- 2 days ago
L. David Marquet is a former United States Navy Captain and author who served in the submarine force for nearly three decades. Graduating top of class from the United States Naval Academy in 1981 during the height of the Cold War, Marquet served on multiple submarines. He captained the USS Santa Fe from 1999 to 2001, transforming it from one of the one of worst-performing in the US fleet to the highest ranked.
Marquet breaks down the logistics of operating and living on these massive weapons of war, as well as the torpedoes and missiles that make up the United States arsenal, amidst increased geopolitical tensions with China and Russia.
Following his time in the Navy, Marquet published the bestselling book, Turn the Ship Around, in 2013, detailing his time on the Santa Fe. Since then, he's worked as a leadership expert, speaking at companies like Google. He published an additional book, Leadership is Language, in 2020 and has an upcoming book, Distancing, releasing in August 2025.
For more:
https://davidmarquet.com/books/
Marquet breaks down the logistics of operating and living on these massive weapons of war, as well as the torpedoes and missiles that make up the United States arsenal, amidst increased geopolitical tensions with China and Russia.
Following his time in the Navy, Marquet published the bestselling book, Turn the Ship Around, in 2013, detailing his time on the Santa Fe. Since then, he's worked as a leadership expert, speaking at companies like Google. He published an additional book, Leadership is Language, in 2020 and has an upcoming book, Distancing, releasing in August 2025.
For more:
https://davidmarquet.com/books/
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TechTranscript
00:00My name is David Marquet. I commanded a nuclear-powered, fast-attack Los Angeles-class
00:05submarine, one of the most powerful, lethal, and silent weapons on the planet.
00:10This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:15You're poorly fed, poorly rested, feel like you're under stress basically all the time.
00:22There's so many things that can kill you, let alone the enemy.
00:25But that was the deal. We were on a mission, defending liberal democracy.
00:30Everybody is just working together.
00:37Nuclear submarines are classified as nuclear because they have a nuclear propulsion unit.
00:43So the thing that drives a submarine is a nuclear reactor.
00:48Currently, the U.S. has a fleet of submarines.
00:51First, they're the attack submarines.
00:53The SSNs, that's a sexy job.
00:56This is the kind of submarine that I commanded.
00:58The attack submarines are like the fighter jets of the submarine force.
01:02We go far, far in front of all the friendly forces, and we operate deep in enemy territory.
01:10The other kind of submarine that we have we call boomers, or ballistic missile submarines,
01:14and they're identified by the designator SSBN, which means ballistic missile.
01:20The N at the end means it's nuclear powered.
01:22SS is the Navy code for submarines, so SSBN.
01:26These submarines are there in case there's a nuclear attack on the United States.
01:32These submarines can't be targeted.
01:34They're so good at hiding, they can be quieter than the ocean around them.
01:39We had two basic kinds of weapons, Tomahawk missiles and torpedoes.
01:44Mark 48, heavyweight torpedo.
01:47One of the things that makes American submarines so good is the torpedo tubes aren't at the front
01:52of the submarine and don't shoot straight out.
01:54We move the torpedo room back about a quarter of the way, and it's at the bottom.
02:00And the torpedo tubes are angled, they're canted we say, on the sides of the submarines.
02:04So if you want to shoot a target that's straight ahead, you have to make these mental calculations.
02:12The torpedo is at an angle, and then it's got to align.
02:15So this is a mathematical problem.
02:17It's one of the reasons why not all navies do this.
02:20Secondly, there's an engineering problem, because if they shoot the torpedo out the side,
02:24the water catches a torpedo, it doesn't impulse out fast enough, then it can kind of get jammed,
02:30or it's like sticking your hand out the car window kind of a deal.
02:33But when you can do it, now you move this noisy room, which is the torpedo room,
02:39back away from the sonar system.
02:41So the sonar system sits way up here in this quiet area, so it can hear better.
02:45Because it's back here, the submarine hull itself shields some of the noise.
02:51So if I were going to shoot a guy over here on the left, I would shoot him from a right-side tube,
02:56because the submarine in the middle will mask the sound of the torpedo going out.
03:04It starts heading for the target, and it stays quiet.
03:06You want to stay quiet as long as possible.
03:09And it's trailing a wire behind it, which is connecting the torpedo to the submarine.
03:14And it's a two-way wire.
03:17So we'll continue to monitor the target.
03:21No sound, no sound, no sound from the target.
03:24Target doesn't know it's coming.
03:26Good.
03:26Just keep going.
03:28Or all of a sudden, maybe big burst of noise from the target.
03:31We see here the propellers go over.
03:33They're turning.
03:34They must have detected the torpedo.
