Isn't most of the point of military training and operations to always run an operation as if though it was wartime?
Otherwise if there's a war what are these crews going to be doing? Pissing themselves on the bridge, or have a bottle in one hand and their dick in the other while trying to man their station, possibly while undergoing hard maneuvers?
This seems to be some fundamental failure of crew management. Crews should be allocated in such a way that there's time for toilet breaks.
Presumably they don't run realistic exercises all the time - that sounds like a military equivalent of always being in crunch mode and we all know how well that works out!
Wartime can last years, you can't rely on only being able to withstand that for a couple of weeks or months.
I can't say I have any experience with the military, but from listening to "Life and Work on HMS Enterprise"[1], they are constantly running realistic exercises (in their case, mostly simulating fires and people overboard, since it's a research vessel).
Not always - we don't have everyone at a military base going around with rifles 24-7 because the risks of doing so are higher.
But yeah it is a failure of crew management certainly - at very least there should be a solid "relief" procedure that can handle it - and even stable in the long odds of a crewman getting killed out of line of sight by say a glancing hit.
Otherwise if there's a war what are these crews going to be doing? Pissing themselves on the bridge, or have a bottle in one hand and their dick in the other while trying to man their station, possibly while undergoing hard maneuvers?
This seems to be some fundamental failure of crew management. Crews should be allocated in such a way that there's time for toilet breaks.