Nukes, nubs and coners: The unique social hierarchy aboard a nuclear submarine

> 100% agree that submarine life is better than a surface ship.

Maybe it's different now, but I spent a week riding an SSN as an NROTC midshipman, when I had orders to nuke school a few weeks later (I was commissioned right after first-class cruise and had already gone through The Interview with the KOG; long story). In nuke school I switched to surface, asked for and got sent to the Enterprise, and was pretty happy to be there at the center of the action with great port calls. Standing OOD underway on a carrier — the officer on watch who's in charge of the entire ship, and de facto of the task force — was the most rewarding thing I've ever done professionally, especially during evolutions such as night flight ops. And you deal with (and learn to lead) sailors of all educational levels and from all walks of life, not just the cream of the crop as on subs.

Sounds like he knew he was about to be part of this person's all-in-good-fun humiliation. Entertainment like that cannot be passed up!

My experience of Navy personnel from ship visits as a contractor (commissioning and sometimes fixing SATCOM equipment for Australian Navy, US Special Operations ships etc.) has been that quite a lot of the higher ups seem to be pretty good. Maybe they try to weed out the jerks and psychopaths before they get up that high, or perhaps there are natural processes that do it? I have heard that the other services (especially Army) are a lot worse, so perhaps it's all to do with the realities of all these people having to be stuck together for months on ships or subs that means it's much more important to have good leaders at sea?

I had a time when I'd flown out to fix our satellite terminal, it was literally the only thing holding up this patrol boat from deploying, and the CO (commanding officer) came and asked how I was doing and then went and got me a Coke from the galley himself! There was absolutely no annoyance and anger at me because our company's equipment was holding it up, just "what can we all do to get this working as quick as possible". Another time we had to replace a large part of a gimbal on a frigate, with myself and a tech from our company and a couple of low-ranked seamen, and the top WEEO (Weapons Electrical Engineering Officer) happily jumped in and helped us drag a big crate up the side of the ship.

Of course it's different being a contractor coming in than being one of the lower ranked enlisted people, but on all the ships I've been on it always seemed to be pretty good relationally. Of course, I'd usually be on just before deployment so a few weeks or months later things may not have been so rosy either!

How do fights and conflicts work out? Surely under the stressful conditions of a sub, people have conflict. And keeping that conflict hot can't be good for everyone. Are the personality types less prone to conflict, or is there some general way it gets resolved?

This somehow reminds me of the Antarctic environment, where in Bellingshausen station one person found another's 'weak spot' - telling him the endings to the books he was reading. This eventually resulted in a near-fatal stabbing.

Again, it's not that way in general or I would have heard about it. Frankly, I'm appalled that an officer would tolerate and engage in this kind of behavior. Maybe it's a fast attack thing. In that case, I'm very glad I was on a Boomer.

Congress authorized nearly $800 billion dollars for DOD in December. What’s an appropriate figure? https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22840615/us-defense-spendin...

I have no experience in the Navy, but I wonder if ships and subs couldn’t maintain three different operating tempos, something like Standard, Elevated, and the already existing General Quarters.

Standard would be something like dividing the crew into two shifts, and the day into two 12hr blocks. One shift would be on-duty and the other off-duty during each 12hr block. For normal peacetime operations. 12hrs per day of rest time should be sufficient to prevent fatigue on long deployments.

Elevated would divide the crew into three shifts, and the day into three 8hr blocks. 2/3rds of the crew would be on-duty during any 8hr block, and 1/3rd off duty. 16hrs on and 8hrs off for every crew member. For operating in hostile areas or similar.

And of course there would be the already-existing third operating tempo, General Quarters, where the whole crew is awake and at battle stations, for imminent combat.

Then design ships and subs around this concept, with sufficient automation for Standard to be viable with minimum possible crew, and extra redundant control systems to utilize the extra crew during Elevated and GQ (and to still function with battle damage and crew loss if necessary).

I'm led to believe that the CO2 concentrations still routinely go above 2000 ppm though. Is that right?

I really enjoyed this Smarter Every Day episode that talks about maintaining air quality on a submarine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Ud6mHdhlQ

Is there a "dad with a thermostat" joke in there somewhere, only applied to CO2? :)

I've also wondered about this, but its also true that they work on an 18 hour day, which is also clearly terrible. Submariner above says that they are always "semi-fatigued". I don't think it's unbelievable that they are operating impaired.

I knew about hot-racking. That actually makes sense. But why not 8-hour shifts instead of 6?

It was like that in the 80's and 90's too. When we went on a special run, nearly the entire crew would hot rack.

