![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-836198322.jpg.jpg\")
Couch said the trucking industry in recent years has paid close attention to fatigue management and planning tools based on biometric data, and the Navy has been able to leverage some of that work for CREW and OWL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just being aware that a member of the team is not at full capacity, or several members of the team are not at full capacity,\u201d he said. \u201cYou could find somebody else who\u2019s closer to full capacity, or you could just acknowledge that and then use better team skills, like making sure you\u2019re checking in with people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The human factors team has run CREW pilot programs on several destroyers, littoral combat ships as well as an entire amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit \u2014 or nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines across about 10 ships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Couch said sailors were receptive to participating in the pilots since they got to keep the watches and rings. The team has focused on making sailors aware that fatigue isn\u2019t a sign of weakness, but rather something that affects everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pilot will continue to run with more ships in the near term to refine algorithms and to start working through what it takes to get data to the right place in a timely manner. The ultimate goal is to establish a secure Bluetooth connection on the ship for automatic data transfer, and then for the data to go into Jupiter, the Navy\u2019s enterprise data environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An operational risk alert<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Among the recommendations following the 2017 collisions was a lofty goal: Use available data to determine when a ship is at risk of a safety mishap, such as a grounding or a collision. At the time, the Navy didn\u2019t have the data repository or the analytics capability to make this a reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took two years of work, but by the summer of 2020, outgoing Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Adm. Rich Brown approved seed money to start the Operational Safety Information and Risk Indicator System, also called OSRI. OSRI leverages Jupiter, which launched in the spring of 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe ultimate goal of OSRI is to come up with this data-driven, risk-modeling effort that will cue us at the ship unit level that there\u2019s a potential risk or vulnerability, and then be able to apply resources based on that cueing,\u201d Couch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though this effort is still a work in progress, the human factors team has spent the past year and a half identifying available data streams, determining which are important, and creating a picture of each ship\u2019s cumulative risk and readiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The team has identified six data points that appear to be highly related to whether a ship is at risk of a mishap. Chief among them is a ship\u2019s muster report that shows daily attendance on the job. Reviewing previous mishaps and near-miss events, the team discovered many involved a key billet where the most experienced person typically working on the ship was away, leaving a less experienced crewmate to fill in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor example, we had an event where the ship fired a high-explosive round over the top of another ship. And one of the key factors in that was that the gunner\u2019s mate chief, who usually stood this watch in combat, was ashore,\u201d Couch said. \u201cIt\u2019s very, very common that some person who usually does something and has a great deal of experience was not present.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another data point involved mishaps during a ship\u2019s maintenance phase. Certain types of mishaps during maintenance tend to correlate to mishaps at sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other data points included manning levels \u2014 geared at examining the experience and education of individuals, how long they\u2019ve been assigned to the ship, and how regularly they\u2019ve been on the ship versus off the ship \u2014 as well as individual readiness factors like fatigue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OSRI can also incorporate subjective information, including the results of afloat safety climate assessment surveys, which are periodically sent to ships\u2019 crews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The team now wants to use new artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies to incorporate more data streams into the ship risk indicator system. For example, one individual casualty report from a ship might not paint much of a picture, but the totality of all the casualty reports over a period of time, combined with internal feedback from surveys as well as external feedback from training and assessment organizations, can help reveal a trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The team is also pursuing Project Hermes to apply natural language processing to verbal information and to help incorporate that as data into the risk indicator system. Ships send multiple messages a day about their material condition, fueling and spares status, personnel levels, operational activities, and more. Project Hermes would take these written messages, break them down into data and feed that into the risk matrix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once complete, OSRI and these other efforts are meant to help leaders at all echelons make better decisions so no ship finds itself at risk of a mishap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the Naval Surface Forces level, the data will inform personnel policies. In recent years, the Navy has pulled sailors off ships in maintenance to fill empty billets for ships about to deploy. However, early data from the OSRI effort shows adding a new sailor to a crew just before deployment doesn\u2019t drive down risk because it takes 90-180 days for a sailor to adjust to a new crew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The data also indicates a noticeable uptick in risk when key sailors leave a ship during maintenance \u2014 meaning this past practice disadvantaged one ship to marginally improve another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The human factors team hopes to use OSRI and other insights from its ongoing projects to model potential manning policies that would rule out harmful ideas, replacing them with ideas that raise the safety of the entire fleet. Service leaders can then use that data to craft more convincing budget justifications for the Pentagon and Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the deckplate level, Couch expects commanding officers to soon have tools to help plan routine and special operations while identifying gaps early, before the ship is in danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An individual risk matrix includes factors like fatigue, how long the sailor has been a member of the crew, the environmental conditions in which the ship is operating, the material condition of the ship, what operations the ship will conduct that day and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCommanding officers, when they have the opportunity to brief [the commander of Naval Surface Forces, Vice Adm. Roy] Kitchener, on here\u2019s how we\u2019re going to tackle the basic phase or the maintenance phase, they\u2019re much more granular in talking about exactly what sorts of people they need,\u201d Couch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe biggest outcome for us is that we\u2019re no longer automatically willing to take somebody off a maintenance-phase ship to fix a ship at sea,\u201d Couch added. \u201cWe can demonstrate now that\u2019s just kicking a problem down the road, which we\u2019re less willing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After two catastrophic collisions in 2017, the U.S. Navy moved forward with dozens of recommendations meant to ensure it couldn\u2019t happen again. But during this process, something became clear: Despite spending billions of dollars on readiness initiatives, the Navy\u2019s mishap rate hadn\u2019t improved in the last 30 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":116566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"2":{"categories":["your-military","news","left-column","home"],"primary_category":"your-military"},"7":{"categories":["ship-collisions","news","your-navy","daily-news-roundup","newsletters","left-column","home"],"primary_category":"your-navy"}}},"categories":[160,16,36],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3354],"class_list":["post-61490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-naval","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"WC2GFJJN35EBDOYRAGOUQBTOGY","arc_canonical_url":"\/naval\/2022\/07\/12\/council-tests-out-of-the-box-ideas-to-boost-at-sea-safety\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/council_fitz.jpg.jpg\")
Better manning policies<\/h1>\n\n\n\n