Sea Control - Sea Control 161 - Fatigue is the Navy's Black Lung Disease with Dr. John Cordle

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

Links:1. Fatigue is the Navy's Black Lung Disease by Dr. John Cordle2. Naval Postgraduate School Crew Endurance 

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're talking with Dr. John Cordell, retired Navy captain, about his recent article for U.S. Naval Institute Press Proceedings. Fatigue is the Navy's black lung disease. As a reminder, the opinions expressed here are personal opinions and do not reflect the view of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense. So, sir, I'm not even sure where to start on the congratulations here, as you've had a hell of a year. Completed your doctorate. You're honored as the 2019 Proceedings Author of the Year. And your wife had one of the top ten most read articles in Proceedings last year on the ways that stress affects spouses and relationships.

And she just published another one, which I still have to read and share with my wife. So you've had a pretty good holiday season. No, thank you. Yeah, it's been busy. And yeah, I'm very proud of my wife. Those are things that we've talked about for about 25 years now. And she finally put pen to paper. And I think it turned out pretty well. Yeah, we definitely agree there. As I said, I shared that with my wife as soon as it came out. We'll be reading the next one together and talking about it in our experiences. So, very, very good article. But before we discuss your article, you've been a pretty strident critic of the Navy for years on the subjects of manning, stress, and fatigue. You reference your experience with stress in the article as well as your other work as a surface warfare officer. And I'll quote, starting as a tired watchstand or shift worker and later serving as a commanding officer and then chief of staff at the surface type commander. Could you give us a bit more background on each of those jobs and what level of stress those jobs entail?

Sure. There's definitely a relationship, you know, between stress and fatigue and it all kind of ties together. And I'm sure you have some stories, too, from your time. And it's not just a surplus warfare thing, but I'll talk a little bit about my own experience. So one is looking back is kind of funny, but it does sort of bring things in context. As a shift worker student at Prototype, we had this seven-day days and seven days of swings and seven days of mids. So the swings was noon to midnight, and then mids was 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. You worked seven shifts, and then you had a day or two off, and then you came back for the next rotation.

So that second midshift was pretty brutal. and the second night of mids we sort of took to sneaking off and catching a nap somewhere so i went to the men's room which was a trailer out in this cold parking lot in hartford connecticut and you know was in there to do what you do and fell asleep and woke up an hour later uh realizing i was late in a panic went to stand up and of course my legs gave out because there was no blood in them and so i'm laying there on the floor of this nasty head i'm thinking this is about as low as it gets but then my next thought was but it is kind of warm and cozy maybe i can catch another nap and so i'm going to regret telling that story but uh but it makes a point that fatigue makes you

make bad decisions you know um and it impairs your ability to make good decisions and so so that was at the age of 25 fast forward i'm a tao on the arty burke john now who's now chief naval personnel was one of three watch standards standing five and dimes and we were just tired all the time sir can i can i interrupt for a second can you explain tao and five and dimes real quick i'm sorry no not not everybody is a u.s navy u.s navy listener i hope sorry yeah please stop me i'll try to stay away from the acronym so standing tactical action officer which is the watchstander um in combat information center and controls basically the ship's actions fighting the ship it actually has weapons release authority on behalf of the

commanding officer. So pretty important watch station, standing rotation that we call five and dimes, five hours on, 10 hours off with three personnel, but it's a rotating watch. So you never sleep or stand watch at the same time. So looking back, the science tells me that we are, we were fatigued for most of that deployment. So I remember an incident where I was called into a meeting about something that happened the night before where we had flown an aircraft into a bombing area that was under our control and put that crew at risk. And as I started to think about it, I just didn't remember that. And they said, well, it was on your watch. And here's the audio tape. And you can hear my voice telling the ship, the aircraft to go over there and look at those

flashes and investigate. When I should have known that it was a live area, but we blew it. And not only do we blow it on watch, but I didn't even remember it the next day. That's how tired I was. The point there is that your fatigue, once you get more senior, affects not only yourself, but could impact the lives of others. And then so as a commanding officer, I could go on for several stories. I call them near miss, which is 30 seconds or 30 feet from a collision or a grounding, right? So I had four in command, and two of them, really three of them, I was so fatigued that I made them worse. So in one case, we were approaching a ship maneuvering alongside. We had a boat on one side.