03:35But now I can steer, right, you know, five degrees.
03:40We can steer the torpedo.
03:41And the torpedo tells us what it's seeing.
03:45It's sending back these cryptic messages.
03:48So here's the target.
03:51The torpedo's coming in.
03:52It actually never hits the ship.
03:55It'll go under the ship, and it detonates.
03:57We're going to blow a big hole in the ocean.
03:59Why?
04:00Because ships are designed to be stabilized by all this water around them.
04:07And when there's a big hole in the middle, it goes like this.
04:10And it cracks in half.
04:13Even a big destroyer, only the captain's the person who can authorize that.
04:17It's tragic.
04:18We never like to sink a ship and kill people because it's not.
04:25We're humans.
04:26And it also means if you had to do it, it means that deterrence, in a sense, failed because
04:32you're at war.
04:33So, but, like, if you mess around, we're going to put you on the bottom.
04:39We're going to chase you until you can't stay awake, and then we're going to put you
04:42on the bottom.
04:44We have two basic kinds of missiles and submarines.
04:47One, we have these tomahawks.
04:48They can go a thousand miles.
04:50These are the kind of missiles where you see in the news, the Navy launched missiles into,
04:55at the beginning of the Iraq war, and they launched missiles into Iraq.
04:59They're about the same size of a torpedo.
05:01In fact, they're designed so that they use the same handling equipment, basically.
05:06They go through the same size tube and all this kind of stuff.
05:08And the way that works here is you get an order to launch missiles.
05:16Now, as a submarine commander, you don't really know what's at the other end.
05:18You can read the targeting package.
05:20We're just kind of the armory that gets it there and then launches it safely.
05:24It goes up in the air, then it does its thing.
05:27So you would only launch those on order from Hira.
05:31Then, a whole other level, nuclear.
05:35So that's highly controlled.
05:36You have to get one of these specially formatted messages.
05:39You have to decode right, and then it has to say the right thing in the message.
05:43And then we break these codes, and you have two sets of officers independently checking,
05:47sort of like two-party authentication on your phone, but the links are longer.
05:53But let's say the link is, like, one, two, alpha, bravo.
05:58And so you'll have one group of officers, a pair over here, and they're like, one, two, alpha, bravo.
06:04And then the officer is looking at the message, looks at it, and says it matches, one, two, alpha, bravo.
06:09And then over here, in a different part of this, a few feet away, another pair of officers doing the same thing,
06:14but they'll do it backwards.
06:16So those are like, bravo, alpha, two, one.
06:18And so we're doing this multiple ways to make sure that no one makes a mistake, and it's an author, and it's a thing.
06:25And then they come together, and they agree, and they talk to the weapons officer, and the second-in-command, and the captain,
06:31and they have to all agree.
06:33So it's a very serious business.
06:38At a moral level, you know you're ordering the death of people.
06:43It's not like the movies.
06:46It's not cool.
06:48You're not happy.
06:50It's sober.
06:58The captain on a submarine has a lot of authority to punish people, a scary amount of authority.
07:06So I can fine a person, I can reduce them in rank, which would take them maybe two, three years to recover from.
07:13Well, actually, you never recover, because you're always then behind.
07:16So that's terrible, because then you also lose pay.
07:19I put them in three days' bread and water.
07:22If I want to do more than that, I've got to get someone's permission.
07:26So there's this big code book we call the UCMJ, Uniform Code of Military Justice.
07:30It's got all these rules about what punishments basically are assigned to different things.
07:35So some of the really bad things to do are AWOL or unauthorized absence, leaving your post, falling asleep on watch.
07:44Insubordination, I'd say, is incredibly rare.
07:47I cannot remember a time when someone deliberately didn't follow their orders, which is good, but it's also bad,
07:58because then you've got to be really careful when you give an order.
08:01They're going to do it.
08:02They're going to try and do it.
08:03And if it's not right, they're going to try and still do it.
08:07And so you've got to be really, really—I learned the hard way on this one.
08:13Integrity is really, really taken seriously.
08:17Whatever you say, we're going to believe you.
08:20The ballistic missile submarines have a lot of pressure to get underway at sea.
08:24We've got to get out there with our missiles.
08:25This pressure to get to sea trickles down through the ship, and you come into port.
08:31You have a few days to fix everything that's wrong and go back out to sea.
08:34Sad situation happened when I was engineer.
08:37I had a chief who was a—I would say he was a good guy in the engineering department who took a shortcut.
08:45There 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.
08:57I normally wouldn't do this, but I was looking at these bolts on this one big piece of equipment, and it just didn't look like it was right.
09:05And I said, that's weird, because there's sign-offs.
09:08It 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.
