Redouble Crew Endurance Efforts— at the Deckplates

I recently completed a submarine executive officer (XO) tour. In my previous experience, many leaders had little to no concern for crew rest. Officers were averaging three to four hours of sleep a night, and often that was broken up. When a chief petty officer or officer was needed to perform an urgent task, their rack was “secured.” The enlisted sailors did not suffer to that extreme, but incidences of sailors going 24 hours without sleep were not uncommon.

As a junior officer, I expected and accepted this practice, until one night I was on the periscope and dozed off. No one knew, but it hit me hard that the only person on the boat who could see through the scope was too tired to do so. I took this seriously for the rest of my junior officer tour, department head tour, and XO tour, never standing a watch without six to eight hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. I am senior enough now to do that without questioning, but most officers and enlisted are not.

While they talk about it, I am not convinced that leaders in the surface warfare and submarine warfare communities believe in a culture of crew rest. When I recently asked a very senior officer about this, I was told, “We fixed this already.” With all due respect, sir, no, we have not. Instead of patting themselves on the back, Navy leaders should read the January 2020 Proceedings article, “Fatigue Is the Navy’s Black Lung Disease.”¹ There have been changes made and some improvement, but the cultural shift required to empower deckplate leaders and drive this culture to the most junior sailors is far from complete.

My opinion on crew rest was cemented during a staff tour with Destroyer Squadron 22 in Norfolk, Virginia. In my exposure to the aviators of Carrier Strike Group 2, I was struck by their devotion to crew rest and their willingness to not do things if the sleep was not right. When I reported as an XO at a meeting with the chief petty officers and officers, I told them my expectation was that every sailor sleep six to eight hours before watch—no exceptions. This met with a lot of resistance. I was surprised. I expected everyone to be happy, but they were not.

What I failed to do was lay out how we were going to make it happen. I loosely discussed a few things but did not give concrete examples. In retrospect, they did not believe me and saw my sleep expectation as another unreasonable request they would struggle to meet. The good news was I had the backing of the commanding officer (CO) and chief of the boat (COB). They did not feel the need to shout it from the mountain top, but they saw my plan and supported it—as good leaders do.

Getting Serious about Sleep

The first thing we did was make sleep planning for every sailor on a weekly basis an operational requirement. At the plan-of-the-week meeting, department heads had to prove that every event in the plan afforded each sailor six to eight hours of sleep before watch. We even invited several first-class petty officers to participate, as we noticed that there were often conflicts that the khakis could not see. This was not a perfect process and required a lot of strong corrections, but the ship’s leaders got it. There were tough spots and things in the schedule that had to be moved or even canceled, but well-rested watchstanders was always the top priority.

We forbade the term “all awake period.” That does not mean there were not times when everyone was awake, but it was only when necessary, not a routine event. We ran ship-wide drills—in fact, we ran them two to three times as often as most submarines—but other than during these drills, there were hardly any periods when the whole crew had to be awake. The cultural focus from the senior leaders on crew rest made the process much easier, and the plan would have been impossible to execute without it.

I spent my first tour as an enlisted sailor on a frigate and three years at Destroyer Squadron 22 as the submarine operations officer. I remember the 12-to-14-hour workdays being engrained in the culture. Now in the submarine warfare community, the command runs three eight-hour watches every day. Every sailor sleeps the same time every day. We do rotate the crew through the shift so that all watch sections are appropriately drilled. These rotation days are crucial, and the schedule must be carefully examined to ensure crew rest is properly managed, but even on these challenging days it is possible.

We also found it necessary to allow deviations from normal processes. If a piece of equipment broke, the department head or division officer did not have to be woken up to report it to the CO. It was routinely handled by the leading chief petty officer or even a divisional petty officer. Sleep before watch was the top priority, and most things were not allowed to get in the way. For example, messages normally routed by division officers were sometimes routed by the chief or first-class petty officers. Sometimes a department head or even the XO were bypassed when routing a message. And yet we survived.

It Doesn’t Change on Deployment

The submarine’s leaders set the example. During deployment, the CO stationed me as the command duty officer (CDO) underway, a position also used on aircraft carriers. I slept every day from 1500 to 2200. The CO delegated a lot of authority to me when he was sleeping, and I woke him only a handful of times on two patrols. As CDO, there was little I could not authorize. The CO slept every night from 2230 to 0730. If things came up when one of us was asleep, I made the decision if he was asleep or I was bypassed if I was asleep. This was easy because we all knew and trusted each other.

There were times that things were done that neither of us liked, but if it was not precedent-setting or unusually important, no one cared—we got over it. On one occasion the CO was being very directive about how to drive the ship and a department head got me up to engage in the conversation. We worked it out, and there were no major issues. The CO and I routinely took naps when we did have long days and encouraged others to do the same.

Special events that were threats to sleep, such as extensive corrective maintenance or maneuvering watches (sea-and-anchor detail), all had special watchbills that ensured everyone got sleep. On one occasion, when a major piece of equipment went down, we put electrical division in shift work and secured one of their watches. They worked for five days straight, 24 hours a day, and covered all their watches while still sleeping eight hours a day. Without this repair, the submarine’s mission would have been at risk. Electrical division was able to do this complex repair flawlessly, and the fact that the sailors were well-rested was a pivotal factor. We also allowed unassigned or non-vital sailors to sleep during maneuvering watches. On previous ships they would be awake “just in case.”

The Crew-Rest Culture

We repeatedly told the crew they were required to get six to eight hours of sleep before every watch and that only the CO could override that. We encouraged the sailors to speak up if someone violated protected-sleep periods. As I mentioned earlier, many of the officers and chief petty officers were initially against it because they thought it was not possible. We were not perfect implementing this plan. There were failures, but when we failed, we owned it, and this forced the officers and chiefs to accept the failure and critique it to determine how it happened and why it happened. It was almost always an oversight or miscommunication, and we dealt with it without overreacting.

In the end, forcing the issue and challenging the chief petty officers’ mess and wardroom to ensure every crewmember got their sleep was the only way to change the culture. The crew trusted us and saw us “walking the walk.” The whole crew, E-1 to O-5, got six to eight hours of sleep every day, completed back-to-back patrols in the COVID-19 era, and got the retention excellence award. They achieved two highly successful patrols especially in the “people centered” metrics, a tracking system U.S. Navy Submarine Forces uses to rank personnel management. When we returned home, the operations officer’s wife told me, “Thank you, this is the first time my husband wasn’t physically and mentally wrecked after a patrol.”

Crew endurance principles are not just an administrative requirement that leaders dictate, and the fleet cannot afford to simply check the block and go back to “business as usual.” The real challenge is making crew rest real at the deckplates—making a well-rested, safe crew the new “business as usual.”