I lost situational awareness because I've been on the bridge for so long. gave a backing bell, which on a ship like the Oscar Austin, made a huge wave that tipped the rib over and put six people in the water. So again, fatigue, bad decision, somebody got hurt. And I say I did that because I was the commanding officer. So that still bothers me. And that's really kind of been what motivates me to have these discussions. So the last part was chief of staff, a little bit different. That was more stress than fatigue. But my wife always laughs You guys crack me up. You build these ships out of steel. You put them in salt water, and you freak out when they break and when they rust. It's like you never owned a boat, but I would get all these calls all the time and have to answer them. There was really never any downtime, and so I put my BlackBerry and dating myself in the bathroom, and here we are again. And I would answer emails when I snuck in there for a few minutes, about 7 p.m., about 9 p.m., and about midnight.

And I came in one day, and the staff had sort of plotted Kaza's bathroom cycle on the whiteboard based on my email frequency. But you just never got a break, you know? Yeah. And I know that one of my counterparts on the West Coast, chief of staff, took a brief from Dr. Shattuck, Nita Shattuck, who's been a mentor of mine. who's a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. And he said, that brief changed my life. He said, I rearranged some things in my home, some things in my personal routine, and it just made me a much more healthy person based on adjusting my sleep routines.

So those are some examples there. Hopefully they kind of cover the gamut. Oh, yeah. You chose to address your article to the Navy. You and I are both surface people. Is the sleep problem a Navy-wide problem? Is it specific to certain communities, or is it just more acute in certain communities? Good question.

You know, I have been kind of taking the task on that, and I have to admit that I'm kind of myopic to the surface community. You know, an aviator wrote in that we figured this out a long time ago. Yeah, they're always quick to remind you how much sleep they get. They are. That's right. But that said, you know, my point of this article is it's an institutional problem, both on the active duty side and in the fact that it has health implications far after the individuals are retired. So there are specific challenges in each community. You know, part of the challenge I see is that every type of commander seems to have a different instruction, different policy, different sort of set of rules, whereas the basic requirements are the same.

What I'm looking for and hoping to advocate is a centralized policy, centralized training, just a set of standards that all of the communities in the Navy can map their policies back to. So you're seven years removed from service yourself. Is sleep duration a problem for you? No. You know, I just had my 35th reunion from the Naval Academy, and my company mates just thought it was hilarious that the guy who used to sleep so much and have racked arms has now made it a career. um but uh no you know i haven't um but i think it's kind of like risk management you know i mean people don't smoke and get lung cancer and people smoke and don't get lung cancer that doesn't mean you should smoke right right um and so i've also followed the advice of some of my mentors you know like i exercise every day for 30 45 minutes i sort of cut off my caffeine in the afternoon i don't drink a lot i have some stress relief of walking through the woods or things like that so the

things that the sleep experts will tell you to do i do that so you know does that mean i won't have something you know once i get a little older possibly but i can tell you again this isn't scientific but uh in my small circle of friends oh six major command retired about in their late 50s four have had strokes and two died from them and so that kind of makes it personal you know does that prove that it's related to their watch and their work routine no but it certainly resonates with me. And so that also sort of motivates me to, you know, get off my butt in the morning and go for a walk. Yeah. So some of your recommendations were for additional training, general military training, additional modules, command pipelines. Didn't some of that training,

at least in the command pipelines, already exist? Yes and no. You know, if you look back at the comprehensive review, it said a recommendation that this be included, I think, by March of 18 into all the pipelines. That really didn't happen, I think, because nobody took ownership of it. Post-graduate school built some training. They do train some of the SWAS students. I don't think it's quite to the point where it's a formal, repeatable process. But no, there has been a lot of effort in that area. I point out in the article, the Naval Postgraduate School website is very robust. They just revamped it. It's got tons of material. Well, like everything else, I can put everything in the world on a website, but somebody's got to go there and look at it. And so I think there's definitely room for improvement. I think, as I said in the article, what's lacking is a comprehensive approach. You know, one of my sleep expert friends who's a Ph.D. working for the Navy sort of read this over the script,

and I let her take a look at it to make sure it was accurate. And, you know, her response was, wow, wouldn't that be awesome? It's such an imperative that we have a coherent training program. I think there's a lot of room for improvement. The pieces are all there. There's just no overarching Navy strategy. And that's where somebody, whether it was from Naval personnel, from the new chief learning officer, Mr. Kroger, there's opportunity here that the information is there, the structure's in place.

