The Readiness Threat Right Before Our Eyes
The Navy must recognize how personal technology affects sailors’ mental health, reenlistment opportunities, discipline, and, most dangerously, sleep.
By Captain Dave Kurtz, U.S. Navy
February 2020
Proceedings
Vol. 146/2/1,404
Mental health professionals believe excessive personal technology use has an adverse neuropsychological effect on attention and concentration, and this can be seen in the fleet.1 Though the medical community has not decided whether these effects constitute an addiction, the readiness effect is real. It is time for the Navy to do more specific research on the personnel impacts and our sailors’ attitudes toward personal technology use to understand the scope of the problem. Once the Navy understands the issue, it must raise awareness to mitigate the negative impact on fleet readiness.
The crew of an aircraft carrier is a microcosm of the fleet, and since data points from a large, diverse population flow through a single chain of command, observations there tend to manifest as trends before they aggregate fleetwide. I recently finished a two-year run as the executive officer (XO) on board the USS Nimitz (CVN-68). In this capacity, I worked daily with approximately 1 percent of the Navy’s personnel, 77 percent of whom are 25 or younger.2 Based on this experience, as well as through conversations with peers across the Navy, I found excessive personal technology use is having a detrimental impact on fleet readiness.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/february/readiness-threat-right-our-eyes