09:15So he got—he was gone the next day.
09:18Most of the time, to get communications, you've got to stick a mast out of the water, because radio waves don't penetrate the ocean.
09:32So you come shallow, you stick a mast out.
09:34There are satellites that go overhead at certain times.
09:38They download this burst, so they can download a lot of data in a very short period of time.
09:44So when the message comes in, if it's not in the right format, then it's not a valid message.
09:52It doesn't matter what it says.
09:53And the codes change all the time.
09:56It's like encryption on your computer.
09:58Things are coded at one end and uncoded at the other end.
10:02So it's got to get through all these wickets before you even read it and pay attention.
10:07We had a funny situation happen.
10:09This was during an exercise.
10:10We were in an exercise where we were supposed to sink another submarine.
10:13We had an exercise torpedo.
10:15So you take the warheads off, and it's painted orange.
10:19Because we've been playing this cat-and-mouse game with the submarine, we haven't cleared the broadcast.
10:24And time comes up, and one of the junior officers—because we're so used to operating in peacetime—is like,
10:33oh, I need to raise the mast and clear the message traffic.
10:37And I kind of lost my cool then because, no, we're at war.
10:42We've got to sync this guy, and then we can get the admin messages later.
10:47Most of your radio communications comes from these satellite communications.
10:53But we also have a backup.
10:55The backup is called ELF, Extremely Low Frequency.
10:59So these are the big, long antennas.
11:01They're out in Minnesota, and they make the cow milk turn green.
11:05Just kidding.
11:05And they send these really long radio waves out so that the antennas need to be really, really long to send out a long wave.
11:14And because of really long wavelength, low frequency means that they penetrate the first little bit of the ocean.
11:23But we can run an antenna up that runs close to the surface of the ocean, and it can receive ELF radio.
11:29It's very limited data.
11:31So you get three letters.
11:32That's all you get.
11:33And then you look at a code book.
11:35It's ABC, nothing.
11:36ABC, nothing.
11:38But every once in a while, a letter will say, oh, we have something urgent for you.
11:42You've got to come up and get your regular message.
11:45If you're on an SSBN, you are always getting these things because they always need to be ready to go into lunch mode.
11:52And they are.
11:53And 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.
12:03That's a huge deal.
12:04So you practice, practice, practice.
12:06You're always 100%, 100.0% of the time you have connectivity.
12:11Submarines can do things that you can't do on a lot of other ships.
12:16There was an exhibit at the Smithsonian that showed one of these things.
12:21So I know I can talk about it.
12:23It's called an underhaul.
12:25Let'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, doesn't really move.
12:34And we kind of get suspicious that, well, maybe it's dropping something or it's got something underneath it.
12:39So next time a ship gets underway, we have a submarine nearby.
12:44Sneak up, look up, see what's underneath the ship.
12:47We can do stuff like that.
12:48We can also collect intelligence from cell phone towers, radio waves, from radio transmissions between ships.
12:57Submarines are really, really good at this because they don't know you're there.
13:00So they, say, act like they would normally act.
13:04They make the same communications.
13:06They get the same permissions.
13:08And 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.
13:15And we build up this library of how they talk, and then you start to build up these patterns, which is really, really important.
13:23We spend a lot of time getting ready for war.
13:32Our philosophy is the more ready we are for war, the less likely war will happen.
13:39The more capable we are of sinking the enemy, the less likely the enemy is going to try something like invade Taiwan or something.
13:54So one of the things that you need to be able to do is operate your submarine for a long time out in enemy waters.
14:00Most of the time we don't advertise these things, but sometimes we'll do something.
14:04It's in international waters, so it's all legal.
14:07We'll shoot an exercise weapon or we'll shoot an actual war shot.
14:12We do this every once in a while.
14:14We need to send these little signals, hey, we can do this.
14:19Don't mess with us.
14:20If 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.
14:25You'd be surprised at how hard we work to follow all the rules.
14:31And when I mean rules, I mean like rules of international law and where you can drive the submarines.
14:37We don't go sneaking in another country's water.
14:41When we want to go someplace, we get permissions.
14:46But there are some traditional and legal waterways where you can go.
14:51For 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.
15:00But because it's one of these international straits, it's legal to go through there.
15:04We go through on the surface, fly an American flag.
15:07It's all above board.
15:09If there's land, then you draw a 12-mile circle around the land if it's an island.
15:13Some 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.
15:26And then they say, oh, that's an island now.
15:28And they draw a 12-mile circle around it.
15:31And we're like, no, that's not legal.
15:35So in a case like that, we would drive there.
15:38But it's not like we're violating, we don't think we're violating international law.
15:42We think we're enforcing it by driving there.