But somebody has to take this on as an operational imperative and say, this is not about, you know, some touchy-feely sleep program. This is about the key weapon system on a ship and operational readiness and push it over into that domain. So you mentioned that the training sort of exists, but there's bits and pieces. So one of the other critiques that's going to get brought up any time that you try to roll something out like this, particularly if you attach a label like GMT or general military training to it, is like, oh, this is going to be an increased administrative burden. And so Admiral Greenert attempted to address this when he was the chief of naval operations. His tasking was itself, of course, an administrative burden. How do you answer the critique that this training is going to be another administrative task?

Well, I guess I would kind of go back to my roots as a nuke. And the nuke approach to training is when you start to build a schedule, you go to the whiteboard, it's empty, and you put in the training, and then you put everything else in. And in my mind, the training, you know, the CNO's focus back then was to remove administrative barriers that were not related to warfighting. And in my mind, again, and this is, I think, the cultural change that needs to happen, educating people about the impact of fatigue and crew endurance is a warfighting issue. It's an operational imperative. And so it's at the core of warfighting and not a peripheral administrative burden. I guess that's the way I would approach it. And it kind of goes to your own personal responsibility. Talk more about that in a minute. But I just have seen over and over again where senior people, captains, sat through an hour of Dr. Shadid's lecture and their entire perspective changed because they didn't know what they didn't know. And that's where the education comes in. It's so important.

and it ought to be at all levels you know you've got to start you know the boot camp and it doesn't have to be a separate topic it could be part of the ship handling training which i think it is part you know it ought to be part and parcel of this simulator training it ought to be part of the capstone course for flag officers because a lot of folks think they know but i've talked to even retired flags who said wow looking back i did not realize that i was uh i was doing that to myself or doing that to my uh to my folks yeah one of the other arguments against the training And this is kind of off topic from what you and I discussed pre-show about ask anyway and you can answer me or not. One of the arguments that always gets made in favor of our culture of sleep deprivation here is like, well, this is rooted in combat experiences dating back to the Second World War.

It's like you read a book like The Good Shepherd, which, yes, it's a fictional account, but is based in some reality. And you can read about British captains operating off of Malta, too, experiencing the same things where they're not sleeping for days at a time because they're constantly under threat. How would you answer that critique? That's a valid point, but I think it misses the point. So the first answer is, you know, just like you enter battle with the army you have, you enter a battle with the resilience that you have. So if you start tired at the beginning of the fight, you're going to be more tired sooner. It's going to impact your success. And so, you know, there's a resilience that built up over time.

I talk in the article about the short-term effects, and we're starting to study the mid-term effects and even the long-term effects. But I'm talking about the short- to mid-term effects of poor judgment. There's a great article by a gentleman named Dr. Jonathan Shea called The Moral Imperative for Self-Care. that cites many examples of commanders who became sleep-deprived and lost battles. I had a personal experience as CO of San Jacinto, commanding officer. We did an exercise against an Israeli submarine, and when we debriefed with the captain, he said, Captain, your strategy was brilliant, the way you kept me awake for 62 hours until I made a terrible decision that cost me the battle.

