How Nuclear-Powered Submarines Actually Work

My name is David Marquet. I commanded a nuclear-powered, fast-attack, Los Angeles-class submarine. One of the most powerful, lethal, and silent weapons on the planet. This is everything I'm authorized to tell you. You're poorly fed, poorly rested, feel like you're under stress basically all the time. There's so many things that can kill you, let alone the enemy. But that was the deal. We were on a mission, defending liberal democracy. Everybody is just working together. Nuclear submarines are classified as nuclear because they have a nuclear propulsion unit. So the thing that drives the submarine is a nuclear reactor. Currently, the U.S. has a fleet of submarines. First, they're the attack submarines. The SSNs, that's the sexy job. This is the kind of submarine that I commanded. The attack submarines are like fighter jets of the submarine force. We go far, far in front of all the friendly forces, and we operate deep in enemy territory. The other kind of submarine that we have, we call boomers or ballistic missile submarines, and they're identified by the designator SSBN, which means ballistic missile. The N at the end means it's nuclear-powered. SS is the Navy code for submarine, so SSBN. These submarines are there in case there's a nuclear attack on the United States. These submarines can't be targeted. They're so good at hiding, they can be quieter than the ocean around them. We had two basic kinds of weapons, Tomahawk missiles and torpedoes, Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo. One of the things that makes American submarines so good is the torpedo tubes aren't at the front of the submarine and don't shoot straight out. We move the torpedo room back about a quarter of the way, and it's at the bottom. The torpedo tubes are angled. They're canted, we say, on the sides of the submarines. If you want to shoot a target that's straight ahead, you have to make these mental calculations. The torpedo goes out at an angle, and then it's got to align. This is a mathematical problem. It's one of the reasons why not all navies do this. Secondly, there's an engineering problem, because if they shoot the torpedo out the side, the water catches the torpedo, it doesn't impulse out fast enough, then it can get jammed. It's like sticking your hand out the car window. When you can do it, now you move this noisy room, which is the torpedo room, back away from the sonar system. The sonar system sits way up here in this quiet area, so it can hear better. Because it's back here, the submarine hull itself shields some of the noise. So if I were going to shoot a guy over here on the left, I would shoot him from the right side too, because the submarine in the middle will mask the sound of the torpedo going out. It starts heading for the target, and it stays quiet. You want to stay quiet as long as possible, and it's trailing a wire behind it, which is connecting the torpedo to the submarine, and it's a two-way wire. So we'll continue to monitor the target. No sound, no sound, no sound from the target. Target doesn't know it's coming. Good. Just keep going. Or all of a sudden, maybe a big burst of noise from the target. We see here the propellers go over. They're turning. They must have detected the torpedo. But now I can steer right, you know, five degrees. We can steer the torpedo. And the torpedo tells us what it's seeing. It's sending back these cryptic messages. So here's the target. Torpedo's coming in. It actually never hits the ship. It'll go under the ship, and it detonates. We're going to blow a big hole in the ocean. Why? Because ships are designed to be stabilized by all this water around them. And when there's a big hole in the middle, it goes like this, and it cracks in half. Even a big destroyer, only the captain's the person who can authorize that. It's tragic. We never like to sink a ship and kill people because it's not for humans. And it also means if you had to do it, it means that deterrence in a sense failed because you're at war. But if you mess around, we're going to put you on the bottom. We're going to chase you until you can't stay awake, and then we're going to put you on the bottom. We have two basic kinds of missiles in submarines. One, we have these tomahawks. They can go a thousand miles. These are the kind of missiles where you see in the news, the Navy launched missiles into, at the beginning of the Iraq War, they launched missiles into Iraq. They're about the same size of a torpedo. In fact, they're designed so that they use the same handling equipment, basically. They go through the same size tube and all this kind of stuff. And the way that works here is you get an order to launch missiles. Now, as a submarine commander, you don't really know what's at the other end. You can read the targeting package. We're just kind of an armory that gets it there and then launches it safely, and it goes up in the air, it does its thing. So you would only launch those on order from higher up. Then, a whole other level, nuclear. So that's highly controlled. You have to get one of these specially formatted messages. It has to decode right, and then it has to say the right thing in the message. And then we break these codes, and you have two sets of officers independently checking, sort of like two-party authentication on your phone, but the links are longer. But let's say the link is like 1-2-Alpha-Bravo. And so you'll have one group of officers, you have a pair over here, and they're like, 1-2-Alpha-Bravo. And then the officer is looking at the message, looks at it, and says it matches, 1-2-Alpha-Bravo. And then over here, in a different part of this, a few feet away, another pair of officers doing the same thing, but they'll do it backwards. So those are like Bravo-Alpha-2-1. And so we're doing this