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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This is also very important for lorry drivers, to the extent that there's all sorts of tracking and enforcement for how long they're driving. But in this case it sounds like poor staff management: this isn't a convenience store running on zero-hour contracts, they should have a shift plan in place that provides adequate cover before even leaving port.

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Bingo. Problem is USnavy has large + increasing at sea staff/billet shortages, but at the same time has to (or insist on) on doing more missions with less sailors. You can build a better checkbox, but can you build a good enough checkbox to allow a lorry driver to drive 20 hours a day?

Of course you can. Just take a cue from the standard physical throttle design: https://i.imgur.com/mK0vYth.png

Now there's no such concept as a ganged/unganged state. You move the middle (which has the larger area, since it's the most common tool) to move them together, and the side sliders if you want to control thrust individually.

The shift (watch) plan is set by the ship's officers but they have to work with the personnel that they're assigned. There is a constant shortage, especially for experienced sailors on surface vessels. But they have to put to sea anyway to accomplish the mission, which causes personnel burnout due to overwork thus worsening the shortage in a vicious cycle.

The only real solutions would be for Congress to either significantly increase personnel funding, or trim back the mission set to make it sustainable at current personnel levels. There is no political support for either solution and so the problem will persist.

If they are putting people on shift who are too tired to competently do their job, I assume many of those jobs aren't actually important. Some of the jobs are important (and when done wrong lead to these kinds of incidents), but given how widespread sleep deprivation is from people's comments here, clearly a lot of the jobs can be done very poorly without affecting operations.

That sounds like a management issue. Congress doesn't manage how ships run. The Navy makes all those choices itself.

Unfortunately what are you supposed to do when you 80% of the Sailors you're supposed to have, and that number was already 20% less than what you needed to actually fill a watch bill?

at some point you are short handed enough that you’re combat-ineffective whether you pretend or not.

Yes.

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