And I said, well, that wasn't my plan. How did I do that? and he said you kept me in water below 100 fathoms and our doctrine says i have to be on the bridge if the submarine is in shallow water so we didn't stop eating in world war ii we still fed the troops um so that they could fight so you know having a policy where you think about that all the time just makes it better when you enter the battle that's why i get i get frustrated when i hear a captain say well i can't do this in the basic phase i can't do this in com 2x well you don't stop eating in comm 2x you uh which is an exercise shipboard underway exercise so that's the way i would couch it is this is a requirement i didn't make the requirement to eat and i didn't

create the requirement to sleep it's how you deal with that requirement and it doesn't go away in that i'll just share one of my personal experiences here i was in a exchange officer on a german frigate in uh willemshaven germany and we went over to the flag officer sea training in plymouth England where the Royal Navy invites all their NATO friends in. I say invites, I'm sure they're well compensated for it. And the Royal Navy just kicks the hell out of you for seven weeks until you're trained and ready to fight. And you leave at the end feeling like you can do anything you want with that ship. But one of the things they do is they will give you a week where it's like, no, you're at war for this week. How are you going to set up your watches? So your watch standards

are going to be coherent and how are you captain going to handle your responsibilities in this time here and we broke the crew up into two and like if you were off in that six hour period you were off regardless of what was going on because you still needed to be ready to fight when you came on the bridge and we did have lectures about sleep and it was kind of the first time in my career i had experienced anyone really concerned about the level of sleep that i was getting it was a new experience for me. No, well, that's good to hear. I mean, I didn't, I guess I didn't, I might have already known this, but I also did an exchange tour with the Germans in Flensburg, which is where I met my wife. So we share that. We can do the next interview in German, I guess.

Yes, sir. I'll interview you and your wife in German. That'll be good. Excellent. Just to touch on that for a second. So, you know, at the end of the day, though, as much as you'd like to think that that was because they cared about you, it really wasn't. It was because they wanted you to be a resilient warfighter when you took the watch. That's why, I'll give you an example. On USS San Jacinto on deployment, you know, the lights were not on in berthing except from noon to 1 o'clock. There were people, a third of the crew was asleep at any given time, whether it was 1 o'clock in the morning or 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Why? Because I wanted my mid-watch to be awake and alert.

And so, you know, some would say, well, you can't do that. You have to do sleepers at 8 o'clock in the morning. You have to clean the berthing. Well, you know, they're adults, right? And so treat them like adults. and so we did all of our meetings and stuff between 9 a.m and 1500 in the afternoon and after dinner it was if it was your work period you worked if it was your sleep period you sleep and it was a personal responsibility there's a great article in this proceedings by captain

kurtz somerset about it was the talk the article was more about personal devices and their impact but he also touches on how it impacts sleep it's just because you give people time to sleep doesn't I mean, they sleep. They go in the rack and fire at the iPad or the iPhone. So, you know, that's a whole other discussion. But at the end of the day, it's all about when I take that watch, am I as alert and responsive as I can be to make good decisions? Yes, sir.

So you mentioned before the cultural problem, which I think is a lot more naughtier and systemic, literally decades. And, you know, I referenced World War II. But if we could, I'd like to address that problem first. How do you propose going after the surface warfare culture? Specifically to this issue, you know, it's funny. If you go back and read my wife's article, it's not really about SWO culture so much, although, you know, that was her experience, her lens as well. But the Navy culture where, you know, the CNO telling admirals you have to take 10 days of leave every year.

But then my friends who work for admirals say, yeah, he's on leave, but I'm still getting the same number of emails as I did when he wasn't on leave. You know, well, that's not the point. And so culturally, the expectation, just something as simple as when you're on leave, take leave, right? You know, when I was in Germany, the commandant of the academy went on leave, and I asked him, you know, how can I reach him? And he's like, why would you reach me? You know, I mean, he was just astounded that I would ask that question. So that's a cultural issue. How do you get there?

Well, first of all, I thought there was two really telling comments. I guess my wife and I both got some fantastic comments from doctors, aviators, people who had relatives who suffered from black lung disease and fought the government. Really interesting. But one relatively senior government person, I think, from his profile said, this is a great article. It will be read, commented on, and forgotten. But then a spouse came up and said, you know, you don't change culture by issuing an instruction or a message. It's a series of small decisions made every day. and so you know it can be a little bit of both but if the people that i was talking about