multiple ways to make sure that no one makes a mistake and is an author. And then they come together, and they agree, and they talk to the weapons officer, and the second-in-command, and the captain, and they have to all agree. So it's a very serious business. At a moral level, you know you're ordering the death of people. It's not like the movies. It's not cool. You're not happy. It's sober. The captain on a submarine has a lot of authority to punish people, a scary amount of authority. So I can fine a person, I can reduce them in rank, which would take them maybe two, three years to recover from. Well, actually, you never recover because you're always then behind. So that's terrible because then you also lose pay. I put them in three days bread and water. If I want to do more than that, I got to get someone's permission. So there's this big code book we call the UCMJ, Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's got all these rules about what punishments basically are assigned to different things. So some of the really bad things to do are AWOL or unauthorized absence, leaving your post, falling asleep on watch. Insubordination I'd say is incredibly rare. I cannot remember a time when someone deliberately didn't follow their orders, which is good, but it's also bad because then you got to be really careful when you give an order. They're going to do it. They're going to try and do it. And if it's not right, they're going to try and still do it. And so you got to be really, really... I learned the hard way on this one. Integrity is really, really taken seriously. Whatever you say, we're going to believe you. The ballistic missile submarines have a lot of pressure to get underway at sea. We got to get out there with our missiles. This pressure to get to sea trickles down through the ship and you come into port, you have a few days to fix everything that's wrong and go back out to sea. Sad situation happened when I was engineer. I had a chief who I would say was a good guy in the engineering department who took a shortcut. There was a technical thing with these bolts where the bolt head needs to be tight enough on the bolt threaded part that it's actually sticking out on the other side a little bit. I normally wouldn't do this, but I was looking at these bolts on this one big piece of equipment and this didn't look like it was right. And I said, that's weird because they're sign-offs. It turns out that this chief had cut corners, signed off that they were good to go when he didn't know they were good to go. So he was gone the next day. Most of the time to get communications, you got to stick a mast out of the water because radio waves don't penetrate the ocean. So you come shallow, you stick a mast out. There's satellites that go overhead at certain times. They download this so they can download a lot of data in a very short period of time. So when the message comes in, if it's not in the right format, then it's not a valid message. It doesn't matter what it says. And the codes change all the time. It's like encryption on your computer. Things are coded at one end and uncoded at the other end. So it's got to get through all these wickets before you even read it to pay attention. We had a funny situation happen. This was during an exercise. We were in an exercise. We were supposed to sink another submarine. We had an exercise torpedo. So you take the warheads off and it's painted orange. Because we've been playing this cat and mouse game with the submarine, we haven't cleared the broadcast. And time comes up and one of the junior officers, because we're so used to operating in peacetime, is like, oh, I need to raise the mast and clear the message traffic. And I kind of lost my cool then because, no, we're at war. We've got to sink this guy and then we can get the admin messages later. Most of your radio communications comes from these satellite communications. But we also have a backup. The backup is called ELF, extremely low frequency. So these are the big long antennas. They're out in Minnesota and they make the cow milk turn green. Just kidding. And they send these really long radio waves out so that the antennas need to be really, really long to send out a long wave. And because of really long wavelength, low frequency means that they penetrate the first little bit of the ocean. But we can run an antenna up that runs close to the surface of the ocean and it can receive ELF radio. It's very limited data. So you get three letters. That's all you get. And then you look in a code book, it's ABC, nothing, ABC, nothing. But every once in a while, a letter will say, oh, we have something urgent for you. You got to come up and get your regular message. If you're on an SSBN, you are always getting these things because they always need to be ready to go into launch mode. And they are. And it's big, it's a huge deal if you're changing depth or something and you lost one radio mode before you get the other one. That's a huge deal. So you practice, practice, practice. Always 100%, 100.0% of the time you have connectivity. Submarines can do things that you can't do on a lot of other ships. There was an exhibit at the Smithsonian that showed one of these things. So I know I can talk about it. It's called an underhull. Let's say the Chinese or the Russians have this ship that we don't really know what it does, but it kind of sits there. It doesn't really move. And we kind of get suspicious that, well, maybe it's dropping something or it's got something underneath it. So next time a ship gets underway, we have a submarine nearby. Sneak up and look up, see what's underneath the ship. We can do stuff like that. We can also collect intelligence from cell phone towers, radio waves, from radio transmissions between ships. Submarines are really, really good at this because