15:44But if we did that, we'd probably send a destroyer or something that would be obvious to see.
15:49We wouldn't, you don't send something that's secret and say, oh, by the way, we went over there.
15:53I think the public would be surprised at just how busy and active everybody on the submarine is.
16:06You're underfed, or you're malfed, you're under-rested.
16:12You have your operational job, your standing watch, and everyone on the submarine has to do that.
16:16Officers and enlisted guys.
16:18Then when you're off watch, you have more responsibilities.
16:21You 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.
16:31And 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.
16:42Okay, we need to go around this way because there's some uncharted seamounts, whatever it is.
16:46Then on top of that, we have training.
16:48Well, we'll do, say, a fire drill.
16:51A fire on a submarine is in all hands.
16:53Everybody's involved.
16:54Sound the alarm, everyone wakes up.
16:57The man's their station, the man's their gear.
16:59Then you've got to put out the fire, and then you've got to put all the equipment away.
17:02So that's like half an hour.
17:03And this could happen at any time.
17:05Two worst things on a submarine are fire and flooding.
17:08The most common cause of fire on a submarine, it's mundane, it's dryer lint.
17:13If there's one washing machine and one dryer, you've got 140 guys.
17:19So they're pretty much going all the time.
17:21Flooding is really bad also.
17:24Flooding can put you on the bottom.
17:26And so, first of all, it starts with design of the submarine.
17:29So if the water comes, sprays out, takes out the electrical panels, we can still operate
17:34some of these key valves without any electricity.
17:37And then if you have really bad flooding, then you have to emergency blow up to the surface.
17:42So we have these two handles in the control room.
17:44They're called chicken switches.
17:46And they also do not require electricity to operate.
17:51And they allow this compressed air and these cylinders to go through a very short length of pipe.
17:56It goes in the ballast tanks, blows the water out of the bottom of the ballast tanks.
18:01Submarine rises very rapidly.
18:02I never had to do that for real.
18:05We would practice it.
18:06There's a couple big rooms on the submarine.
18:08The engine room, the torpedo room, and the mess decks.
18:11The mess decks are where the crew eats.
18:14We have two dining rooms.
18:15We have a little dining room for the officers we call the ward room, W-A-R-D room.
18:20There's a table, long table, assigned seating, 12 chairs around the table.
18:24Then we have the mess decks, again, long tables.
18:26It's like picnic tables set up.
18:29And the submarines, you could decorate your mess deck.
18:32So on Santa Fe, which was named after Santa Fe, New Mexico, we had pictures of this ship's logo
18:38and, you know, painted cacti.
18:40And, you know, it's just a little kind of spirit thing.
18:42The space is so limited.
18:46So when we go to sea with 140 people, we only have 117 actually built-in beds.
18:50So a bunch of people are going to be sharing beds.
18:52We call it hot racking because a person gets out of bed and goes on duty, and a person on
18:56duty gets in the bed.
18:57It's still warm from the body heat.
18:58So when you go to sea, you typically go out with 90 days worth of food.
19:03So when you go on one of these six-month deployments, a couple times during the deployment, you'll
19:08stop and you'll bring on more food.
19:10Most of the food is dehydrated or canned or frozen.
19:14Your fresh food, basically three days.
19:16And then there's no more lettuce.
19:19And it's a big deal.
19:20Food's a big deal because there's not much else that you can do that's fun and, you know,
19:27socially brings the crew together.
19:29There are certain staples that submarine sailors like.
19:33One is hamburgers, which we call sliders.
19:36One is pizza, which we always serve on Friday night.
19:40And one is ice cream.
19:42And we have an ice cream machine.
19:44We call it the auto dog, which isn't pleasant to think about, but it's a very important machine.
19:51So, like, you have the machine that makes oxygen, and then you have the ice cream machine.
19:55We try and maintain all the rituals.
19:57So we'll celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday.
20:04And we have halfway night's a big celebration.
20:07The mail is a big deal.
20:08Hearing from the families is a big deal.
20:11Back when I was doing my time as a submarine, so I'm talking like 80s, 90s, early thousands,
20:18the families were allowed to send these very short cryptic messages, like 40-word messages.
20:24And then, of course, you're dealing with people in their 20s and 30s.
20:28So you can imagine, like, some of the wives are trying to sneak in, like, little sexy things.
20:35And so we kind of let that go.
20:39But you can't say, for example, traumatic news, like, hey, your dad died.
20:45We'd filter that out and make sure the sailor got that in some kind of a controlled way if they were sent that.
20:52And we'd bring the sailor in.
20:54They always know it's better.
20:55Like, if the captain and chief of the boat are sitting there and they call you in for a project, they already know it's not good.
