Robert Kaplan: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

The term was initially coined by Marine Gen. and Commandant Charles Krulak in 1999.

Contreras’s point about a hangar for two helicopters deserves expansion. Choppers were perfect for anti-submarine work. In the air, the noise of the ship did not interfere with their dipping sonar when it was in passive mode, and when it was in active mode the chopper did not give away the position of the ship to the enemy because it was flying some distance from it. Moreover, two choppers flying about with dipping sonar covered a much wider range of territory than would a ship by itself.

He was subsequently named Sailor of the Year for all surface ships in the Pacific Fleet, and was promoted to chief petty officer in 2005.

Number seven was Ayad Futayyih Khalifa Al-Rawi, Quds Forces chief of staff.

Only the commanding officer was allowed to punish, done through nonjudicial punishment (“captain’s mast”).

The origin of “manning the side” when on a friendly port visit was to demonstrate that the crew was not down below manning the guns.

A Navy lieutenant is the equivalent of a captain in the other services.

Carl Vinson of Georgia was a member of the House of Representatives for over fifty years, and played a substantial role in getting the funds for a two-ocean navy.

Because I departed the Benfold in Honolulu, I was not there to experience the arrival at its home port in San Diego, where helicopters flew overhead in formation to celebrate its return, and the crew lined the rails with roses in hand for their loved ones.

The Tomahawk was designed originally as a submarine-launched weapon.

Both were two-star admirals, or rear admirals upper-half.

Submarine tenders are massive surface ships that service almost every aspect of a submarine. Their size is necessitated by their Tomahawk and torpedo magazines, and the numerous machine shops that repair and manufacture everything from engines to lockers. Women constitute around half of a tender’s crew. It was Frank Cable, at the turn of the twentieth century, who commanded the sea trials of some of the earliest American submarines.

For Navy SEALs, the sub was the preferred method of insertion and extraction in 90 percent of their missions.

In World War II, submarine casualty rates were six times as high as other American naval forces: 52 submarines and 3,500 submariners lost.

Officially, the color of U.S. submarines was “dark gray,” and that of surface warships the much lighter “haze gray.”

As on a destroyer, the captain of the boat holds the rank of commander, or lieutenant colonel in the other services. But since function takes precedence over rank, he is referred to as “captain.” Similarly, aboard a submarine, the various lieutenants are not addressed as such, but as “nav” for the lieutenant in charge of navigation, “weaps” for the one in charge of the weapons systems, “eng” (soft g ) for the reactor engineer, “chop” for the supply officer, and so on.

Only on Saturday, Field Day—when everyone cleaned the boat—was there reveille.

Lt. Michael Murphy of Raleigh, North Carolina, was the navigator; Lt. Comdr. Michael Luckett of Banning, California, the engineer.

Wet transmission checks refers to checks on the circuitry of torpedoes while they are in tubes pressurized with seawater. Magnetic silencing, or degaussing, is the process of removing the boat’s magnetic signature by running electric currents through it, so that it cannot be threatened by magnetic mines. Thermoluminescent dosimetry refers to the measurement of radiation levels on the body.

A submarine, like an aircraft carrier, was usually referred to as a “boat.” But it was also a warship, so calling it a boat was not a hard and fast rule.

The cooks—the true heroes of submarine existence—also did the officers’ laundry.

Because sailors had a habit of telling sea stories whenever they congregated to unravel strands of old line, telling a sea story came to be known as “spinning a yarn.”

A submarine nuclear reactor has a life span of thirty-three years, but requires a refueling after twenty years. The $200 million was reasonable considering that a new SSN could cost as much as $1.4 billion, with even a diesel-powered sub running up to $800 million.

In order to embed for an extended period on a fast-attack nuclear submarine, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement with the Pacific Fleet. Certain details about the exercises I agreed in advance not to disclose.

The crews of SSBNs (ballistic missile subs), wherever they happened to be in the world, used ZULU time—Greenwich mean time not adjusted to daylight savings.

The combination acted as a diuretic, which helped the sailor pass the contaminant out of his system.

The actual “best” speed of a fast-attack nuclear submarine is something that I experienced, but that I am not allowed to print because it is classified. The same with the deepest depth it can attain.

EUCOM was working with other branches of the U.S. government to construct transmitters for an FM radio network throughout the Sahel, in order to counter messages broadcast by the Salafists. But this was a targeted information operation, designed to achieve fast, measurable results, rather than traditional, broad-based nation-building.

The official name of the effort was Operation Flintlock.

For an explanation of JSOTFs and C-JSOTFs, see Chapters 4 and 5 in Imperial Grunts.

I had been embedded with the 3rd of the 3rd in southern Afghanistan in late 2003. See the last part of Chapter 5 in Imperial Grunts.

For an argument in favor of admitting women to Special Forces, see Chapter 6 of Imperial Grunts.

JDAM: Joint Direct Attack Munition, a massive GPS-guided air-to-ground bomb.

Sgt. 1st Class Carlson was born in Iowa and moved from place to place growing up in Illinois, as his father, an engineer, kept getting better and better jobs.

See Chapter 6 of Imperial Grunts for a more detailed discussion of how Special Forces needed to evolve.

The other sniper was Mike Salzwedel.

The 12.5-inch combat utility knife was named after Lt. Gen. William P. Yarborough.

It was the same principle when fighting from Humvees. The fire would come from a stationary Humvee while another advanced.

Lines of tape were spread over a flat surface to simulate partitions in a building.

There was another side to this argument, provided to me by an Army sergeant major some months later in another theater. The Army was about structure and discipline, he explained, not self-expression. If Green Berets had to grow beards and wear pakols to ease their relationships with Afghans, or if civil affairs officers at a Kenyan beach resort had to grow their hair long to look more like tourists and NGOs, that was accepted and encouraged even. But wearing ball caps served no practical purpose in terms of a mission.