they don't know you're there. So they act like they would normally act. They make the same communications. They get the same permissions. And we might not know exactly what they all mean at the time, but we collect it all, put it on these hard drives, send it back, and you build up this library of how they talk. And then you start to build up these patterns, which is really, really important. We spend a lot of time getting ready for a war. Our philosophy is the more ready we are for war, the less likely war will happen. The more capable we are of sinking the enemy, the less likely the enemy is going to try something like invade Taiwan. So one of the things that you need to be able to do is operate your submarine for a long time out in enemy waters. Most of the time we don't advertise these things, but sometimes we'll do something. It's in international water, so it's all legal. We'll shoot an exercise weapon or we'll shoot an actual war shot. We do this every once in a while. We need to send these little signals, hey, we can do this, don't mess with us. If you come after us, we're going to punch you in the nose, and we'll punch you in the nose so hard, you're going down, you're not coming up. You'd be surprised at how hard we work to follow all the rules. And when I mean rules, I mean like rules of international law and where you can drive the submarines. We don't go sneaking in other countries' water. When we want to go someplace, we get permissions, but there are some traditional and legal waterways where you can go. For example, the Strait of Malacca, which is the waterway between Asia, basically, and the Indian Ocean that goes past Singapore and Malaysia, Strait of Malacca. But because it's one of these international straits, it's legal to go through there. We go through on the surface, fly an American flag, it's all above board. If there's land, then you draw a 12-mile circle around the land, if it's an island. Some countries, like the Chinese, they're taking these underwater atolls that don't break the surface, or haven't in a thousand years, and piling up with concrete, and then say, oh, that's an island now, and they draw a 12-mile circle around it. And we're like, no, that's not legal. So in a case like that, we would drive there, but it's not like we're violating. We don't think we're violating international law. We think we're enforcing it by driving there. But if we did that, we'd probably send a destroyer or something that would be obvious to see. You don't send something that's secret and say, oh, by the way, we went over there. I think the public would be surprised at just how busy and active everybody is. You're underfed, or you're mal-fed, you're underrested. You have your operational job, your standing watch, and everyone on submarine has to do that, officers and enlisted guys. Then when you're off watch, you have more responsibilities. You have to do cleaning, you have to do some of this minor maintenance, changing oil, checking machines, changing gaskets, fixing a small oil leak, that kind of thing. And for the officers, we're not necessarily doing the cleaning, but planning what happens next, where are we going to go, how are we going to get there, getting the charts ready, looking for hazards, okay, we need to go around this way because there's some uncharted seamounts, whatever it is. Then on top of that, we have training. What we'll do, say a fire drill. A fire on a submarine is an all-hand, everybody's involved. Sound the alarm, everyone wakes up, man's their station, man's their gear. Then you got to put out the fire, and then you got to put all this equipment away, so that's like half an hour. This could happen at any time. Two worst things on a submarine are fire and flooding. The most common cause of fire on a submarine, it's mundane, it's dryer lint. There's one washing machine and one dryer, you got 140 guys. So they're pretty much going all the time. Flooding is really bad also. Flooding can put you on the bottom, and so first of all, it starts with design of the submarine. So if the water comes, sprays out, takes out the electrical panels, we can still operate some of these key valves without any electricity. And then if you have really bad flooding, then you have to emergency blow up to the surface. So we have these two candles in the control room. They're called chicken switches, and they also do not require electricity to operate, and they allow this compressed air in these cylinders to go through a very short length of pipe. It goes in the ballast tanks, blows the water out of the bottom of the ballast tanks. Submarine rises very rapidly. I never had to do that for real. We would practice it. There's a couple big rooms on the submarine, the engine room, the torpedo room, and the mess decks. The mess decks are where the crew eats. We have two dining rooms. We have a little dining room for the officers we call the ward room, W-A-R-D room. It's a table, long table, assigned seating, 12 chairs around the table. Then we have the mess decks, again, long tables. It's like picnic tables set up. And the submarines, you could decorate your mess deck. So on Santa Fe, which was named after Santa Fe, New Mexico, we had pictures of the ship's logo and painted cacti, and it's just a little spirit thing. The space is so limited. So when we go to sea with 140 people, we only have 117 actually built-in beds. So a bunch of people are going to be sharing beds. We call it hot racking because the person gets out of bed and goes on duty, and the person on duty gets in the bed. It's still warm from the body heat. When you go to sea, you typically go out with 90 days' worth of food. So when you go on one of these six-month deployments, a couple of times during the deployment, you'll stop and you'll bring on more food. Most of the food is dehydrated