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Comment by BitAstronaut | Hacker News Reader

> and whatever happens becomes a lesson learned that the Navy trains on in the future.

Former enlisted here. Unfortunately death by power point doesn't solve the problem of overworked sailors.

Easy fix: just have powerpoint training on not overworking your sailors and protecting sleep. For all hands. After waking them up with a fire drill.

(This happened to us on Ustafish)

Did you consider reporting that up the chain of command?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a better use case for the sarcasm slash \s than with this comment.

Kinda like how modern software corps have presentations on work-life balance.

yeah, one of the few zeniths of absurdity...

The PowerPoints will continue until morale improves!

> Unfortunately death by power point doesn't solve the problem of overworked sailors.

It really depends on who dies. Luckily, there are far better ways to solve the problem than by killing someone.

Was overwork / fatigue what caused the incidents OP listed?

It has been a historical issue for the Navy with respect to accidents: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-366.pdf

I don't think those details have been released on this incident though.

That is a possibility. The navy has had at least two serious collisions with other ships in recent years. Oddly enough, touchscreen-based UIs were determined to be one of the contributing factors!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...

Not related. But no real (even if configurable) button sucks a lot. It is not because old hand but imagine a pure iphone like camera for very quick photographic decision. Or video.

Move to a moving platform.

A lot of our muscle memory and sense help us.

God bless.

> Oddly enough, touchscreen-based UIs were determined to be one of the contributing factors!

There's no substitute for looking around (which of course is impossible in a submarine below periscope depth). As a JOOD* underway aboard an aircraft carrier, I had a tendency to spend a lot of time looking at the radar scope. But as soon as I qualified and started standing OOD* watches, I realized that I had switched to constantly scanning the horizon and the flight deck and only occasionally glancing at the radar.

* OOD = Officer of the Deck, the person on watch who's responsible for the safe navigation of the ship for that "watch" (generally, a four-hour period), reporting to the commanding officer. JOOD = Junior Officer of the Deck, in training to be an OOD.

Sometimes, sometimes not. In the case of the boat I was on, it wasn't fatigue, it was people new to their jobs combined with some stupidity.

There’s also the issue of half-assed murder boards qualifying people before they’re actually qualified.

who knows at this point, at least with regard to this latest incident, but it is always a possibility, given that the navy traditionally overworks enlisted crews on subs and gives them substandard living conditions... when i was on a fast attack sub 40 yrs ago, I had to work 6 hrs on and 6 hrs off, around the clock, while underway...and during one of my 2 6 hrs shifts off, I had the opportunity to sleep in a cot where two other men also slept during their shifts...it's called hot bunking...

this all goes back centuries, back to when navy crews were often kidnapped and made virtual slaves...the navy has always been operated for the benefit of the officer class...

and nowadays we have the issue of lowered standards as well.

> back to when navy crews were often kidnapped

This was called "Shanghaiing"[0] or "Impressment"[1] (ala a "press gang") and has an interesting history:

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/04/shanghaiing-how-tricke... (also see [3])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kelly_(crimper)

Lol this is 100% accurate. Former enlisted sailor on a ddg

Understood.

But in the case of subs, aren't there automated warnings and such? Certainly the computers are monitoring the signals as much as the humans.

Certainly the humans shouldn't be overworked, but how does a ultra high end military vehicle (?) strike something?

My understanding is they're relying on inertial navigation and water pressure sensor (to know the current depth) - you could turn on active sonar to map the sea floor, but that kind of ruins the stealth thing, and you can't look out a window. If there's a submerged obstacle that isn't mapped, especially another sub, you won't know it's there until it's too late. Which is pretty much what happened in the HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant collision.

Don’t forget the Pit Swords!

Aren't lessons incorporated into checklists and drills? I don't see how powerpoint could help anyone.

I'd imagine they don't always get to train on actual equipment. Sometimes there's classroom training where powerpoint could easily be used.

what about gundecking the UI watches :-)

No one said the training was PowerPoint.

I'm pretty sure that GP just did. Their post was a multi-pronged dig at their time serving - the first being that their training was (mostly?) ppt based, and secondly that sailors are overworked.

The training is not PowerPoint.

How do you think they deliver this training to enlisted?

Have you received training as an enlisted person? Because PPTs are but one - of numerous - ways, to include drills, exercises, and other physical doing.

Yes, 12.5 years enlisted. I've sat through more dumb PPT's that are a reaction to an incident than I care to remember. With Covid, the model seems to have moved to doing an online course which is a bunch of slides and some multiple choice questions.

12+ years here. You must’ve been on some shitty details. Thanks for your service.

Experience varies. I've enjoyed all my postings, some more than others and I don't regret enlisting for a second. But I've certainly seen a lot of reactions to make incidents in the form of watch a video or a PowerPoint presentation. Not so much for proper training.

The cutting edge in mediocre corporate training at the moment is drawing pictures about experiences based on open ended questions to which no one dares say an answer is wrong but instead passively aggressively use voting via small tags of coloured paper and resulting in nothing aside from a few quotes from self improvement books, and a cake and photo at the end of the day to *celebrate the journey", and that shading stick figure figurines with grey makes them look better.

Give me back days of dross PPTs please.

>With Covid, the model seems to have moved to doing an online course which is a bunch of slides and some multiple choice questions.

Took y'all long enough to get with the times. The civilian contractors have been doing these for years.

As a submariner, outside of A school, I got no PowerPoint training. It was all OJT

In the Navy the training is invariably PowerPoint, for officers and enlisted

The training is not PowerPoint.

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