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Navy Returns to Compasses and Pencils To Help Avoid Collisions at Sea (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Urgent new orders went out earlier this month for United States Navy warships that have been plagued by deadly mishaps this year. More sleep and no more 100-hour workweeks for sailors. Ships steaming in crowded waters like those near Singapore and Tokyo will now broadcast their positions as do other vessels. And ships whose crews lack basic seamanship certification will probably stay in port until the problems are fixed.[...] The orders issued recently by the Navy's top officer for ships worldwide, Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden, drew on the lessons that commanders gleaned from a 24-hour fleetwide suspension of operations last month to examine basic seamanship, teamwork and other fundamental safety and operational standards. Collectively, current and former officers said, the new rules mark several significant cultural shifts for the Navy's tradition-bound fleets. At least for the moment, safety and maintenance are on par with operational security, and commanders are requiring sailors to use old-fashioned compasses, pencils and paper to help track potential hazards (alternative source), as well as reducing a captain's discretion to define what rules the watch team follows if the captain is not on the ship's bridge. "Rowden is stomping his foot and saying, 'We've got to get back to basics,'" said Vice Adm.
After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the surprising findings was that adding more inspectors could actually make things less safe. Each inspector figured if they skipped inspecting a part, the other inspector(s) would catch it. So they felt it was not that big a deal to be lazy at their job and skip a few of the harder inspections here and there. But when all the inspectors think this way, the chances of a bad part passing "inspection" increased compared to if there was only one inspector.
In the same way, if you know there's a computer system which tracks your ship's location and the location of all other ships, and automatically sounds an alarm if it detects a collision course, then you're more likely to slack at your job and start reading slashdot or the latest J.K. Rowling book. OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task. Double or multiple redundancy works for equipment, but not always for people.
Let me lay it out for you. If you join the Navy and get any kind of decent ASVAB score you will get assigned to a service 'A' school and become a technician. If you don't you get sent to a ship's deck division, where your job is to clean and paint and stand deck watches.
So basically the deck division consists of the least capable people on the ship. Every officer who stands Officer of the Deck has another job, except for the deck officer who is in charge of deck division. These other officers supervise cooks and admin types and technicians. The First Lieutenant supervises these guys.
Working hours on a ship is no joke. Basically you stand watch on a 4 and 8 rotation. Four hours on watch and eight off. Now if that 8 happens between 7 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon you're working. If your a tech you're doing periodic maintenance or troubleshooting. If you're in deck you are doing painting and cleaning, because that' all the skills you have. So a typical day is up at 4 am to stand watch. Get off watch at 8 and start working. (You got 20 minutes for breakfast somewhere in there.) Work until noon. 1 hour for lunch. 1 until 4 more work. Take the watch at 4. Watch 4 to 6. (Dog watch.) Off from 6 until midnight and then back on watch. (There's only three watch sections, remember?) Watch midnight until 4. 4-6 sleep. Reveille at 6. Relieve the 4 watch for 20 minutes so they can eat. Etc. You sleep (broken) about 8 hours a night, maybe.
What usually happens is that in that 6 to midnight time when you should be sleeping you find that there's some work the Department Head, Division Officer or Division Chief needs done that keeps you up until 10, so you only get 2 hours sleep before watch.
On a small gas turbine ship you have to refuel about every three days. That's usually done at night (like it would be during wartime) and that means everybody's up from midnight to 3 am, and you still half to get up at Reveille at 6 and work all day (when you're not on watch.)
100 weeks are common and Saturday and usually Sunday are workdays too. (On Sunday Reveille might be at 7 and if the ship is a carrier you might even get 45 min off for worship services, if you do that sort of thing.)
It pretty much sucks. Compare to working on a Merchant Marine ship where watches count as work time and anything over 40 hours is OT for enlisted.
No military reason for it either, other than to squeeze every last bit out of all the sailors.