or canned or frozen. Your fresh food, basically three days, and then there's no more lettuce. And it's a big deal. Food's a big deal because there's not much else that you can do that's fun and socially brings the crew together. There are certain staples that submarine sailors like. One is hamburgers, which we call sliders. One is pizza, which we always serve on Friday night. And one is ice cream. And we have an ice cream machine. We call it the auto dog, which isn't pleasant to think about, but it's a very important machine. So like you have the machine that makes oxygen, and then you have the ice cream machine. We try and maintain all the rituals. So we'll celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday. And we have halfway nights, a big celebration. Mail is a big deal. Hearing from the families is a big deal. Back when I was doing my time as a submariner, so I'm talking like 80s, 90s, early thousands, the families were allowed to send these very short cryptic messages, like 40-word messages. And then, of course, you're dealing with people in their 20s and 30s. So you can imagine like some of the wives are trying to sneak in like little sexy things. And so we kind of let that go. But you can't say, for example, traumatic news like, hey, your dad died. We filter that out and make sure the sailor got that in some kind of a controlled way if they were sent that. And bring the sailor in. They always know it's bad. Like if the captain and chief of the boat are sitting there and they call you in. They already know it's not good. You just tell them, this is the deal. And at the next port, we're going to send you home. When you're on a submarine, you don't really have a sense of where you are in the ocean. You try and block it out, the fact that, hey, I'm hundreds of feet under the water. Submarine is very quiet. So it's kind of like a library where even though we don't really have to, we kind of speak in quiet hushed tones. You do hear things. There's a lot of sound in the ocean. And most of it, we know what it is. Oh, that's an oil well, a thousand miles away. I can't say we understand everything that goes on there. And sometimes the sound bends and distorts. It's strange sometimes. I joined the Navy because we were in the middle of the Cold War. I was this geeky kid in high school. And my dad was a scientist and I was on track. I should have been a scientist. But I really felt passionately about what we stood for with the Constitution and liberal democracy. So I graduated from high school in 1977. About four weeks later, right after July 4th, I reported to the Naval Academy as a plea. You're in the Navy at that point. The day you show up, cut your hair, you line up in these long lines, you get uniforms, just like you see in the movies. I loved it. And I had a small group of guys. I was a physics major and we would study together. I knew I wanted to be a submarine because it just matched my personality. It was quiet, introverted. 3D chess was my jam. And it's hard to get accepted in the submarine force if you don't have a decent technical background. There's two paths into the submarine force. There's the officers and the enlisted. In the U.S. Armed Forces, we have this dichotomy. And it's basically split. If you have a college degree, you're going to become an officer. And if you don't have a college degree, you're going to an enlisted person. It has nothing to do with intelligence or motivation. It's good for the force to have a diversity of thinkers. But most of the guys are engineers, physics majors, math majors, that kind of thing, because you're running a nuclear reactor. I had all A's, so I graduated right at the top of the class. At the Naval Academy, you have a thing called service selection night, which is, I think, maybe like six months before you graduate, maybe a little bit longer. You get to express your preference for where you want to go. Rarely were people forced to go into submarines. There is separate training for the submarine force. Most of it is technical. But there's a screening process, which I just vaguely remember. There's these psychological exams that you take, and they ask you questions like, you have free on Saturday night, what would you rather do? Stay at home and read a book or go to a bar with your friends? Stay at home, read a book. So that's the kind of question. Hey, if this happened, would you be mad, sad, happy, whatever? And so we're looking for people like no drama mama kind of people. We do a lot of training that puts people under stressful situations. One of the most memorable trainers that we have is a flooding simulator. It's basically a small room. So it's a couple floors high, but it's not very big. You have a team. There's maybe six of you. You have these little, we call them bandits or these little straps and plugs for patching leaks and holes. They tell you, so here's what's going to happen. The water's going to spray out. You guys got to, if you guys don't pass the leaks, the water's going to keep rising and you all die. Well, what they don't tell you, the water is frigging cold and it hits you with force. It's like a fire hose. That's at 33 degrees. And so you're sort of stunned. And the instinct is, Oh, I see a hole. I see water spraying out. Let me go grab, do it. But that's the, again, that's the instinct that kills you. Why? Because what you need to do is get the holes on the bottom first, because what happens is if there's a hole down here and then the water starts to fill up, once the water fills up past that hole, it's super hard to pass that hole. You don't see it. You don't know what's down there. And so there are a lot of these things where your instinct is to do A, but you, you need to do B. And so you're, you need to kind of override your impulsive instincts to do the right thing. But