Title: Lack of Sleep Among Active Duty Military Contributes to Millions
of Dollars in Damage and Service Member Deaths

Description: We expect our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to be
combat ready. But sleep deprivation and fatigue can dramatically reduce
readiness, and fatigue has been connected to accidents that have
resulted in deaths, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in damage
to ships, aircraft and other military equipment. We ask GAO's Diana
Maurer about how widespread is this problem is and what the military is
doing about it. 

Related Work: GAO-24-105917, Military Readiness: Comprehensive Approach
Needed to Address Service Member Fatigue and Manage Related Efforts

Released: March 2024

{Music}

[Diana Maurer:] The problem of lack of sleep and related fatigue is a
longstanding, widespread and persistent problem for the military. 

[Holly Hobbs:] Hi, and welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report--your source for
fact-based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office. I'm your host, Holly Hobbs. We expect our
soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to be combat ready. But sleep
deprivation and fatigue can dramatically reduce this readiness. And
fatigue has been connected to accidents that have resulted in deaths, as
well as hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to ships, aircraft and
other military equipment. In a new report, we looked at service member
fatigue. How widespread is this problem, and what is the military doing
about it? Joining us to talk about this new report is GAO's Diana
Maurer, an expert on military readiness. Thanks for joining us.

[Diana Maurer:] Thank you. Happy to be here.

[Holly Hobbs:] So, Diana, how big of a problem is this?

[Diana Maurer:] So we found that the problem of lack of sleep and
related fatigue is a longstanding, widespread and persistent problem for
the military. Now, what do I mean by that? Longstanding, we have DOD
reports on the extent of this problem that go back 20 years. Widespread.
It's across all of the services and across a number of military
occupation within those services. And persistent--when we say lack of
sleep, we're not just talking about a sailor or a pilot who has to shave
a few hours off of sleep every now and then. We're talking about service
members who are getting 6 hours or less of sleep for months on end. And
when that happens, they reach a level of fatigue and sleep deprivation
that approaches being intoxicated with alcohol. That's a very bad thing
when you're talking about people who are flying military aircraft,
driving multi-ton vehicles and steering very large capital ships on the
open sea.

[Holly Hobbs:] And how do we know this? How do we know service members
aren't getting enough sleep?

[Diana Maurer:] So DOD in its own policy says they want everyone to get
at least 7 hours of sleep per day. And to help check up on that, they've
been doing surveys over the course of the last 20 or so years. And those
surveys have consistently found that the majority of service members are
getting 6 hours of sleep or less for extended periods of time. We did
our own survey as part of our report and we found very similar results.
We looked at a wide variety of specialist--so we're looking at people who
pilot helicopters. We look at people who are fixing aircraft. We're
looking at missileers who are the DOD people who are inside missile
silos and a variety of other highly critically important occupations.
And we found that they were reporting the majority of the time, two
thirds of the time they were getting 6 or 7 hours of sleep or less every
night. And the quality of that sleep, when they were able to get it, was
often poor, especially if they were deployed, because there was a lot of
noise , uncomfortable sleeping conditions. There are a lot of
interruptions. And so they really face some significant issues with
sleep deprivation and fatigue.

[Holly Hobbs:] I  think you said that the DOD recommended 7 hours of
sleep?

[Diana Maurer:] Yes.

[Holly Hobbs:] That's not 8 hours of sleep, which I think is what's
recommended for the public. Do we know why it's less, or like, is that
the minimum? Where does that come from? Do we know?

[Diana Maurer:] So from a DOD perspective, that's their goal. That's
what they say should be achieved. And frankly, when we looked at the
policies that DOD has around sleep, the policies are actually quite
good. They talk about things like make sure everyone gets at least 7
hours of sleep. Try to have breaks. Make sure that people who are
involved in particularly dangerous occupations are getting that sleep,
and so forth. The challenge that DOD faces is translating that guidance,
which at the end of the day, those are words on pieces of paper into
realities on the ground. And so a lot of our findings and
recommendations were around that translation of policy into practice.

[Holly Hobbs:] So you said we did our own survey. What did service
members tell us about the impacts fatigue was having on them and their
job performance?

