Sleepless In Singapore: LCS Is Undermanned & Overworked, Says GAO

Gestart door dudge, 06/04/2014 | 16:53 uur

dudge

Gaat welliswaar niet om de LCS, maar toch.

Navy OKs changes for submariners' sleep schedules

GROTON, Conn. (AP) — With no sunlight to set day apart from night on a submarine, the U.S. Navy for decades has staggered sailors' working hours on schedules with little resemblance to life above the ocean's surface.

Research by a Navy laboratory in Groton is now leading to changes for the undersea fleet. Military scientists concluded submarine sailors, who traditionally begin a new workday every 18 hours, show less fatigue on a 24-hour schedule, and the Navy has endorsed the findings for any skippers who want to make the switch.

The first submarine to try the new schedule on a full deployment was the USS Scranton, led by Cmdr. Seth Burton, a cancer survivor. He said the illness he experienced as a junior officer helped convince him of the health benefits of keeping a sleep pattern in line with the body's natural rhythm.

"I know that there's lots of medical side effects to just not having a good, regular sleep pattern," said Burton, 41, of Huntsville, Ala.

A submarine sailor's day is generally divided equally into three periods: Time on watch, off time that is devoted partly to training and drills, and sleep. Under the new schedule, those time blocks are stretched from six to eight hours.

Submarine crews are not big enough to support more than three watch rotations and, beginning in the 1960s, the Navy capped shifts at six hours in part to limit fatigue as sailors manned the vessels' nuclear reactors. But the study by the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, at the submarine base in Groton, documented weariness that can set in every third cycle as sailors are working when their bodies are accustomed to sleeping.

Navy Capt. Steven Wechsler, the laboratory's commanding officer, said the study found the fatigue that came from working on the reactors an additional two hours can be balanced out by the longer, more consistent sleep period on the 24-hour schedule.

Since 2005, the laboratory has done experiments on submariners' sleep patterns, testing melatonin levels in sailors' saliva, surveying crews and fitting sailors with devices to measure activity levels and sleep quality. Last May, the Navy authorized submarine commanders to use the 24-hour schedule. Wechsler said he expects submarines will use it "when appropriate," noting it may depend on the mission type.

The circadian rhythm, a master biological clock that regulates when we become sleepy and when we're alert, has been the subject of many studies by industry and academia. The Navy's surface fleet is also trying schedules that align more with the natural body clock: A strike group deployed with the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush is trying a schedule of three hours on, nine hours off.

The Groton lab focused specifically on applications for submariners, one of the only groups outside a laboratory to operate without any external time cues.

While the medical benefits may be clear, the transition to a 24-hour schedule poses logistical challenges on cramped submarines.

On the attack submarine Scranton, which returned in January to Norfolk, Va., from a seven-month deployment, Burton said the new schedule initially led to backlogs of laundry and frustrations over access to laptops and exercise equipment. The enlisted sailors on Burton's crew kept a straight, eight-hour rotation, but he structured shifts for officers in a way that allowed all of them to be awake and work together for part of each day.

He said sailors always managed to adapt to the old schedule, but after working out the wrinkles, the new hours were well received.

"The crew loved it," he said. "I saw a great response."

http://news.yahoo.com/navy-oks-changes-submariners-sleep-schedules-165501963.html

dudge

Sleepless In Singapore: LCS Is Undermanned & Overworked, Says GAO
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on April 04, 2014 at 12:18 PM

UPDATED with US Navy response

WASHINGTON: Some spectacular glitches marred the first overseas deployment of the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, including an electrical failure that left the USS Freedom "briefly" dead in the water. Now Breaking Defense has obtained an unpublished Government Accountability Office study of Freedom's Singapore deployment that raises more serious questions about a long-standing worry: whether the small and highly automated LCS has enough sailors aboard to do up all the work needed, from routine maintenance to remedial training.

By now, the Navy brass have surely gotten tired of GAO taking shots at LCS. But according to GAO, LCS sailors are getting literally tired of the ship: They averaged about six hours of sleep per day, 25 percent below the Navy's eight-hour standard, and key personnel such as engineers got even less. That's in spite of

   -extensive reliance on contractors both aboard and ashore, with a "rigid" schedule of monthly returns to Singapore that restricted how far from port the LCS could sail;
   -the decision to increase Freedom's core crew by 25 percent, from 40 to 50 — the maximum the ship can accommodate without a "significant" redesign; and
   -the 19-sailor "mission module" crew, who are supposed to operate LCS's weapons, helicopters, and small boats, pitching in daily to help the core crew run the ship's basic systems.

The core crew's engineering department in particular told GAO they had no idea how they'd keep the ship going without help from the mission module's engineers. But the module the Freedom took to Singapore, the "anti-surface warfare" module that includes several small boats, has many more engineers than the forthcoming mine-countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare modules. In fact, while the entire 19-sailor anti-surface module crew has skills useful in running the ship itself, the MCM crew has only four sailors who could help, and the ASW module only one. That means an LCS outfitted to hunt mines or subs would effectively be 15 to 18 sailors short — about 20 to 25 percent.

GAO admits at least some of the problems are first-time-out glitches that affect any new ship. The Navy upped the Freedom core crew from 40 to 50 at the last minute, for example, so the 10 new sailors came in unprepared and required as much training time during the deployment as the other 40 put together. The service is also improving the LCS training program, which the entire crew found wanting, though a complete reform will take two to three years.

The Navy is also revising the LCS maintenance program for greater flexibility, less reliance on contractors, and more use of diagnostic sensors — already being installed on the USS Fort Worth, which will head to Singapore later this year — to allow "conditions-based maintenance" when parts show signs of potential failures, instead of having to manually check (for example) each of the ship's 350 valves once a month. The new maintenance program should also fix simple mistakes like not having enough Internet connectivity for maintenance operations at the pier in Singapore.

Finally, Freedom's frequent mechanical failures stem in large part from glitchy equipment that has been replaced with more reliable models on other LCS ships. Not all these fixes can be retrofitted to the troubled Freedom, so the first-born LCS may remain the class's problem child and a maintenance headache throughout its service life, more suited to training and/or hazing new LCS sailors than for overseas operations. But the rest of the Freedom class should function better — though GAO warns the fixes aren't yet proven.

Even more worrying is that the Lockheed Martin-built Freedom represents only one of the two LCS designs: General Dynamics' Independence class is entirely different — and that design has never been deployed abroad. Indeed, the Independence itself has spent much of its time testing prototype mission modules, so GAO feels there's far too little data on how the ship itself holds up when it spends weeks on end at sea.

The Navy moved so fast on LCS that it has already contracted for 24 ships, 12 of each version, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has cut the program at 32 ships pending an extensive review of alternative vessels, from a modified LCS to a new and tougher type of ship. While Hagel's guidance emphasizes the LCS's shortcomings in high-intensity combat, you can bet basic maintenance will get major attention too.

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/sleepless-in-singapore-lcs-is-undermanned-overworked-says-gao/