then you get through that and everyone's laughing and not everyone makes it through the training process. And if someone's ill suited, they generally select that, they self-select out of the program because they know, Hey, this is, this isn't for me. So I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981. So this is, we're in the height of the cold war. Typical deployment cycle is six months, plus or minus sometimes a little bit. So the road, the whole cycle is a year and a half training, six month deployment. A year and a half workup, six month deployment. During the year and a half workup, you're at sea about one third of the time. My favorite deployments are my first deployment when I was a junior officer on board the Sunfish because this is back in the cold war. The Sunfish was a SSN and it was super cool. Sunfish operate out of Charleston, South Carolina. You go out locally, maybe down the Bahamas, up and down the East coast. And you would train, you would operate the submarine, you would get everybody up to speed. As a junior officer on the operational side, I was officer of the deck. So I would drive the ship for six hours, once a day, and I'd have various division officer jobs. I had a captain who was sort of a very strict, formal, authoritarian guy, but still a guy who really knew his stuff and you would follow him into battle. Then he was replaced by a guy named Mark Paliath, who later became an Admiral. Admiral Paliath was great. He was really good at empowerment. If it was varsity level stuff, you needed someone to drive the ship, he'd get me up there. So we're getting ready for one of these deployments. We're going to go up and chase the Soviets around. And there's a part of the Atlantic Ocean, which we call the G.I.U.K. gap, which is Greenland, Iceland, U.K. And the Soviets, if they were going to come out in the Atlantic, had to come through that G.I.U.K. gap. So we're off the coast of Charleston, so we're not anywhere near any Russian submarines. And I'm on the periscope, we're just doing a training exercise and we're just tootling around. I look out and I see this merchant ship on the horizon. And we use the sonar system very judiciously on the submarine. We listen all the time, because listening is quiet. No one knows you're there. We're just literally collecting, listening. We occasionally use active sonar, which is what you see in the movies, like ping, pew. And so you go out with this big pulse of sound and then you get an echo back. It's a trade-off because as soon as you do that, that sound can be heard a lot further than when you get useful information back. So this can be heard for miles and miles. And it can be fingerprinted into not just a submarine, but a U.S. submarine. So we're very judicious. You need the captain's permission to use this active sonar. And I was talking to the sonar supervisor, wouldn't it be cool if we could go active and get all the sonarmen up here so they could actually see what it looks like? And then all of a sudden I hear this voice, the captain's voice, he says, well, why don't you just tell me what you intend to do? I said, well, Captain, I intend to go active on sonar. So he says, okay. And he walks away. I'm like, what? So it's like, basically like your dad handing the keys to Ferrari to you or something like that. It's crazy. And it's just like, it's so cool. Like the hair is sticking up on my neck right now. Well, many years later, we get all the sonarmen, they come and they look at the stuff. I see what it looks like. And we rotate them through, rotate some of the other crew members through, we do it for five or 10 minutes. And then, you know, we're done. We got all the training out of it. This playful attitude, this attitude of this, like this curiosity, like this was just me being a student again, a kid. And it was so cool. So then every time I went back on watch, the guys were like, Hey, Lieutenant Marquet, can we do this? Can we do this? Let's like, let's go see how steep we can go down. And the last minute pull, let's throw the rudder. Let's go fast flank. And then we'll throw the rudder over hard. So again, this was training off the U.S. coast. So we wouldn't necessarily do this stuff unless you're running away from a torpedo or something. But because of that, we really understood what the submarine would really, could really do, not just theoretically. We go to the G.I.U.K. gap, we're going up to where we thought the Soviets would be operating. We're looking for Soviets. We want to make sure that if we had to go to war with them, that we knew where the submarines were so we could take them out. You know, you're young, it's exciting. You're doing this super cool thing that even now we can't talk about all the stuff that we did. So that was cool. And we did good stuff. I can tell you, you know, we would have kicked it. There's no doubt. The hierarchy of a submarine is defined and it's very clear. And there's always a person, a second in command, a deputy or an alternate. And we'd run drills where we didn't capacitate the captain. Because what we're trying to see is can the ship operate without the captain? Because the captain may become incapacitated. Typically, a person doesn't keel over from a heart attack. But we had, so for example, the second in command, his father became really ill. So we need to send him off the ship so he could go back to be with his dad. So we filled in. An officer's career path would be division officer, department head, second in command, XO, we call him executive officer, first in command, commanding officer, captain. On the enlisted side, it's a little bit different. But you could, again, you move to what we call the COB, chief of the boat. Advancement in the Navy, both for officers and enlisted, is highly technical. No one gets advanced because, you know, they're