepair, it's not uncommon for 30-50% of the communications equipment to be broken at any given time, parts taking months to receive (mostly due to budget restraints).
Sailors are routinely sleep deprived. It's not uncommon for a sailor to be up by 6AM, work all day, and then be steering the ship from 00:00 to 04:00, with no sleep, followed by maybe 2 hours of sleep before having to work again the next day, and possibly have another watch from 20:00-12:00. Rinse repeat.
Airline pilots are a prime example. How many airliners crash these days? CRM is one of the factors in making them so safe. Truck Drivers now have similar requirements and a much improved safety record as well. This is literally life or death, industries that ignore it are being unnecessarily reckless and unprofessional.
It always seems to me that modern staffing modeling/logic just skips emergency situations especially for critical systems. When I read this idea that generalization and reduced staffing was to replace specialization for exactly this reason. It's hard to moonlight as an electrician during the worst moments, even if you can somehow skimp by at the best moments. The whole point of a navy vessel is to be as self sufficient in all conditions not to have to page a vendor halfway around the world just because the system blew up again, and that's just orthogonal to a business where you can put in a few extra hours to fix a problem or can wait until Monday for a vendor to call back. I'd be interested to know if some people have seen better operations research and modeling to cover these sorts of organizational systems compared to the apparent style of cut a labour force until you see blood and reap the profits from minimizing that expense against long term stability.
The real problem is that they're reducing the crews on ships of all kinds, not just the newer ones. I inherited 2-3 people's worth of equipment responsibilities when I checked on board, and that's on top of all the extra nonsense the Navy has you do other than work on your equipment.