No rest for the weary: Lack of sleep threatens safety and readiness

It's sadly the same old story

The aviation community has understood this for decades. This is why we have crew rest rules. Studies have shown that once you are past the 17-19 hour mark you are mentally impaired on the same level as someone who has had enough beers to blow a 0.05 BAC. Go much past that any you are up to 0.1 BAC. If you do that night after night the amount of time you are awake before you become impaired decreases significantly. So for instance after 5 days of only getting 5 hours of sleep you could be considered drunk at the 10 to 12 hour mark right when you are supposed to be on watch. Now combine that with 10 or so other watch standers plus leadership that is getting even less sleep and you have a extremely dangerous situation.

https://hbr.org/2006/10/sleep-deficit-the-performance-killer

One of the worst (and best) experiences for me so far was my last exercise in Australia in 2015. My job when deployed is to set up and maintain network infrastructure to include switches/routers, cabling, helpdesk support, and server management. I had spent three weeks in Okinawa building my servers for the op, only to have a few of them corrupted when I try to deploy them down under. Mind you, this should have been as simple as plug-and-play, since the Corps spent a few thousand for me to get these things ready before flying to Australia. My first two weeks once the exercise kicked off was pretty much nonstop server configuration from scratch while at the same time yelling at the two inexperienced corporals under my charge and teaching them how to do switch configs in a command line interface (typing words and numbers to make it do what you need it to do, like MS DOS back in the day). Somewhere in there I'd get like four hours of sleep every 24-30 hours because my lieutenant tells me to after seeing me crash repeatedly at the keyboard. After those first two weeks, everything was finally up and I was finally getting a 16-hour work day with 8 hours of rest until the end of the op. I still don't know if the NAM I was awarded was worth the lack of sleep...haha.

The moral of the story is that we can only do so much on so little sleep, and with fewer people on hand than what is optimal in order to maintain 24/7 operations, everyone suffers and mistakes are inevitable. Does it excuse a class A mishap, however? I won't be the judge of that.