21:01And you just tell them, this is the deal.
21:06And at the next port, we're going to send you home.
21:11When you're on a submarine, you don't really have a sense of where you are in the ocean.
21:18You try and block it out, the fact that, hey, I'm hundreds of feet under the water.
21:24The submarine's very quiet.
21:25So it's kind of like a library where, even though we don't really have to, we kind of speak in quiet, hushed tones.
21:32You do hear things.
21:34There's a lot of sound in the ocean.
21:36And most of it, we know what it is.
21:38Oh, so that's a, that's a, that's an oil well.
21:42A thousand miles away.
21:44I can't say we understand everything that goes on there.
21:48And sometimes the sound bends and distorts and it's strange sometimes.
21:58I joined the Navy because we were in the middle of the Cold War.
22:02I was this geeky kid in high school and my dad was a scientist and I was on track.
22:08I mean, I should have been a scientist.
22:10But I really felt passionately about what we stood for with the Constitution and liberal democracy.
22:16So I graduated from high school in 1977.
22:19About four weeks later, right after July 4th, I reported to the Naval Academy as a plebe.
22:26You're in the Navy at that point.
22:28The day you show up, they cut your hair, you used to line up in these long lines, you get uniforms, just like you see in the movies.
22:34I loved it and I had a small group of guys.
22:37I was a physics major and we would study together.
22:39I knew I wanted to be a submarine because it just matched my personality.
22:44It was quiet, introverted, 3D chess was my jam.
22:49And it's hard to get accepted in the submarine force if you don't have a decent technical background.
22:54There's two paths into the submarine force.
22:58There's the officers and the enlisted.
22:59In the U.S. Armed Forces, we have this dichotomy.
23:01And it's basically split.
23:03If you have a college degree, you're going to become an officer.
23:06And if you don't have a college degree, you're going to become an enlisted person.
23:10It has nothing to do with intelligence or motivation.
23:13It's good for the force to have a diversity of thinkers.
23:16But most of the guys are engineers, physics majors, math majors, that kind of thing.
23:21Because you're running a nuclear reactor.
23:23I had all A's, so I graduated right at the top of the class.
23:26And we have, at the Naval Academy, have a thing called Service Selection Night.
23:32Which is, I think, maybe like six months before you graduate, maybe a little bit longer.
23:37You get to express your preference for where you want to go.
23:41Rarely were people forced to go into submarines.
23:44There is a separate training for the submarine force.
23:48Most of it is technical.
23:50But then there's a screening process, which I just vaguely remember.
23:53There's these psychological exams that you take.
23:56And they ask you questions like, you're free on Saturday night.
23:59What would you rather do?
24:01Stay at home and read a book or go to a bar with your friends?
24:06Stay at home, read a book.
24:07So that's the kind of question.
24:08Hey, if this happened, would you be mad, sad, happy?
24:12You know, whatever.
24:13And so we're looking for people like no drama mama kind of people.
24:19We do a lot of training that puts people under stressful situations.
24:22One of the most memorable trainers that we have is a flooding simulator.
24:27It's basically a small room.
24:30So it's a couple floors high, but it's not very big.
24:33You have a team.
24:34There's maybe six of you.
24:36You have these little, we call them bandits, or these little straps and plugs for patching leaks and holes.
24:43They tell you, so here's what's going to happen.
24:45The water's going to spray out.
24:46You guys got to, if you guys don't patch the leaks, the water's going to keep rising and you all die.
24:50Well, what they don't tell you, the water is frigging cold.
24:53And it hits you with force.
24:55It's like a fire hose that's at 33 degrees.
24:59And so you're sort of stunned.
25:01And the instinct is, oh, I see a hole.
25:04I see water spraying out.
25:05Let me go do it.
25:07But that's the, again, that's the instinct that kills you.
25:09Why?
25:09Because what you need to do is get the holes on the bottom first.
25:13Because what happens is if there is a hole down here and then the water starts to fill up,
25:19once the water fills up past that hole, it's super hard to patch that hole because then you don't see it.
25:26You don't know what's down there.
25:27And so there are a lot of these things where your instinct is to do A, but you need to do B.
25:33And so you need to kind of override your impulsive instincts to do the right thing.
25:38But then you get through that and everyone's laughing.
25:42And not everyone makes it through the training process.
25:44And if someone's ill-suited, they generally select that, they self-select that of the program because they know, hey, this isn't for me.
25:56So I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981.
25:58So this is, we're in the height of the Cold War.
26:06Typical deployment cycle is six months, plus or minus sometimes a little bit.
26:11So the whole cycle is a year and a half training, six-month deployment.