um you know i i think your your publication published an op-ed of mine to admiral gilday to make this an operational imperative if it was a talking point for him it was a talking point for pac fleet fleet forces the different navy leadership that would start to change the culture if there was a a culture where this sleep education was important people would start to to make it something they talked about and it would become a part of our culture you know the junior folks get it right the the sailors out there the junior officers sometimes it's the older folks that need educating and to realize that a snide comment here and there can undo you know months of training by just uh what you think is funny you can sleep when you're dead or

you know being tired as part of being a swole people listen to that and so i think it's important to work that that's why i think the capstone course would be a great place the senior enlisted Academy to have this sort of coherence. But this training, to back up a second, so the postgraduate school put this training together. There are sleep experts throughout the Navy. Dr. Kim Culley at Subland was part of the comprehensive review. Dr. Rachel Markwald down at the, I'm going to say the name wrong. Give me one second here. I wrote it out. The Sleep and Fatigue Research Laboratory at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego. There is, the expertise exists but there's no fabric to tie it together into a program into a process and that's

the cultural change that needs to be there you know i kind of was talking with one of my friends the other day and i said you know it's kind of like if you're an elevator and the elevator is falling and you look around everybody else in the elevator it doesn't look that bad because you're all in the same position it's only when you step out and you look back in that you go holy crap that's a pretty bad situation and sometimes i feel that way is is i didn't see it myself when i was in that situation. I graphed my stress level in the Navy. You and I talked a little bit about this before of career progression. My last 10 years in the Navy were spent as a commanding officer of a destroyer, ops on a strike group staff, a reactor officer, major command, and then chief

of staff. So I had about 10 years where my stress level and my fatigue level sort of hovered around a seven eight nine and i retired and i went to about a three um and uh and so you just don't realize it my wife was the one who said it's nice to have my husband back yeah you know um and i talked to so many spouses who feel that way and so the active duty folks they don't see that the that the elevator's falling uh because they're in it uh or it's going to cost money to fix it We haven't really got into the manpower thing, but we'll talk about that in a moment, I think. But there's multiple facets to it. I'm sorry, I rambled on in the culture question, but it's a tough one.

And people toss that culture word around a lot, but it's a pretty complex topic. It's complex, and I guess I don't want to paint it as nothing positive is happening. We are definitely making strides. The Navy is light years from where it was when I came in in 2003 as far as recognizing the problem and taking steps to address it. Well, thank you for pointing that out. It's knotty. I said it's knotty because it's a hard problem. It's not just going to change today.

That's right. And thank you for pointing that out because I did want to make clear that there are some really good things going on. There are toughness initiatives at boot camp. There are monitoring damage control parties. There is training being put out there. It's just, you know, when you look at what is and what could be, even the National Transportation Safety Board, when they came out with their review of the John S. McCain, they sort of chastised the Navy for not moving out as quickly as they could have. And so no way here am I impugning anyone for doing anything wrong. It's just, you know, there's so many simple steps that don't cost much that could be taken now or accelerated now that that's what I'm sort of advocating.

Pasco, why did you decide to title your article the way you did? Why did you equate it to black lung disease? That's a great question. I think you've probably written some articles. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned from my experience with proceedings is it's one thing to write the article. It's another thing to find a title for it. And that's an art in and of itself. And so if people don't, if the title doesn't catch your eye, you're not going to read the article. So to be honest, that was part of the motivation. That particular topic came up in a discussion with a retired flag officer who had said to me something like, you know, I've been retired for a few years now, and I'm only starting to realize the effects of my Navy career on my health. And I kind of just clicked. I said, that sounds like black lung disease because I read some article on it.

And when you go back and look at it, and again, you know, I'm not equating fatigue to black lung disease per se. Um, and, uh, but the institutional response to black lung disease back then was basically that if we just ignore it, it'll go away and it's not our responsibility. You know, the miners come in and do their job to go home. You know, if they all catch, uh, you know, some odd disease that may or may not be related to, to coal dust and die, you know, that's, that's a problem. But if we take that on, it's gonna, that's gonna be our problem. Right.

