Endurance at Sea

Endurance at Sea: Psychological Resilience and the Limits of Endurance in the US Navy

What does it actually cost a crew to keep a warship at sea past the point anyone planned for?

Endurance at Sea is a research-driven examination of what sustained naval deployment does to the people who carry it out - and what the evidence says a navy can, and cannot, do about it. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, official Navy and GAO reporting, and well-documented incidents including the USS Fitzgerald and John S. McCain collisions, the 2022 suicide cluster aboard three carriers, and the record-length deployments of USS Nimitz, Gerald R. Ford, and Abraham Lincoln, this book traces a single argument across twenty-one chapters: that a warship's combat power and its crew's sustained human functioning are not two separate subjects, but one.

It moves from the physical - sleep, noise, crowding, deployment length - through the social and moral - cohesion, leadership, family, chaplaincy, moral injury - to what happens when endurance fails: concealment, organizational breakdown, and the public crises that follow. It closes not with reassurance or alarm, but with a specific, evidence-based architecture for what a sustainable deployment would actually require - and an honest accounting of which fixes are within a command's own authority, and which require decisions no officer can make alone.

Written for Navy officers, defense studies students, policymakers, and anyone seriously interested in what keeps a crew - and the institution around it - functioning under sustained strain, Endurance at Sea is not a work of advocacy for or against the Navy. It does not offer a tidy conclusion, because the evidence does not support one. What it offers instead is the most complete single-volume synthesis currently available of the physical, social, spiritual, and institutional dimensions of endurance at sea - assembled by a former Navy servicemember and lawyer for readers who need more than reassurance and more than alarm.

Dr. Cornelis van Houte, former Navy servicemember