Does having two crews on a DDG make sense?

having served in port and starboard watch, then going to GQ, man overboard, and what ever drills. the problem is manning levels.

I think more important than increasing manning is a simple understanding of the limits of human physiology. After 17 hours of awake time, you are as impaired as someone with a 0.05 BAC, which is high enough to go to prison in some states.

Let's imagine a scenario where you didn't get hosed by duty the day before. You got a full night's sleep and woke up at 0500 before the ship got underway. You go through your whole work day and you have the 1700-2200 watch. You are very much legally impaired by the tail end of your watch. nd this is the case more often than not.

What I've seen be the most common watch rotations are both 4-section, with either a rotating 5-hour watch and a short watch over midnight (i.e. 7-12,12-17...) or static 3-on, 9-off (6-9,9-12...). In either case, you are going to end up with people waking up at 0100 for a 0200 watch, who were ordered to not go to sleep before 2200 the night before. The result is a crew that is perpetually exhausted. When you run people down, you need to understand that accidents will happen. Sadly, in the at-sea environment, an accident can easily cost the life of a shipmate.

An on-hull and off-hull crew will not solve this problem. A lot can be done to actually deal with this internal to each ship. Mandatory post-dinner meetings need to be shifted to daylight hours. Understanding that people might need to miss a briefing if attending it means they will be up for 24 hours without sleep. Having people wait outside of a dept head's door for an hour to get a message or report signed must become a thing of the past. The COs needs to flex on how much they'll allow his crew to allocate their own time. Otherwise, tired people will still be a hazard. And contrary to what nearly every NAVSAFCEN report says, fatigue is ALWAYS a factor.

My first tour was 7th FLT on a DDG as an OSSN and honestly there’s no telling how a blue/gold scenario would go over:
- Manning would have to be under control before the idea could even be put into a trial phase.
-Most bases wouldn’t have the space to adequately train the shore status crew without putting big deck crews at a disadvantage.
- At the start each ship would only have one qualified underway crew at a time. Making mission assignment a burden on dual crew qualified ships.
- Use of a B/G crew set up would overload ATG and other certification organizations.

The list is long. But honestly if it’s not working for an LCS which has a crew size that is 3-4 times smaller than a DDG, there would be no hope for the rest of the surface fleet to shift to a B/G crew model.