26:19A year and a half workup, six-month deployment.
26:23During the year and a half workup, you're at sea about one-third of the time.
26:28My favorite deployments are my first deployment when I was a junior officer on board the Sunfish,
26:34because this is back in the Cold War, and the Sunfish was a SSN, and it was super cool.
26:42Sunfish operate out of Charleston, South Carolina.
26:45You go out locally, maybe down the Bahamas, up and down the East Coast, and you would train,
26:51you would operate the submarine, you would get everybody up to speed.
26:54As a junior officer on the operational side, I was officer of the deck,
26:58so I would drive the ship for six hours, once a day, and I'd have various division officer jobs.
27:05I had a captain who was sort of a very strict, formal authoritarian guy,
27:10but still a guy who really knew his stuff and you would follow into battle.
27:13Then he was replaced by a guy named Mark Peliath, who later became an admiral.
27:19And Admiral Peliath was great.
27:20He was really good at empowerment.
27:22If it was varsity-level stuff, he needed someone to drive the ship, he'd get me up there.
27:28So we're getting ready for one of these deployments.
27:30We're going to go up and chase the Soviets around.
27:36And there's a part of the Atlantic Ocean, which we call the GI-UK gap, which is Greenland-Iceland-UK.
27:44And the Soviets, if they were going to come out in the Atlantic, had to come through that GI-UK gap.
27:49So we're off the coast of Charleston, so we're not anywhere near any Russian submarines.
27:56And I'm on the periscope.
27:58We're just doing a training exercise and we're just tootling around.
28:01I look out and I see this merchant ship on the horizon.
28:06And we use the sonar system very judiciously on the submarine.
28:12We listen all the time because listening is quiet.
28:15No one knows you're there.
28:15We're just collecting.
28:17We're listening.
28:17We occasionally use active sonar, which is what you see.
28:20And the move is like, ping, pew.
28:23And so you go out with this big pulse of sound and then you get an echo back.
28:27It's a trade-off because as soon as you do that, that sound can be heard a lot further
28:32than when you get useful information back.
28:34So it can be heard for miles and miles.
28:36And it can be fingerprinted into not just a submarine, but a U.S. submarine.
28:41So we're very judicious.
28:42We don't use it.
28:43You need the captain's permission to use this active sonar.
28:45And I was talking to the sonar supervisor.
28:49Wouldn't it be cool if we could go active and get all the sonar men up here so they could
28:53actually see what it looks like?
28:54And then all of a sudden I hear this voice, the captain's voice.
28:57He says, well, why don't you just tell me what you intend to do?
29:00I said, well, captain, I intend to go active on sonar.
29:02So he says, okay, and he walks away.
29:05I'm like, what?
29:06So it's like basically like your dad handing the keys to a Ferrari to you or something like
29:11that.
29:11It's crazy.
29:12And it's just like, it's so cool.
29:15Like the hair is sticking up on my neck right now, many years later.
29:19And we get all the sonar men.
29:20They come and they look at the stuff.
29:21See what it looks like.
29:23We rotate them through.
29:25Rotate some of the other crew members through.
29:27We do it for five or ten minutes.
29:28And then, you know, we're done.
29:29We got all the training out of it.
29:31This playful attitude, this attitude of like this curiosity, like this was just me being
29:38a student again, a kid.
29:40And it was so cool.
29:41So then every time I went back on watch, the guys were like, hey, Lieutenant Marquet, can
29:46we do this?
29:47Can we do, let's like, let's go to see how steep we can go down.
29:50And the last minute pull, let's throw the rudder.
29:53Let's go fast, flank, and then we'll throw the rudder over hard.
29:56So again, this was training off the U.S. coast.
29:58So you wouldn't necessarily do this stuff unless you were running away from a torpedo
30:01or something.
30:02But because of that, we really understood what the submarine would really, could really do,
30:10not just theoretically.
30:11We go to the GI-UK gap.
30:13We're going up to where we thought the Soviets would be operating.
30:17We're looking for Soviets.
30:19We want to make sure that if we had to go to war with them, that we knew where the submarines
30:22were so we could take them out.
30:24You know, you're young, it's exciting.
30:26You're doing this super cool thing that even now we can't talk about all the stuff that
30:31we did.
30:32And so that was cool.
30:33And we did, we did good stuff.
30:35I can tell you, you know, we would have kicked it.
30:39There's, there's no doubt.
30:40The hierarchy in a submarine is defined and is very clear.
30:50And there's always a backup person, a second-in-command, a deputy, or an alternate.
30:57And we'd run drills where we'd incapacitate the captain because what we're trying to see
31:00is can the ship operate without the captain because the captain may become incapacitated.
