Though not just now. “All hands awake!” The voice on the intercom is accompanied by an alarm, loud and insistent. Bong, bong, bong, bong. An annoying child with a stick and pot.
“Simulate sending all missiles.” This is a lot of missile. Each Trident carries multiple warheads, each programmable to its own destination, with sufficient precision to, as I’ve twice heard it put, “hit a pitcher’s mound.” The ballistic missile submarines of the US fleet, fourteen in all, are a roving underwater nuclear arsenal. Along with missiles in underground silos and others on bomber aircraft, they make up the “nuclear triad” of US strategic deterrence. You would be crazy to nuke us, is the message here; we have more bombs than you have, and you can’t take ours out first because you’ll never find the ones on the subs. Ballistic missile submarines have whole oceans to hide in, and a nuclear reactor aboard to generate power and water, so they never need to surface for fueling. They can stay deep until the food runs out.
The Tennessee’s second-in-command, Executive Officer Nathan Murray, invited me to join him in the missile compartment for the drill. (I sailed out to the sub with a group of prospective commanding officers going aboard for a practical evaluation.) We pass a row of sleeping spaces along one wall, some closed off with black vinyl curtains, giving them the look of bathroom stalls at certain punk clubs in the 1980s. Murray points out the bed of a young man who shares his space with the wall coupling for the fire hose. He was woken up last night for a fire drill, and now this.
The Submarine Force has formally acknowledged that it has a sleep problem. Quoting Force Operational Notes Newsletter (Special Crew Rest Edition), “An individual’s sleep at sea is not protected, allowing administrative training, maintenance, and ‘urgent’ matters to routinely shorten or interrupt a person’s sleep….” The crew of the Tennessee endure fire drills, flooding drills, hydraulic rupture drills, air rupture drills, man overboard drills, security violation drills, torpedo launch drills. They practice launching the missiles more regularly than some people floss. On one hand, you want the crew to be well trained. You don’t want to hit the wrong pitcher. On the other, you don’t want training and drills going on so often that the people tending the bombs and reactors are chronically sleep-deprived.
In 1949, submarine schedules allowed ten hours a day for sleep. On top of their “long sleep,” half the crew took at least one nap. Starting in 1954, subs went from diesel to nuclear-powered engines. The result being that there’s a lot more to watch than a temperature gauge and an oil level. On the USS Tennessee, four hours’ sleep has been about the average.
Before coming aboard, I spoke by phone with sleep researcher Colonel Greg Belenky (Ret.), the founder of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane. Belenky knows what happens when people go from sleeping eight hours a night to sleeping four or five. Their cognitive mojo declines over the course of a few days, whereupon it plateaus, settling in to a new, compromised state. The less sleep they’re getting, the longer their mental abilities deteriorate before they plateau. Which mental abilities? Most. Sleep deprivation shrinks memory and dims the network that sustains thought, decision making, and the integration of reason and emotion, Belenky said. “You know when you have a problem you’re working on and you give up? Then you get a good night’s sleep, wake up, and suddenly there’s your solution? That’s what sleep does. It returns the brain to its normal specs.”
On submarines, the junior crew have it worst. On top of work and watch duties, they are preparing for “qualification,” a sort of submarine version of passing the bar: sixty-plus verbal quizzes on submarine components and systems plus practical tests on various elements of your particular sub—anything from taking the helm to using a fathometer to blowing a sanitary tank. “I’ll get three hours of sleep one night, and the next night none,” said a long-faced seaman studying dive hydraulics in the vaporizer haze of the Tennessee’s enlisted crew lounge. (Between the vaping, the zombie-apocalypse video-gaming, and some aggressive tabletop football flicking, a terrible place to study. Or maybe just to be middle-aged.)
The seaman will tell you he’s fine, but Belenky knows he’s not. When people drop below four hours a night, they don’t plateau. Their abilities continue to erode until they end up at the point where sleep researchers have had to come up with special terms, like “catastrophic decompensation.” “Put simply”—and here Force Operational Notes shifts into typographic overdrive, simultaneously boldfacing, underlining, and italicizing—“failure to get adequate continuous sleep every day results in overly fatigued personnel who, in a matter of days, function at a deficit similar to being intoxicated.”
Like drunks, the chronically sleep-deprived are doubly dangerous in that they’re poor judges of their own impairment. Jeff Dyche, a sometime research psychologist at NSMRL, now with James Madison University, told me about a study that showed that people who’d slept six hours a night for two weeks were as cognitively diminished as people who’d been up for forty-eight hours straight. Unlike the up-all-nighters, routine six-hours-a-nighters see no need for caution. They’ve felt mildly exhausted for so long it’s become their normal, Dyche says. “They’re like, ‘Ah, I’m used to it.’” I’ve been hearing a lot of this over the past two days. “I get four and a half hours and I’m generally okay for a twenty-four-hour period,” said a sailor pushing trash into an institutional-grade compactor that would work with equal efficiency on flesh and phalanges.
Murray and the sub’s commanding officer, Chris Bohner, volunteered to try out a new watch schedule aimed at keeping crew better rested, both for their health—insufficient sleep having lately been linked to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease—and for everyone’s safety. It is not a simple undertaking. “I spend a very significant amount of time,” Murray says, “figuring out people’s rest.” Murray is a popular leader—in both manner and mien, a solid individual. You never see him slouch or lean or jut one hip. He stands steady and square on both feet, like a bag of mortar set down. His hands park on his belt, with an occasional sweep over his head, which he keeps closely shaved. The latitude of Murray’s hairline, like that of the submarine itself, will remain a secret to me.
The problem is that things come up. People fall behind and schedules fall apart. The problem this week is me. Everyone’s work was interrupted because the crew had to spend four or five hours looking for a spot where the seas were calm enough to drop a gangplank between the sub and the vessel we sailed out on.
Part of the Navy’s challenge in dealing with undersleeping has been that somewhere along the line, it became a point of pride. At NSMRL I met a longtime submarine commanding officer named Ray Woolrich. “Marines sitting around in a bar,” said Ray, “will tell you how many push-ups they can do. Aviators will tell you how many g’s they can take. Submariners will tell you how many hours they stayed up.” Better to be exhausted than to gain a reputation as a “rack hound.”[56]
For decades, military sleep research proceeded in lockstep, focusing less on getting sleep than on getting by without it. Study after study tested this or that stimulant on fliers, soldiers, sailors. Only recently has protecting sleep become a Defense Department priority. Current Army policy requires unit leaders to develop and implement a sleep management plan in theater. (Though in one small survey of soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, 80 percent had never been briefed on such a thing.) A turning point, according to Belenky, was the lengthening of the Army’s field training exercises (FTXs), the massive simulated confrontations that serve as a sort of practical final exam for soldiers. “At some point the doctrine folks had concluded that any war worth going to would probably last a week or two, so they increased the duration of the FTX from three days to two weeks,” Belenky said. Up to that point, there had been a tradition of staying up for all of it, in order to “look motivated and get a good evaluation.” Belenky recalls getting a call from a commander shortly after the change went through. “He said, ‘I need your advice on pharmacology. I need my boys to be able to stay up longer.’” Belenky figured the man was talking about a couple extra days. “I said, ‘How long do you want them to stay up?’ He said, ‘Two weeks.’ People actually tried to gut it out.” It was a vivid and no doubt fairly entertaining demonstration of the importance of sleep to military competence.
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In military slang, there’s a friendly epithet for everyone. I, for example, am a “media puke.”