Also, "nights" are not a real thing, not in the biological sense. In the surface ship nuclear power plant world where there is no air conditioning, you can't stand watch for more than 5 hours, which means 4 5s and one 4 hour watch. Think you stand the same watch every day? Nope, not enough people. You normally stand 1 on 2 off (5 and dimes) or one on 3 off (5 and 15s). This puts your sleep window at different spots every night.

Subs are air conditioned, so they can stand either 6 and 6s or less commonly 6 and 12s. Their lives are generally worse in every way. Except they all like smelling each other farts and sharing beds, so it works out.

Can confirm this is a problem in Naval aviation also.

I obviously haven't done an A/B study, but I would figure that having periods of crunch time (long or short) with periods of sane time would both keep military units in practice for when they do need to be up for three days on four hours of sleep AND let them train/maintain/not crash their ships into other ships.

But I doubt that the culture described in TFA, and this thread evolved in any way but organically.