[Diana Maurer:] So we heard a lot from service members. They were very
open and they provided very extensive and honest comments in response to
that survey. Give you some examples. A remotely-piloted aircraft pilot
said they, quote, almost collided with another aircraft due to mental
fatigue. A motor vehicle operator said they sometimes fall asleep while
driving and they were afraid they may end up killing someone. A
maintainer, someone who fixes aircraft, said sleep deprivation leads to
a greater possibility of mistakes when they're trying to fix and repair
aircraft. And we heard from officers inside missile silos that people
were falling asleep at their controls inside a missile silo. These are
significant concerns and we heard it directly from the service members.

[Holly Hobbs:] So that's the impact on the service members. What about
the impact on the military itself? How does it impact military
readiness?

[Diana Maurer:] So fatigue directly impacts military readiness and
military performance. When you are sleep deprived, your ability to make
good, quick decisions is degraded. The ability to notice when there's a
warning light flashing on the cockpit dashboard, that's going to be
degraded. Your ability to make determinations on whether or not an
aircraft is safe to fly is going to be degraded. So all of that hinders
mission operation and readiness. It's a contributing factor to a number
of accidents. DOD has reported on this extensively. The Army found that
fatigue was a cause in nearly 10% of tactical vehicle accidents over a
decade long period. The Navy reported nearly 500 instances where there
were vehicular accidents involving Marines or Navy personnel that were
partially attributed to fatigue and lack of sleep. And in 2017, the Navy
suffered four significant accidents at sea, in large part due to
fatigue, that contributed to the loss of 17 lives and hundreds of
millions of dollars of damage to capital ships. So it's a significant
problem.

[Holly Hobbs:] Diana, did you tell us what the Department of Defense is
doing about all of this?

[Diana Maurer:] So the DOD is taking a lot of actions to try to address
these problems. And to their credit, their policies that they have in
place are actually quite good on paper. They're also doing a lot of
research of the impact of sleep deprivation. Also doing research into
wearable devices, watches and rings and other things that they can
provide service members, give them better tools for tracking how much
sleep they're getting. They're adjusting scheduling practices. And
they're even trying to educate service members on how they can get
better sleep and the impact of what happens when they don't get enough
sleep. So there's a lot of different activity that DOD is taking. They
recognize there's a problem. One of the main challenges is that those
activities are scattered around DOD.

{MUSIC}

[Holly Hobbs:] So military service members aren't getting enough sleep,
which is resulting in accidents and even deaths. And while the
Department of Defense is taking steps to better understand the impacts
of fatigue, these efforts are scattered. Diana, what more do we think
the DOD should be doing to address service member fatigue and its
impacts on military readiness?

[Diana Maurer:] So there's a lot of interest at all levels of the
department. And there are a lot of offices and organizations with DOD,
who are taking some steps to try to address fatigue and sleep
deprivation. The challenge is no one owns it. We have recommendations
around making sure that there's someone at a senior level within the
department who really is in charge of making sure that policy is being
implemented, that the services have clear guidance and direction on what
they should be doing and the services know who to report to, to make
sure that they're that they're being held accountable for making
progress in addressing the significant challenge. A second thing is that
the DOD needs to do a better job of just keeping its arms around all the
different research projects that they have underway. We looked just at
those research efforts that were focused on wearable devices. We found
four dozen different research projects across DOD. Many of those
research projects were on exactly the same wearable device. In many
cases, the people working on research project A had no idea that related
research was going on at the same time. So we have recommendations
around making sure the department has a comprehensive list of these
research projects. That they're comparing notes and sharing the results.
That will ensure that there's better internal coordination and make it
easier for DOD to get good technology in the hands of service members
that much sooner.

[Holly Hobbs:] And last question, what's the bottom line of this report?

[Diana Maurer:] So the bottom line of our report is that sleep
deprivation and fatigue is a serious problem facing the military
services. There's a lot of activity they have underway to address those
problems. We think it's important for DOD to have clear leadership to
drive the necessary changes, get a better handle on the ongoing research
and other activities within the department, and make sure that service
members are given the tools that they need to make sure that they can
safely and effectively carry out their jobs, which are really important
for national security.

[Holly Hobbs:] That was Diana Maurer talking about our new report on
military fatigue. Thanks for your time, Diana.

[Diana Maurer:] Thank you.

[Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. To
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