So you want to understand an aircraft carrier? Well, just imagine that it's a busy day, and you shrink San Francisco Airport to only one short runway and one ramp and gate. Make planes take off and land at the same time, at half the present time interval, rock the runway from side to side, and require that everyone who leaves in the morning returns that same day. Make sure the equipment is so close to the edge of the envelope that it's fragile. Then turn off the radar to avoid detection, impose strict controls on radios, fuel the aircraft in place with their engines running, put an enemy in the air, and scatter live bombs and rockets around. Now wet the whole thing down with salt water and oil, and man it with 20-year-olds, half of whom have never seen an airplane close-up. Oh, and by the way, try not to kill anyone. article 
It is in the real-world environment of workups and deployment, through the continual training and retraining of officers and crew, that the information needed for safe and efficient operation is developed, transmitted, and maintained. Without that continuity, and without sufficient operational time at sea, both effectiveness and safety would suffer.
Moreover, the organization is not stable over time. Every forty months or so there is an almost 100 percent turnover of crew, and all of the officers will have rotated through and gone on to other duty. Yet the ship remains functional at a high level.
Behavioral and cultural norms, SOPs [standing operating procedures], and regulations are necessary, but they are far from sufficient to preserve operational structure and the character of the service. Our research team noted three mechanisms that act to maintain and transmit operational factors in the face of rapid turnover. First, and in some ways most important, is the pool of chief petty officers, many of whom have long service in their specialty and circulate around similar ships in the fleet. Second, many of the officers and some of the crew will have at some time served on other carriers, albeit in other jobs, and bring to the ship some of the shared experience of the entire force. Third, the process of continual rotation and replacement, even while on deployment, maintains a continuity that is broken only during a major refit. These mechanisms are realized by an uninterrupted process of on-board training and retraining that makes the ship one huge, continuing school for its officers and men.
The ship appears to us as one gigantic school, not in the sense of rote learning, but in the positive sense of a genuine search for acquisition and improvement of skills. One of the great enemies of high reliability is the usual "civilian" combination of stability, routinization, and lack of challenge and variety that predispose an organization to relax vigilance and sink into a dangerous complacency that can lead to carelessness and error. The shipboard environment on a carrier is never that stable. Traditional ways of doing things are both accepted and constantly challenged. Young officers rotate in with new ideas and approaches; old chiefs remain aboard to argue for tradition and experience. The resulting dynamic can be the source of some confusion and uncertainty at times, but at its best leads to a constant scrutiny and rescrutiny of every detail, even for SOPs.
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