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One story that still haunts me about the culture onboard the submarine.

We were dropping the trash and one requirement is that an officer be present. I was told to go get an officer. I found the Chief Engineer sitting in his room reading his Bible. I asked if he could come and be the required officer. He said, "sure."

When people saw the Chief Engineer behind me they mocked, "Hey! Couldn't you have gotten someone more senior?"

I didn't know that "officer" in this role meant to go find an Ensign or Lieutenant JG, not the officer who's 3rd in command of the whole boat. Folks got a lot of laughs out of that one.

Overall, though, life on a submarine is infinitely better than a surface ship. I served on a fast attack sub and a frigate. The people on a submarine help make life better because most of the jobs on a submarine are advanced and require clearances that people can't get if they're on drug waivers or dropped out of school.

That Chief Engineer sounds like a good dude. (And he said "sure", so...)

100% agree that submarine life is better than a surface ship. I personally would have had a much harder time with the officer/enlisted relationship on a surface ship, in particular.

> 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.

Oh, interesting! I thought that the sub community got all the nukes fresh from school, and the surface nukes all had a sea tour under their belt before getting sent to Power School / Prototype.

You make a compelling case - OOD on a carrier has got to be a hell of an interesting job! Personally I liked the smaller team on a sub, getting to do TS missions, etc. But I can definitely see where you're coming from. (And frankly, I still think submarine life is better than traditional non-nuke SWO life, still.)

I think you’re right, nowadays CVN nukes get a div-o tour before power school. Somewhere they work in SWOS. My class of surface nukes was the first to be sent to SWOS right after prototype (this was 1975), and power school was right after commissioning.

I recently met someone who had desired to be a nuclear operator on a sub, but ended up working an aircraft carrier. At the time that she joined, the Navy didn't permit women to serve underwater-- so apparently operating surface nukes despite having never taken your Jules Verne voyage was permitted, at least ~20 yrs ago.

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!

Haha, exactly! Ultimately harmless and it'll make for a good story that would one day be immortalized on HN. Good judgement call on their part!

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!

Odd comment about the Army there. The culture of Army officership is all about leading from the front, carrying your own rucksack and cleaning your own rifle, eating last, and taking care of people (literally inspecting feet for injuries in the field). Senior Army officers I've met are overwhelmingly gregarious and affable, if not always competent in the broad array of things they're charged with.

My Cold War trash story - One of my roommates in college served on the USS Peterson (DD-969, a Spruance class destroyer), and in the middle of the Atlantic they decided to have some fun with the Soviet "fishing trawler"[0] that was shadowing them. Normally, the crew would weigh the trash bags down so that they immediately sank.[1] But this time they "forgot" to put the weights in and filled the trash bag with adult reading material with all the good parts cut out. And then coated it with the kitchen slops (potato peelings, spoiled meat, etc).

As the Soviet trawler swooped in to claim their floating prize, the Peterson crew was at the fantail laughing at what their reaction would be when they opened the bag up. Yes, they trolled the Soviet Navy.

[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/encyclopedias-almanacs...

[1] No classified material was in them - it was mostly to keep the surface of the ocean clear and prevent it from washing up on shore. These days only degradable garbage is thrown overboard. Trash is compressed and stored until the ship makes port.

> Law of Conservation of Happiness: Once you're submerged, happiness can be neither created nor destroyed

This is an example of the weirdness you were referring to because this is something your crew came up with to cope. Every crew has it's own coping strategy and culture, which I learned when we combined Gold and Blue crew before heading into dry dock. The nukes on my Gold crew were almost universally nice and supportive of each other, save for laughing at the guy who had his girlfriend break up with him at 40 words per week.

edit: I was enlisted, not officer but nukes at least blurred a lot of those lines

I worked with an ex submariner in the oilfield and he was fond of this phrase, must be a submarinerism

We certainly had that phrase on my boat.

In the form of "the law of the conservation of misery" it was apparently a favourite saying of Steve Jobs' not-always-loved subordinate manager Bob Belleville https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... , and sure enough Belleville had apparently been in the US Navy: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

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

>But everyone learns other crew members' weaknesses and ruthlessly exploits them if necessary.

This is literally my worst nightmare. Highschool bullying 2.0 except with no escape. I know for sure I'm not military material.

It's really not that bad the majority of the time. However, you train yourself not to have a reaction to stuff... because if you are particularly offended by {extreme porn, seeing penises, people criticizing your favorite team, taking "your mom" jokes to heart} that's an easy button for someone to press if they get bored.

Submarines are pretty unique places in that every person is pretty critical in an emergency. So while it can be brutal at times, it's also pretty collegial.

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?

