With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing that leaves them sleep-deprived leading to these incidents?

From my comfy armchair, for a peacetime navy ship cruising around, there is "nothing" to do, but keep the lights running. Routine maintenance, monitor foreign ships, etc. I would expect boredom to be a more significant problem than overwork. Clearly, I am missing something.

A good article, and part of what turned me onto this issue a few years back, is this piece by ProPublica investigating the USS Fitzgerald and McCain crashes

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...

A quick break down:

* chronic understaffing - ships have a certain number of billets. 7th Fleet in particular has been sending ships to sea without all their billets filled, particularly in the junior officer ranks. This means that you're not just doing your job, but also doing the job of the person who isn't there

* deferred maintenance - there's a lot of redundancy on these ships (warships tend to like that) so if something breaks it's not catastrophic - you can just use the back up until the sophisticated main system is repaired in port. However, after years of "just using the back up," those systems are failing, and HAVE to be repaired, often at sea. So, in addition to your job, and the job of the person who isn't there, you might also have to go help fix the HVAC or some weapon system or what have you.

* aggressive operational tempo - the Navy has said they need X number of boats to do the tasks required of them. They are funded for/have X-N boats. In order to make up the deficit, the ships they have are deployed on longer cruises, with less time to fix things. This is the core issue that's the root cause of these other failure cases, in my opinion.

>With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing

Probably not, but maybe it's possible to give a taste. My perspective is all submarines, which is certainly different. Maybe read this and assume that the superficial details are the only exaggerated parts: https://subpargroup.substack.com/

Your core 'job' underway is being 'on watch': think tollbooth operator, maybe. You show up to work 45 minutes early so you can talk to everyone at work and learn everything that's abnormal or broken from the night before. Then for 8 hours a day, you're a tollbooth operator. When you finish up with that, you step next door to have dinner. Then, half the booth operators go to run street sweepers for an hour (again, this is after the toll booth shift) while the other half go to consolidate all the handwritten toll records made during the shift. On a simple day, that's 30 minutes, but it could be 3 hours if some of the numbers don't add up. Now you're ten hours in, and that's not too bad if all you had to do is collect tolls. But good luck with that.

Because you're also the guy who keeps all the lifting gates in good repair, or the guy who maintains the internet infrastructure or cooling or lighting to the tollbooths. And some jerk crashed through one of the gates last shift, breaking the arm off. In case that wasn't bad enough, the arms for your tollbooth were last produced in East Germany in 1987, and now you've been coasting on the fumes of that stockpile for 30-some years. The other toll plazas in your consortium probably have some, but they'll all lie and say they don't because their lives become more inconvenient in every way if you take their spare parts. But you have to find a way to make one shake out anyway. Don't sleep until you know how. You can send three emails per day to figure out how to fix it.

By the way, you have to go take your monthly tollbooth operator knowledge test. And be up one hour early to practice putting out tollbooth fires tomorrow morning.

Finally, the tollbooth consortium also operates ICBM silos, and you have to be ready at a moment's notice to remember how to do that.

Also, the guy who keeps the internet running is home for 3 weeks with his new baby, so you'll have to fix that too before you can email people about those toll gate arms.

All the people who failed in the past at what you're trying to fix are hanging out in a lounge playing Xbox and mostly getting paid the same as you.

With Russia letting 50yr+ olds join I wonder what's more preferable. Older experienced but out-of-shape guys coming out of retirement or recruiting younger people but with lower mental and medical score testing?

All the politicians and desktop generals should be added to the crew lists the day war breaks out, that should solve a few problems.