good looking or someone really, you know, likes them or things like that. It's a meritocracy. On a submarine, there are four main departments. There's engineering. Those guys run the reactor. That is the biggest department. There's weapons, as you might expect. These guys maintain the missiles and the torpedoes and the missile tubes and the torpedo tubes. There's what we call nav ops or navigation operations. These guys run the charts, where are we, the radio room. You get these missions that come in and then the ops guys plan out, okay, we're here, they're there. How are we going to get there? When are we going to move? And then the final department is supply. They feed the crew. They manage all the spare parts, which is a big thing because you need to have all these parts. You have all these lockers all through the submarine. And then you need to know where the part is. The vast majority of senior submarine officers and admirals from the submarine force came through the engineering pipeline. There's three options, engineer, weapons officer, or nav ops. I did well in the schools that mattered for engineering, so I was pretty confident. So I wasn't too surprised when I got selected to be an engineer. Now the thing I didn't want was I didn't want to be an engineer on a ship in maintenance because then you could spend two years, you might spend your entire time, two, three years without actually driving a submarine. And that's death of a career. So I wanted a ship that was operational. I got vectored to the Will Rogers. The Will Rogers was one of these ballistic missile submarines. We were operating out of Holy Lock, Scotland. The Will Rogers was a ship in trouble. The ship had failed an important exam before I got there. This is an exam that basically lets them handle nuclear weapons. So it was one of the deterrent submarines. So they need to do stuff, everything under supervision, and that's a terrible place to be. And then number two is they had had a collision with a Scottish fishing trawler. Going there was a hard job. I was engineer. I was not a very good engineer. It was a really hard time for me. Fortunately, I squeaked through the cracks and I got advanced to the next level. I was coming up through the ranks of submarine force and I got selected to be a submarine commander, which was, I wasn't sure it was going to happen because I'd had this kind of dismal time on the Will Rogers. But I got selected. I was super excited. Being a submarine captain was, that's what my dream job was. That's what I wanted. You have maybe 10 to 12 junior officers, but you only have one captain. So there's kind of a 10 to one down select going from just once you're inside the submarine force. What the Navy does, because there's such a reliance on technical knowledge, is we send you to school for 12 months for the ship that you're going to command. And so there's this very orchestrated and choreographed system where we know you're going to command for three years. So at the two-year point, we pick your successor and then we send them to school. And at the three-year point, they graduate from the school and they come out and they relieve you and you go to your next job and they take the ship for three years. And two years into that, we pick their successor. I was identified with the submarine I was going to go to. And it was the kind of submarine that was pretty well known to me. So a lot of what I was learning was stuff that was a refresher for stuff that I already knew. And at the very end, what happened was there's someone at the two-year point who was the captain of the USS Santa Fe. There was a family issue going on with him. So he wasn't like a hundred percent, like it was distracted. And he said, you know what? Someone else got to do this. And he stepped aside. So now the Navy has a submarine, no captain. And I just graduated from school. And the officer who ran the school picked me. I talked to him afterwards and I said, well, why'd you pick me? He said, oh, you're really curious. And this curiosity I think is going to stand you well. And I had no idea he was so right. The Santa Fe only had two problems. She had the worst morale and the worst performance of the fleet. She had the worst re-enlistment rate in the Navy and had a bad reputation for getting the job done. The Santa Fe was a different kind of submarine. I'd never been on a submarine like this. Different reactor plant, had missile tubes. They moved the position of the Fairwater planes down here. So now I'm about to take over the worst performing submarine on the fleet with the worst morale and I don't know the ship. So that was scary. So I had two weeks, two weeks to take over. And my head is like Alice in Wonderland. I just kind of walked around. I talked to people, but they're all looking at the floor and there's dispiriting. Because one, they knew, you know, they've been told, hey, you're the worst. The morale was bad. And now their boss quits. And they get this guy who wasn't even trained for their ship. And I make a big mistake. We're going to run an exercise. And the exercises we call a reactor scram. We're going to shut down a reactor. There's only one way, one reactor. When you have the reactor on a nuclear submarine, it's amazing. You can surge through the water. You have all this power. You When you don't have the reactor, it's terrible. You're draining down the battery. And so the drill we like to run because I just wanted to see how the crew would react. And so we start the drill. I turn to the officer because I want to make it harder. And I say, hey, let's speed up on the electric motor. It's going to drain more current, drain the battery faster and really compress the time. It's going to add stress, basically, to the team. And I'm trying to, you know, see just how bad we are. But it was an order