Oh, there's definitely conflict. I'm a pretty calm guy but I got in a pretty memorable screaming match with the senior most enlisted guy on the boat. But most everyone has incentives to work it out - its to no-one's benefit if people are so hung up on something they can't do their job. In my case, because of that screaming match I really earned that guy's trust (and actually my whole watchteam's trust).

You do end up getting a spidey-sense for when it's too much for people, though. That quickly gets escalated to the CO/XO and people get transferred off the boat. (That's rare, though.)

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.

I was a shy, socially awkward type when I enlisted--definitely not military material. The experience did me a lot of good. For the first year or so I was a target of relentless bullying, but slowly I learned how to stand up for myself verbally, and got better at not attracting negative attention in the first place.

I was looking into the ventilation rate of things and not sure if it was a misprint but submarines apparently have 8000ppm of CO2 when submerged, which to me sounds insane as we know for sure 1000ppm is when it starts affecting your mood, judgements, and decision making capability..

There are CO2 scrubbers on board, the crew turns them on/off to control concentrations. It's one of the things I checked before I went on every watch as OOD (officer of the deck): the CO2/O2 concentrations. (One of our weapons officers was really sensitive to CO2 concentrations and would s*t all over any OOD who let them get too high.)

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

that is pretty darn cool, not sure how to convert that torr to ppm though, in they video they mentioned it's partial pressure? so sounds like one is able to work out percentages therefore ppm by the reading?

To convert a partial pressure in torr (mmHg) to ppm, you divide the partial pressure by the total atmospheric pressure (both in torr) and multiply by 1 million.

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

I'm also interested in the cognitive effects of CO2, and I have a great deal of skepticism in the studies that say small amounts cause noticeable deficits precisely because we know people can carry out complex tasks for months on end inside a submarine. I know other people have also remarked on this (absurd!) inconsistency but haven't seen it satisfactorily resolved.

I will say that it's much easier to believe that the studies are somehow flawed and people don't get seriously impaired by 8000 ppm than it is to believe that we've gone nearly seventy years without noticing that the people who are supposed to launch nuclear strikes in the event of WW3 have been retarded all this time.

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.

The military has done numerous studies showing that CO2 concentrations far higher than 1000ppm don’t have any cognitive impacts. That combined with the real world examples of submarine crews working in high CO2 concentration, means that the most likely explanation is a flaw in the studies showing severe cognitive impact at 1000ppm.

Here’s a good summary of some of the data from a hacker news comment a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863319

It seems perma-fatigue could be a serious problem on a warship. Any idea why the Navy doesn’t restructure the working/waking hours to better optimize crew alertness and focus?

I think it’s similar to doctors: a combination of traditional and demands of the job/flow of work based on existing process.

It has been a serious problem, you read in the news about some warship crash every few years! It's likely that the Navy hasn't restructured things because they simply do not need to and have no incentive to do so. We're not exactly in a peer conflict.

Because until an admiral gets fired, nobody takes some minor fatigue-related mishap like a destroyer running into a container ship (killing a few sailors on board, putting the ship out of action, and causing XY million dollars in damages) seriously.

It's a pervasive and substantial problem in the US Navy atm. The various collisions, groundings, and sabotage in recent years indicates that. The root of it is the navy is being operated at a tempo that it has insufficient ships and sailors to properly maintain. But congress and leadership keep this mess going.

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...

Depends on how many oceans we simultaneously want to be able to fight major wars on.

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).

The problem with ballistic missile subs (and to a lesser extent ships) is that the entire world, except home port, is a hostile operating area.

You know how nuclear war starts?

You get an ELF ping to come to comm depth to receive launch orders. Or you get a torpedo barreling towards you because the other side got their orders first and had an attack sub shadowing you.

We learned in Navy boot camp, guaranteed 1 hour of sleep per day. I think it was not really a guarantee. Everything from the first day forward is from that perspective.

> the boat operated on an 18-hour cycle

Why? That seems incredibly stupid. It's unnecessary and counterproductive and the stakes are high. So why do it?

yeah, it was the same back when i was on a fast attack sub in the 1970s...and here's the fun part--2 other dudes shared my bed/cot...it's called hot racking...I sleep for 6 hours, then get up and go aft to stand watch or do maintenance, and dude #2 gets in the same cot and sleeps for 6 hrs...he then gets up and dude #3 gets in for 6 hrs...you get 6 hrs in bed per day...FTN...

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.

I know this doesn't answer your question but I believe it's a long-standing tradition on many navy and civilian vessels across the world. I only know mariners on oil-producing vessels in Australia but they have all talked about that 6-hour roster. Others will know more than me, but I don't believe this is unique to US Navy.

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...

Because the stakes are high. A pampered crew will never handle a life or death situation if their frame of mind isn't close to the verge of life or death 24/7.

What’s it like getting sick on a submarine? Can you quarantine or do you sometimes just have people bringing vomit buckets to their stations?