Well, I'd imagine the 3 shifts are pretty set, due to habitable space design.

So X / 3 = watch duration

24 / 3 = 8 hours, which does seem long to be kept on hair trigger while performing physically and/or mentally taxing tasks.

I'd like to think the military did studies on performance with respect to watch duration. Or they could have just pulled them out of a hat.

Also, it seems like they might have indeed switched to 8-hour shifts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchkeeping#US_submarine_sy...

We certainly had that phrase on my boat.

I was based out of Holy Loch, New London and eventually the yard at Newport News. Never heard it, so maybe it was a WestPac saying

Too bad then when someone who doesn't have any underlings but whose job is crucial dies.

The Marines do have a baseline of knowledge you have to obtain. There's actually two phases to it:

1. Bootcamp. You're learning all the basics, from history to troop movement, and basic weapons qualification.

2. Infantry Training Battalion. A primer on top of bootcamp for navigation, shooting, troop movement, and weapons qualification. (These are required of every Marine in order to join "The Fleet")

3. Primary/Secondary school. This is your a-billet training (your primary job).

Where most of the other training occurs is once you're in the fleet, which occurs in your first unit after Step 3. There's a moderately high attrition baseline to get to the fleet, which signifies a minimally deployable Marine.

That there are!

As a quasi-related aside, at a startup I worked on a DARPA contract where the Marines were the theoretical end customer (FANG / Adaptive Vehicle Make). There are few cooler people in the world to chew the fat with than Marine warrant officers. YATYAS!

I think the Germans did have more independent thinking. It helped them. They frequently out-fought larger enemy groups, and the independence helped.

They eventually got buried in numbers (Russia) and buried in materiel (US). The US also eventually got around to allowing the same independent thinking, and the German independent thinking got eroded as Hitler meddled more and more in the war.

>It shattered my cliché view of the german army as first and foremost an organization built on discipline.

Discipline is not orthogonal to creative thinking. Wartime activities are not like they read after the fact. As the saying goes, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy". This means that junior officers and NCO's and even soldiers are expected to assess their changing situations and needs in order to satisfy (or retire from) the mission.

What kind of discipline is needed to start following the platoon sergeant when the platoon commander is down? It's even more critical at this point.

Fielding troops in a fight where they have incomplete knowledge requires empowering them with the authority to act in order to fulfill their potential.

Then there are militaries militaries where officers are chosen by some system of prestige (like a watery tart lobbing scimitars). These require absolute adherence to structure so as not to undermine the authority of those with the divine right/political connections.

Now, while this is all idealized, there comes a rank, above which promotion tends to be political as well as about success. The German military certainly had their issues with this, where there was a very real fear that went beyond merely not getting promoted.

Acoup (acoup.blog) has a few really nice posts about this topic (in relation with current Ukraine conflict no less.)

Basic takeaway is this - yes, everyone wants to run their army using (googlable keyword) Auftragstaktik. But that's very similar to saying that everyone in software business wants to run their software company like Netflix, Apple or Google at it's best - with responsible senior engineers that own their mistakes, show initiative, are skilled and don't let performance or power spats influence their ability to achieve goals.

But the reality is, that shaping such an organization (or company!) is exceedingly hard and requires massive culture shifts within people of the organization (which bring their own baggage from outside) and incentives. It's easy to say you want to be Apple, but hammering a 3rd tier company filled with backstabbing juniors into a highly performing machine is going to be an impossible task.

That's what many nations are facing when shaping their armies into better performing units - command-oriented hiearchies can be more effective when your people are poorly skilled and not culturally prepared to work together. Even US had some famous massive fails in WW2 where generals let many Americans die due to their dumb branch power struggles and egos.

Initiative always sounds great but it only works in a proper information environment. This is where the officer/ncm divide comes into play. Showing real initiative means apparently disobeying "orders". To do that you have to understand both your commander's intent when giving those orders and your commander's commander's (your 2-up) intent. That means knowing about other units and their roles in the operation. That's the stuff of officers. Supporting initiative means pushing information down, keeping lower-level officers aware of what is happening in other units. A senior NCM will spend time with his subordinates getting and keeping them ready. The officer will spend time way from his subordinates at meetings/briefs learning about what other units are doing. Long-winded chats with senior officers is how junior officers come to understand their intent. WWII Germany was very good at pushing that information down to junior officers. Russia, recently, has not.

