jedc

Radio is different on a submarine, in that most of the time you're on watch, you actually can't radio anyone. :) So radio spends a lot of their time routing message traffic, preparing outgoing messages, and then a bunch of day-to-day maintenance/crypto stuff. (On my boat, IT was run by Fire Control division, not Radio.) If anyone spends time in Radio outside of watch, it's because it's pretty private - only officers and people in the radio division can get into the room. No one ever slept in Radio on a submarine.

And yeah, there were about 5-6 people in the Radio division, IIRC.

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.)

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.)

My boat used to deploy to the Persian Gulf, and for many years as long as the boat spent at least a little time in certain areas, pay for that month was tax-free. A LOT of re-enlistments (with those 6-figure bonuses) were done to take maximum advantage of those rules.

You're not just standing watch, though. There's training (SO MUCH TRAINING), drills (SO MANY DRILLS), meals, and at least a little time for movies/relaxation. Trying to fit all this in is more complicated with 8 hour watches. (With 6 hour watches, you do all training/drills in the 0600-1200/1200-1800 time periods, and it works out easily.)

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...

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.

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.)

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.

oh, man, this is so spot on! "They're also generally liars." / "God's gift to mankind, except for the dumb ones"

ELT? I was the RCA on my boat. Had some of my notorious stories of my time on board happen when I was the RCA...

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.

Former submariner here (on the officer side). This article is fun and largely true, but also only scratches the surface of the weird culture of US submariners. Some other things to consider:

* submarines deploy for 3-6 months at a time, often-times rarely pulling into ports. Imagine being stuck with 130-150 of your closest friends for that period of time in close quarters. It gets weird.

* Law of Conservation of Happiness: Once you're submerged, happiness can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be taken from others. Easy for the CO/XO to be happy: they run drills & have cleaning days for the crew. But everyone learns other crew members' weaknesses and ruthlessly exploits them if necessary.

* Fatigue. I understand it's changed but when I was a submariner the boat operated on an 18-hour cycle: 3 sections of 6-hour watches. Humans aren't meant to operate on an 18-hour day, and so within a day or two of getting underway you just get into this permanent semi-fatigued state.

As for me, looking back on my time I enjoyed it and learned a lot. (Maybe more importantly, I learned a lot about myself.) That said, while I was on board it was a lot more difficult experience - it's a challenging life.

Former submariner here.

Re: bunking - that's largely untrue. The majority of crew members on board do get their own bunk. But there aren't enough bunks for everyone, so people have to "hot rack" (aka, share). On my boat, this typically meant 3 people sharing 2 beds - if three people that share the same watchstation are hot-racking, at least one of them has to be on watch at any given time, so the other two have a bed if they need it.

Also, a decent number (maybe 10-ish) of the beds/racks tend to be in the torpedo room. Those guys just need to be comfortable sleeping next to big underwater bombs. :)

It's changed a bit, but the thing that made everyone fatigued is that your body is used to a 24-hour day, but your work day was an 18-hour day: 3 sections of 6 hour watches.

There was a great documentary series about the making of Frozen 2 that shows exactly this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Unknown:_Making_Froze...

I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!

There’s special equipment/procedures for surfacing in the Arctic. That’s another really dangerous place to operate. (Default action in a submarine emergency is to get to the surface. That’s… NOT easy when there’s ice above you that’s potentially too thick to punch through)

In my case we were on the surface. Still a bad day, but we had more signs something potentially bad was about to happen. :(

Exactly, it’s a tiny radar signature, particularly compared to its actual size.

I personally had what we called an “ass-puckering” moment for exactly this reason once. At periscope depth in fog, huge cargo ship coming at us… it was the only time in 3 years on board I (or anyone else) had to call “emergency deep”.

Happy injuries were just 11 people. If a submarine is submerged, it's kind of like a weird building without windows, even though it may be traveling at a pretty significant speed. If you imagine being in your own office and then suddenly getting thrown sideways, forward, or up/down, it's easy to imagine getting hurt.

Submarines do you passive sonar extensively before going to periscope depth. There are lots of ways to figure out where contacts are, your range to those contacts, and then avoid them all. But there's no sensor that can tell you with 100% accuracy what's above you.

1 person was killed by injuries upon impact.

But there was one piece of equipment on board that normally runs for ~20-30minutes at a time. It had to run continuously until the ship came into port or the submarine would have sank and 130+ people would have died. They got VERY lucky everything worked out.

Yep, just sound. And you don't even know range, you only know how strong sound is on a particular bearing.

The Navy trains to do a series of maneuvers that helps you understand the range to the ships you do hear, and positions the sub most safely to come to periscope depth. And then while you're coming to periscope depth you're looking out to see if there are any indications you've screwed up. But yeah, there's nothing visual available when you're under the water.

Under the water you've got sonar, which only tells you sound (and sound pressure levels) from a particular bearing.

If you're up at periscope depth you can stick a periscope up to see and other antennas. If you're on the surface you typically send people up into the sail and the boat is commanded from there. (Only a couple people fit up there, so the people actually operating the rudder and navigating are belowdecks).

Overall you generally get a good indication of what's happening, but... it's definitely possible to be surprised.

That's not far off? Our boat grounded on a rock, and it sounds exactly what you'd think a 6000-ton steel tube going over a rock would sound/feel like.

Possibly? There are far fewer officers on a submarine, so there's more opportunity for training.

But submarines don't spend a heck of a lot of time on the surface where piloting skill matters. They stay submerged through the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Hormuz, a lot of the Red Sea, etc. Submarines are slow on the surface and appear much smaller than they really are, so it's generally best for everyone if they go underneath or around chokepoints.

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.

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

Former Navy submarine officer here. This sucks, but it happens. (It happened to a boat I was on.)

It could be hitting the bottom of the ocean (which nearly killed 130+ people on the USS San Francisco years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Co...), it could be hitting another ship above it (coming to and/or operating at periscope depth is dangerous), or potentially another sub.

Invariably people get fired, and whatever happens becomes a lesson learned that the Navy trains on in the future.

"This means reacting well to the news that an executive would like to move on." -- I took this section to be talking about accepting it when an executive quits. Some people handle this really well, and others don't.