31:05Typically, a person doesn't keel over from a heart attack, but we had, so for example,
31:09the second-in-command, his father became really ill, so we need to send him off the ship
31:15so he can go back to be with his dad, so he's filled in.
31:18An officer's career path would be division officer, department head, second-in-command,
31:23XO, we call him executive officer, first-in-command, commanding officer, captain.
31:28On the enlisted side, it's a little bit different, but you could, again, you move to what we
31:32call the Cobb, chief of the boat. Advancement in the Navy, both for officers and enlisted,
31:39is highly technical. No one gets advanced because, you know, they're good-looking or
31:46someone really, you know, likes them or things like that. It's a meritocracy.
31:51On a submarine, there are four main departments. There's engineering. Those guys run the reactor.
31:57That is the biggest department. There's weapons, as you might expect. These guys maintain the
32:05missiles and the torpedoes and the missile tubes and the torpedo tubes. There's what we call nav-ops
32:10or navigation operations. These guys run the charts. Where are we? The radio room.
32:16You get these missions that come in, and then the ops guys plan out, okay, we're here, they're there.
32:25How are we going to get there? When are we going to, that kind of thing. And then the final department
32:28is supply. They feed the crew. They manage all the spare parts, which is a big thing because you need
32:35to have all these parts. You have all these lockers all through the submarine, and then you need to know
32:39where the part is. The vast majority of senior submarine officers and admirals from the submarine
32:49force came through the engineering pipeline. There's three options, engineer, weapons officer,
32:54or nav-ops. I did well in the schools that mattered for engineering, so I was pretty confident.
33:00So I wasn't too surprised when I got selected to be an engineer. Now, the thing I didn't want was I
33:06didn't want to be an engineer on a ship in maintenance because then you could spend two years,
33:11you might spend your entire time, two, three years, without actually driving a submarine.
33:17And that's death of a career. So I wanted a ship that was operational. I got Vector to the Will Rogers.
33:27The Will Rogers was one of these ballistic missile submarines. We were operating out of Holylox, Scotland.
33:33The Will Rogers was a ship in trouble. The ship had failed an important exam before I got there.
33:42This was an exam that basically lets them handle nuclear weapons. So it was one of the deterrent
33:46submarines. So they needed to do stuff, everything under supervision, and that's a terrible place to be.
33:51And then number two is they had had the collision with a Scottish fishing trawler. Going there was a
33:58hard job. I was an engineer. I was not a very good engineer. It was a really hard time for me.
34:03Fortunately, I squeaked through the cracks and I got advanced to the next level.
34:15I was coming up through the ranks of submarine force and I got selected to be a submarine commander,
34:19which was, I wasn't sure it was going to happen because I'd had this kind of dismal time on the
34:24submarine force. Will Rogers. But I got selected and I was super excited. Being a submarine captain
34:30was, that's what my dream job was. That's what I wanted. You have maybe 10 to 12 junior officers,
34:40but you only have one captain. So there's kind of a 10 to one down select going from just once you're
34:48inside the submarine force. What the Navy does, because there's such a reliance on technical
34:53knowledge, is we send you to school for 12 months for the ship that you're going to command.
35:00And so there's this very orchestrated and choreographed system where we know you're going
35:07to command for three years. So at the two-year point, we pick your successor and then we send them to
35:13school. And at the three-year point, they graduate from the school and they come out and they relieve
35:17you and you go to your next job and they take the ship for three years. And then two years into that,
35:21we pick their successor. I was identified what submarine I was going to go to. And it was a kind
35:25of submarine that was pretty well known to me. So a lot of what I was learning was stuff that was
35:34refresher for stuff that I already knew. And at the very end, what happened was there's someone at the
35:39two-year point who was the captain of the USS Santa Fe. There was a family issue going on with him,
35:44so he wasn't like 100%, like it was a distraction. And he said, you know what? Someone else got to do
35:50this. And he stepped aside. So now the Navy has a submarine, no captain. And I just graduated from
35:57school. And the officer who ran the school picked me. And I talked to him afterwards and I said, why did
36:04you pick me? He said, oh, you're really curious. And this curiosity I think is going to stand you well.
36:10And I had no idea. He was so right though. The Santa Fe only had two problems. She had the worst
36:16morale and the worst performance of the fleet. She had the worst re-enlistment rate in the Navy
36:20and had a bad reputation for getting the job done. The Santa Fe was a different kind of submarine.
36:27I'd never been on a submarine like this. Different reactor plant, had missile tubes.
36:31They moved the position of the fair order planes down here. So now I'm about to take over the worst
36:37performing submarine on the fleet with the worst morale and I don't know the ship. So that was scary.