Example: A platoon sergeant may know that the platoon has been ordered to be at X location at Y time. They can do lots of interesting stuff to make that deadline. But they don't have eyes on the entire reason for being at that location because they weren't in the planning meetings at the HQ. The LT was. The LT may "show initiative" by deliberately being late/early to the location because he perhaps sees that the operation is progressing more slowly/quickly than anticipated. The sergeant's job it to know everything about his subordinates in order to get them to do what is needed. The officer's job is to understand everything about how his platoon fits into the larger picture and, occasionally, adapt orders to support that vision.

Not only is that possible but that tendency was the cause (and unexpected finding) of the most famous social psychology "experiment" of them all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

> Is is possible there is a tendency/bias to simply view ourselves as more independant and any adversary we face as more "drone" like ?

This is possible, but the US tries to keep an accurate (or even slightly overinflated; see prewar predictions of Russia's combat effectiveness) idea of how skilled potential adversaries are.

As other comments have pointed out, Auftragstaktik (also known as mission tactics) is an ideal many armies try to reach for. It's possible that it's the ideal form of command and control, but that's not guaranteed. Mission tactics is sorta kinda not really Agile for the military (in the sense it was originally intended by the Agile Manifesto). This can work, or it can result in something like Google where promotions are tied to going off and making something new, not maintaining what you already have.

This sort of thinking is particularly dangerous in war though, because war is a continuation of politics by violent means, and therefore strategy and tactics _must_ be tied to the overall international politics of the state. Individual initiative can result in somebody finding a brilliant new strategy or coming up with a genius plan that would've never made it through an overbearing top-down command structure, or it can result in something like the Japanese military in the Second World War or the German military during both World Wars.

The Japanese military of the Second World War was essentially the head of a military dictatorship, with the added complication that the Army and Navy hated each other. Japanese grand strategy was largely driven by the actions of junior officers who'd go out and do something ridiculous, like when a Japanese lieutenant tried to destroy a rail line and blame the incident on the Chinese, giving his superiors a pretext to invade China, as in the case of the Mukden Incident. Japanese officers, empowered to make decisions for the nation by their own individual initiative, were ultimately responsible for the massive unnecessary loss of life by their continual refusal to even consider negotiations, even far after it was clear to everyone involved on both sides that the Japanese couldn't win.

The German military's descent into individual initiative madness began after Napoleon beat what was assumed to be the most powerful army in Europe at Jena-Auerstedt. Clausewitz, who formulated the "war is a continuation of politics by other means" line above, essentially saw the battle as proof that it was impossible to plan a battle from the top down due to the inherent friction and fog of war of military operations, which the German military refined into their concept of Auftragstaktik. After the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian Wars, the German Command Staff was convinced they'd found the key to key to winning battles by empowering their subordinates. Unfortunately, they also applied that principle upwards and worked to lessen civilian oversight of the military.

Of course, the tangled web of alliances, treaties, and mobilization timetables made the First World War somewhat inevitable, but what's striking is just how little effort went into preventing it at all: the German military was convinced that once the die was cast there was no point in trying to stop the war. The civilian government, convinced by the military that the best way to operate was to give the military an objective and then stay out of their way, let them. I want to be clear: there's many instances throughout history of the military gaining control over the government, but in Germany's case the military didn't gain control over the civilian government, nor did they want to. They simply wanted the civilian government to have as little power as possible over them. Later in the war the government was absorbed by the military, but it didn't start out that way.

This separation of concerns led to the "stab in the back" myth after the war, where the Germans believed that the army was unfairly tampered with by the government. The causes of the rise of Hitler and Nazism involve more than just Auftragstaktik writ large, but the concept of giving subordinates an objective and letting them go certainly didn't help. In particular, the Nazi state was marked by constant infighting by independent agencies: the military had numerous intelligence agencies with overlapping responsibilities who competed for information for example.

Now it may seem a bit of a leap to blame small-unit tactics for Fascism, but in the same way war is just politics extended into warfighting, doctrine is just culture extended into warfighting. The success of FAANG companies and startups is often attributed to the development of modern Agile-type software development practices, which shape the workflow, leadership style, and culture of successful companies, while toxic Agile practices are often blamed for the death of others. In the same way, the indoctrination of military leaders that the best way to lead is to empower subordinates, and the reinforcement of that principle throughout the leader's career all the way to the top, is responsible for, for example, the brilliant success of the first Gulf War, and the mediocre quagmire of the second Gulf War.