and so that sort of echoes the relatively new science of long-term fatigue. Dr. Shattuck will talk about circadian scarring, how there's science that says if you stand a shift rotation, you're unlikely to completely recover back to a normal circadian cycle. There's science tying shift workers to disease, even possibly to cancer. So the question is, do the Navy want to be on the leading edge or do they want to be behind like the like the government was with black lung disease so it's more not so much equating the two uh maladies but trying to capture the institutional response does that make sense yeah absolutely um so we've done a lot of uh i don't want anybody to accuse us of only having admired the problem here so i'm going to ask you about some solutions and

there's some in the article too but systematically what do you think would make sailors lives easier here i have a couple first of all a doctor friend of mine made a comment after reading the article that it's like the fire triangle you have heat oxygen and a combustible material in this world you have sleep or fatigue and then you have manning and you have training are the other two legs of the triangle so maybe that's a future graphic or a future article but when you you break that down and i'll hit fatigue last but the manning part right they just did a study mandated by the cr a comprehensive review where they took two ships and compared uh they plussed up the manning it was out in europe it was in san diego ship a they put to 100 manning ship b they left

at about 92 which is kind of the norm and they studied them ironically they had a real hard time plussing up the crew to get to 100 which almost unraveled the study but the results were pretty compelling it's you know the crew i believe the numbers i had to go back and look they're out there in the article that i wrote on it by increasing the manning by about five to eight percent uh they got 15 percent more sleep per night on the way they worked about an hour less per day in port which doesn't seem like much unless you're driving home in traffic every day in san diego right yes it evens out the other thing was uh they skewed the model because the ship that didn't have the plus up you know part of the model is accounting for leave and special

liberty for the 12 to 16 weeks that they measured in the experiment they took none like they had zero and that's how they got through the you know the training i think they trained the basic phase out there so there was pretty compelling data that uh that it makes a big difference and so so what would i do i would say you know forget about these uh artificial goals of 92 95 the goal should be 100 use ba and basic allowance which is a requirement of what people calculated you need to run a ship but i need those people in the maintenance phase as much as i do on deployment and make that the goal and shoot for that. You're not going to get there for a while,

but I'm a nuke reactor power following steam demand. So set the throttles at 100% and then throw coal on the engine to get there. But if you set the throttles at 92%, then you're never going to get to 100%. And there's a direct impact. There was an article just last week in Proceedings where the CEO of Detroit

talked about having to bring 30 sailors over to get his ship ready for deployment. And unplanned personal impacts on those 30 sailors for a crew of, I think he meant both crews, so still 30 sailors out of 140. That's a pretty significant impact. So that's number one. Manning, manpower, I think there's a compelling argument that that is one of the root causes of the fatigue challenge.

Secondly, the training. Make it an operational priority to have this training, to make it part of the fabric from boot camp through capstone, through the admiral's courses. We're shifting to a peer competitor. You know, if some of these other countries with big ships, with big missiles go to war with us, it's not going to be a couple of days. It's going to be months to years. And you have to set that baseline out there.

And you don't want people making deadly mistakes because they're too tired because we didn't take the time to educate them on the possible impacts of that. And then finally, I think, you know, I didn't think about this until we were talking, but something as simple as the birthing departments, right? There's some studies going on right now. I'm taking a course in human systems integration at the postgraduate school. and part of it is habitability so the quality of sleep the quantity of sleep is important but you know let's look at our birthings rack curtains sound isolation lights on and off policy the type of lights we use i think my i think i slept in the same rack my father did uh we i go home and sleep on a you know 800 or tempur-pedic mattress and yet we if you go on any ship and look at the

mattresses that most of our sailors sleep on they're garbage you know and so uh so maybe an overhaul of birthing specifications is in order to make some level of noise control heat control fatigue a priority there so those are three things i can think of manning training and looking at the habitability now something as simple as birth by uh by watch rotation so in other words instead of having a division berthing you have watch team blue berthing and so everybody's on the same sleep rotation those types of tactical changes again back to that culture change of little decisions every day i think would make a big difference yeah and i think you made a good point too in our uh the emails that we exchanged in preparation for this discussion here about two