that couldn't be done. It's essentially, hey, shifting the second gear on a motor with one gear. And the sailor's like, he doesn't do anything. He was just turning on. Hey, what's going on? He says, Captain, there is no second gear. I'm laughing. It was horrifying. That's like basic stuff. Now I'm looking at my shoes. I look at the officer. I said, you know about this? Yes, sir, I did. I'm like, well, why'd you order it? Because you told me to. And then my whole life flashed before my eyes because I was so, so deeply ingrained in this idea that leaders make good decisions and they tell people what to do. And it was just all blew up in one second because there's no way I was going to be the one who knew what to do because I wasn't trained on the submarine. I know what we wanted to achieve, but what levers to push to make it happen? I was the wrong guy. So we got, I got the officers together. I said, the drill's over. I said, how about, how about this? How about I stop giving orders? And they're like, huh, what? So I reached all the way back to that moment on the sunfish when Poliath asked me, well, Marquet, what do you intend to do? I said, Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. I intend to start the reactor. I intend to load torpedoes. I intend to change me, pizza from Friday to Saturday. Nope, don't do that. I think it was pretty novel. This language based focus on using the word intent rather than getting permission, but it did spread throughout the submarine force. Part of it is because over the next 10 years of these, all these junior officers on board Santa Fe, they, there was a disproportionate number that became submarine commander, 10 of them, 10 guys, which was a huge number. And no one would have predicted it, including least of all me, what happened. This conversion of people from order takers where we're reliant on a captain to have all the answers to 135 people thinking, I said, we used to go from one thinker and 135 doers to 135 thinkers. People like to solve problems and submariners are highly trained and you want to be good. And so they would work extra hard. And so morale went prior to that day in the previous 12 months, we really re-enlisted 10% of the sailors, one in 10, starting that day, it was a hundred percent over the next 12 months. Every sailor, a year from this date where I made a decision never to give any orders, we were inspected by the Navy. So these guys spend three days watching you do all this stuff. They're all taking notes. It's top to bottom inside out audit. The inspection team, the officer, the captain on the inspection team, so he's senior to me. He says the highest score we've ever seen, the highest score we have records of. And no one could understand like, well, a year ago, these guys were, couldn't get underway on time. What happened? People would, didn't understand that it was because now we were activating this thinking, we were getting everybody thinking. And it's like the, that's the real dark side to being a leader who makes it happen. You think you're making it happen. You're like leaning into your team. You want your team to lean into you. American, UK, what the Australians are building towards all have a certain capability, which is going to be envied by the rest of the world. Very close to them are, I would say guys like Japan, which have a very robust, highly capable submarine force, but they're not nuclear. So they can't do quite as much, but Japan, of course, they don't need to go as far to get to the battlefield. So a couple of things we could do one, stay at sea for a long time because the equipment doesn't break. And if it breaks sailors can fix it. So this ability to be there for a long period, it's like, it's really hard to combat that. It's really hard to build a defense system because it's not like you're trying to defend for a 10 minute attack. You're like, you don't know when the attack's going to come and you got to defend for six months. Other countries keep their submarine for a long time. It breaks, they got to go in, or it just starts to degrade slowly. So it starts to rattle more. It makes more sound In other countries, they're much more reliant on the captain. The U.S., we have this really deep bench and that you take away one officer, it doesn't really take away another. It still doesn't matter because everyone just sort of, they fill up into the ranks and we practice it. We're always saying like, well, if you were me, what would you do? If you're the captain right now, what would you do? And we kind of see, okay, how are they thinking? How are they thinking through there? How are they solving the problems? How are they managing the crew? How are they managing the problem? What tactical decisions are they going to make? The average age of a submarine force is getting older and older because we built up a whole bunch of submarines during the Cold War. And so the average age came down. Now it's getting longer. We're not replacing them as much. During the Cold War, there was a clear threat, Soviet Union. We were avowed enemies. And so there was a bipartisan consensus in the country, in Congress that we need to spend money, buy submarines because we knew how potent submarines were at deterring the war. And then when the Soviet Union disintegrated, that sort of monolithic enemy went away. And so now we have terrorist groups or pirates off of Somalia. Submarines are not the optimum weapon for dealing with those kinds of stuff. So this united front to maintain a healthy submarine force fell apart. Now we see the rise again of bad actors. I'll call them bad actors, potentially China, certainly Russia. So now there's re-emerging this consensus that, hey, we really need to get our submarines going again. It's expensive, but you get a lot of bang for your buck when you buy a submarine. There