Robert Beckhusen
The U.S. Navy is supposed to be adapting to face a series of threats it hasn’t seen since the Cold War. In particular, China’s growing — and increasingly assertive — navy comprised of warships that outrange American ones. The United States’ sailing branch has to do all of this with fewer ships and severely exhausted crews.
No longer can the Navy neglect the problem. Chronic fatigue contributing to human error likely played a role in the collisions of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS John S. McCain and Fitzgerald with cargo vessels in the Pacific in 2017, which together cost the lives of 17 sailors. But the factors that led to these catastrophes were widespread and obvious long before and not just in the Navy.
“Insufficient sleep duration, poor sleep quality, and sleep-related daytime impairment are pervasive problems in the military, even more so than they are in society as a whole,” a 2015 report from the RAND Corporation found.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-navys-greatest-enemy-its-no-russia-china-or-north-22509