is sharing these lessons across the fleet so right now i think a lot of these lessons are being shared via articles that individual COs are publishing and not necessarily captured in one central place? No, I think, you know, they're starting, the postgraduate school was sort of stood up that website to do just that, but it needs airtime, it needs runtime, and it needs support from the operational forces. So, for example, when people go out and do safety investigations, you know, if you look at the NTSB, they always look at fatigue specifically and ask questions um of the watchstanders and of the pilots and and the people involved in the accident to determine sort of scientifically their their fatigue levels um you know it's uh it's it's it's

there's got to be a more coherent structure and again it goes back to the center of excellence goes back to the training um but you know as a nuke one of the most important pieces of the training is uh examples and lessons learned and uh case studies so uh so yeah i think that's an important part of it and not depending on proceedings and simsec to spread the word we'll do our part here uh i definitely want to get that website from you so we can post it in with the show notes because i'm sure we'll have some folks listening and say hey i want to go look at this and we'll make it easy for them to find absolutely yeah in fact if you just google Naval Postgraduate School Crew Endurance.

It'll pop up. Yes, sir. But I'll send you the link, absolutely. Yes, sir. I want to thank my guest, Dr. John Cordell, for sharing his thoughts. The article is Fatigue is the Navy's Black Lung Disease. You can find it in our show notes, U.S. Naval Institute's websites, and by using Google. Sir, what can we expect from you next?

Well, one final thought before I sort of pull out my crystal ball. But I just want to say, you know, I've been looking at this for 10 years. I found the first message that I released on San Jacinto dated May of 2010, and the Navy has come a long way, and I think it deserves credit. The leadership deserves credit for that. But, you know, Naval Institute has been fantastic to me with the mentorship on this. That has Navy Times as well. They also published an op-ed on crew endurance last month or two months ago. but if you look at that if you google that article fatigue is the baby's black lung disease you'll

see a picture of a young sailor at the end of a firefighting drill looks like and whatever they did to select that picture that picture speaks more about the problem and the challenge than any article that i've read so i encourage the readers to google the proceedings page look at that young sailor and keep that face in your mind when you're poopooing the idea or wondering whether or not it's worth pursuing because that picture speaks volumes so I just kind of want to toss that thought out there so what am I doing now well I'm actually a delinquent this week in my homework there's a course at the Naval Postgraduate School called Human Systems Integrations a certification and you know I didn't really mention it but this fatigue discussion this

crew endurance it's really part of the whole system of human systems integration which if you go back and read the comprehensive review safety fatigue human factors technology you know all the tenants of hsi um it wasn't until i started taking this class that i realized i've written about oh man training personnel they're all legs or pillars of hsi and uh so to me that's been a bit of an epiphany it's all tied together i sit there thinking wow um you know that's the bigger picture here is that uh that human interface of that of that steering console or the damage control console or whatever it all ties together they all impact each other manning impacts fatigue impacts technology uh so hsi i think i'm sort of trying to open the aperture a

little bit and learn about that um i'm sort of exploring a book that might tie my articles together with sort of a narrative although i'm finding that it's easy to say you're going to write a book but actually writing one is a bit of a challenge but i'm getting pretty close And I also work with a friend of mine that I met back on San Jacinto, Captain Jeff Bacon, retired. You know him from Broadside cartoons. And so another friend of mine came up with a retirement checklist, and Jeff has illustrated it. So I've shared that with some friends, and we might try to publish that thing. But Jeff has been an advocate of humor as a sort of stress control mechanism.

and so you know those are some of the things uh that i'm working on and looking forward maybe to a trip back to germany my wife's hometown at some point yeah other than that uh just keeping busy and uh i'm happy to talk to anyone i mentor folks all the time on the ideas to improve uh uh watch rotations and staff rotations you know i've had a couple commodores reach out and you know the stuff is out there and i'm happy to connect people with the right folks Maybe I'll be the sleep ombudsman. How's that? I like the sound of that, sir.

I would support your candidacy tomorrow. I think you saying that just keeping busy might be the understatement of the year thus far. It's early in the year, but that might be the understatement of the year based on everything that you just laid out project-wise. Well, one of my friends told me there's nothing more dangerous than a retired SWO captain with nothing to do. Accurate statement. thank you again for coming on sir for our listeners thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time

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