are advances in submarines, in U.S. submarines. It's the same trends you see with automobiles to all electric. The Santa Fe had these big steam turbines. And so the reactor heated water, turned it to steam. And we did two things with the steam. One, we ran these turbines that made electricity. And then we ran these big turbines that went to this propeller. It's more efficient if you just make all electricity and then you have the electricity to drive an electric motor. It's a more complicated problem. So that's why we haven't done it so far. But we're now, it's one of the things we're heading towards. I think submarines, just like drones or autonomous self-driving cars, the same thing's happening under the water. If you don't need to put people on a submarine, you can do a lot more with the submarine because a lot of the equipment on the submarine is there to keep the people alive. But the people are the ones that fix the submarine. But the argument is, well, I can buy a hundred of these underwater drones, so to speak, for one big nuclear submarine. I mean, who knows? But look what Ukrainians are doing with their drones. I play with AI every day at home and it's fun. And AI certainly makes the bad guys smarter too. And for me, the worry would be a spoofing one of these messages that tells the submarine, your new mission is to go over here and puts the submarine out of position so that they can do whatever, something like, it's just any interference like that, which gets through the regular filters and using AI to get better at that would be scary. I think it's a lot harder now to be a submarine officer maybe than it used to be. I can tell you when I started, I mean, we were on a mission. We felt like we were the spear tip of democracy. First of all, just the proliferation of technology, I think it's makes it so much, it's very, your brain is like always being pulled in these different directions. And then this overall arching sense of why, like, why am I sacrificing days of my life? I spent 14 years actually on submarines. I calculate I spent seven years underwater in my life. Why am I giving up so much of my life and for what? I just think it's harder now to have that really clear sense of purpose. My son was a submariner for a few years. So like I visited this ship, I met, these are passionate, active thinking young people. There was no monopoly on the sense of dedication for sure. The introduction of women onto the submarines was happening about the time that I was transitioning off the submarines and sort of managing. It was sort of argued that, hey, we can't exclude half the population of smart people from submarines because we won't have enough smart people running the submarines. The way I thought about it was I need different ideas and different ways of thinking about the problem. And the more kind of different people that you get, typically you get more different ideas and thinking about the problems. Santa Fe is still in operation. She's doing well. I had an amazing time as the captain of the Santa Fe. Three years went by too fast. We went on two deployments. We got the highest score in the history of the Navy. We turned retention around from 10% to 100%. I left the submarine and I got awarded a nice job. I was the inspector for the submarine force and then I became a commodore. So I was getting promoted. For me, this idea going back to me not telling people what to do and seeing what they came up with and expressing intent really changed the model. And so now we like to say we're building leaders. It's a leader-leader organization, not leader-follower organization. And I feel good about that. I feel good about these people who had success. Many of them went on to major command. Many went on to become admirals. Several, three at least became admirals. And just from this one submarine crew, I went to the Pentagon, which was a frustrating time for me. And I was not the best Pentagon officer. I decided I was going to be more influential outside than inside, which I think is the right decision. I wrote Turn the Ship Around, which is a story of this turnaround on the nuclear submarine and this use of the word intent primarily. 2013, published by Penguin Random House. Then I wrote a book called Leadership is Language, which talks about the way language influences the culture. Turn the Ship Around was a big success and I've been able to fly around the world and talk to a lot of companies. There's a lot of interest in creating teams where people are thinking and expressing what they're thinking, not just doing what they're told. So now I just wrote a book called Distancing, which is really helpful for everybody, including me. We have a superpower. Every human does. And the superpower is that you can imagine yourself as not you. Because when you go to make decisions and when you go to react to something, we view it from our position of ourselves. We call it the immersed self. I view it from in here. This is where I'm centered. But you don't have to. You can pretend you're somewhere else, someone else or sometime else. But we rarely do it. And it changes the way you think and you get clearer vision. And I've been practicing every day, bringing it into my own life. People ask me, hey, do you miss it? And my flippant answer is no. Then I say, well, yeah, I'd love to go back on a submarine. But as a passenger, as a fly on the wall, I don't want any responsibility. It's too hard. I don't know anything anymore. But just to see, I almost said the word kids, see the kids operate. Because again, they're so young and they're energetic and they're thoughtful. Just see the crew operate, see them interact, see them do this really cool mission in the purpose of defending the constitution, defending liberal democracy. If anyone has an opportunity, definitely say yes.