Returning to your original question, yes, the US and the West in general tends to view individual initiative as better than other systems, and we like to believe we're better at it that other militaries, due to the great success of mission tactics throughout history. But at the same time the West, in particular Germany who's had particularly bad experiences with mission tactics gone wrong, try to limit just how empowered the military can be, by ensuring the military stays under strict civilian control. As you might be able to guess from my general interest in military history, I'm a strong supported of a powerful military, but despite that I'm an even stronger supporter of a civilian controlled military.

> Is is possible there is a tendency/bias to simply view ourselves as more independant and any adversary we face as more "drone" like ?

In Russia it's definitely not the case. Mindless, drone like military mentality is very well-known and entrenched in the culture.

Cone - er

But its spelled differently. The correct spelling is `conr` for Can't Operate Nuclear Reactor.

I'm jaded because I was in charge of the ELTs division for a while, and during that time, I had one guy pop positive on a drug test (but he said he didn't take anything) and another guy submit a letter saying he was a drug user (even though he never popped positive for anything.)

And this was out of a division of ~5-6 people. So...

Their job, mostly.

Let's say they took a sample of the primary coolant, saw that pH was going to get very close to the lower limit, but also that they were going to be relieved of duty in 12 hours. Eh, just write it down a little higher and don't bother adding.

Now the next person takes their sample, and finds that pH is now out of spec. They probably suspect that the previous person lied, but they can't prove it, and anyway if they reported the numbers accurately, there would be a huge investigation, lots of audits, generally not good. So they'll just report that it's low and they need to do an addition, and then lambast the person when they see them next.

Would be more interesting to see colleges teach how submariners teach instead of teaching things like Myer-Briggs.

There's a fellow on Reddit who has been doing some interesting work modeling a notional RISOP — basically, what the Russians would do to us in various counterforce & countervalue scenarios. He cannot comment on SIOP planning as he used to work on it (civil engineer by training), but he can conjecture a RISOP based on open sources.

This person makes a point of targeting American dry cask nuclear waste storage sites. It takes out the power plant they're next to and ruptures the casks, resulting in Prolonged Suck downwind of the site. He also targets dams in a cascading manner, so even if we did "win the war", certain major cities would have been underwater for a sustained period of time.

FWIW, when asked where he'd go to hide out he said he wouldn't, that the loss of food supplies, medicine, etc. would be catastrophic no matter where you ended up in CONUS. Re: food, even if the grain fields of the midwest were intact, you've got no transportation, no power to process the grain into food products, no antibiotics to take care of that scratch you got from the combine, no fuel for the combine, etc. Many would survive but it wouldn't be fun. He lives in San Francisco, FWIW.

Are you just hypothesising, or do you have some reliable sources to base your narrative on?

There's only enough space to have 3 sections of watchstanders on board. So then it becomes a matter of length of watches. 6 hour watches aren't too long, and match up to meals every 6 hours. It's easy/straightforward, and no one gets screwed with always having watch on the midwatch and then also running drills during the day (meaning very little sleep).

8 hour watches could be a bit long, and more problematic is that crew members would always be on the same watch: 0000-0800, 0800-1600, etc. That's potentially even more disruptive.

https://www.crackle.com/watch/8196/2483291 (via google, but have fun with it... popcorn and turn down the lights ;-)

Failsafe is based on the same novel that Dr. Strangelove was based on - but while the (imho vastly superior) Kubrick movie was a comedy, Failsafe is more a warning.

If we trust these people to not initiate nuclear disaster/apocalypse, is it not a lesser trust to ask them to conduct a professional modern workplace?

What is the size of the radio room?

I am imagining something about the size of a closet, walls decked out with gear, knobs, blinking lights and what not.

One or two big monitors, a keyboard and a chair? All squeezed inside a closet sized space with little movement and problems standing up?

So if I was considered Radioman by rate, what is the IT rate called on a submarine?

I also got out in 2012 so things might have changed

Yes you had to pay unfortunately and you didn't have any space really to store them yourself so if the store was out you were SOL. You would purchase them in the Ship Store which was sort of like a mini-bodega.

I guess she's hit a new low.

I'm a former U.S. submariner. Probably 90% of my shipmates who had served at least 3 years would have said the same thing. They hated the Navy, hated sea duty, hated all of it.

And then towards the end of their commitment, with a several thousand dollar re-enlistment bonus on the table, most of them would sign up for another 6 years. The bonus would usually be blown in a week on a new vehicle.

Huh, I thought they kept the temperature in modern subs tightly controlled for the sake of the missiles. Maybe just the missile tubes receive this care?

Propaganda doesn't mean that it's fake, or that it's brainwashing. It's just "primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda." [0] In this case, the agenda is to recruit for the armed forces. In other words "government marketing."

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