36:43So I had two weeks. Two weeks to take over. And my head is like Alice in Wonderland. I just kind of
36:50walked around. I talked to people. But they're all looking at the floor. And it was dispiriting.
36:57Because one, they knew, you know, they've been told, hey, you're the worst. The morale was bad.
37:02And now their boss quits. And they get this guy who wasn't even trained for their ship. And I make
37:09a big mistake. We're going to run an exercise. And the exercise is we call a reactor scrum. We're
37:15going to shut down a reactor. There's only one reactor. When you have the reactor on a nuclear
37:19submarine, it's amazing. You can surge through the water. You have all this power. You can run the
37:24refrigerators and the air conditioners and all the lights you want. When you don't know the reactor,
37:29it's terrible. You're draining down the battery. And so the drill we like to run, because I just
37:35wanted to see how the crew would react. And so we start the drill. I turn to the officer because I
37:41wanted to make it harder. And I say, hey, let's speed up on the electric motor. It's going to drain
37:46more current, drain the battery faster, and really compress the time. And it's going to add stress,
37:51basically, to the team. And I'm trying to see just how bad we are. But it was an order that
37:57couldn't be done. It's essentially, hey, shifting to second gear on a motor with one gear. And the
38:02sailor's like, he doesn't do anything. He was just turning the knob and like, hey, what's going on?
38:09He says, Captain, there is no second gear. I'm laughing, but it was horrifying. That's like basic stuff.
38:16Now I'm looking at my shoes. And I look at the officer and I said, you know about this? He said,
38:22yes, sir, I did. I'm like, why'd you order it? Because you told me to. And then my whole life
38:30flashed before my eyes because I was so, so deeply ingrained in this idea that leaders make good
38:39decisions and they tell people what to do. And it was just all blew up in one second because there's no
38:45way I was going to be the one who knew what to do because I wasn't trained on the submarine.
38:50I know what we wanted to achieve, but what levers to push to make it happen? I was the wrong guy.
38:56So we got the officers together. I said, the drill's over. I said, how about this? How about
39:03stop giving orders? And they're like, huh, what? So I reached all the way back to that moment on the
39:09sunfish. When Poliath had asked me, well, Marquet, what do you intend to do? I said,
39:16Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. I intend to start the reactor. I intend to load torpedoes.
39:20I intend to change pizza from Friday to Saturday. Nope, don't do that. I think it was pretty novel,
39:27this language-based focus on using the word intent rather than getting permission. But it did spread
39:34throughout this submarine force. Part of it is because over the next 10 years of all these junior
39:41officers on board Santa Fe, there was a disproportionate number that became submarine
39:46commanders, 10 of them, 10 guys, which was a huge number. And no one would have predicted it,
39:52including least of all me, what happened. This conversion of people from order takers where we're
39:59reliant on the captain to have all the answers to 135 people thinking. I said, we used to go from one
40:05thinker and 135 doers to 135 thinkers. People like to solve problems. And submariners are highly trained
40:13and you want to be good. And so they would work extra hard. And so morale went . Prior to that day,
40:19in the previous 12 months, we only reenlisted 10% of the sailors, one in 10. Starting that day,
40:26it was 100%. Over the next 12 months, every sailor. A year from this date where I made the decision
40:31never to give any orders, we were inspected by the Navy. So these guys spend three days watching
40:38you do all this stuff. They're all taking notes. It's top to bottom, inside out, audit. The inspection
40:44team, the officer, the captain on the inspection team, so he's senior to me, he says it's the highest
40:49score we've ever seen. It's the highest score we have records of. And no one could understand. Like,
40:54well, a year ago, these guys couldn't get underway on time. What happened? People didn't understand
41:00that it was because now we were activating this thinking. We were getting everybody thinking.
41:05And that's the real dark side to being a leader who makes it happen. You think you're making it
41:15happen. You're leaning into your team. You want your team to lean into you.
41:18The American, UK, what the Australians are building towards, all have a certain capability,
41:31which is going to be envied by the rest of the world. Very close to them are, I would say,
41:36guys like Japan, which have a very robust, highly capable submarine force, but they're not nuclear,
41:44so they can't do quite as much. But Japan, of course, they don't need to go as far to get to
41:49the battlefield. So a couple of things we could do. One, stay at sea for a long time,
41:54because the equipment doesn't break. And if it breaks, sailors can fix it. So this ability to be
42:00there for a long period, it's really hard to combat that. It's really hard to build a defense system,
42:10because it's not like you're trying to defend for a 10-minute attack. You're like, you don't know
42:14when the attack's going to come, and you got to defend for six months. Other countries keep their
42:20submarine for sea for a long time. It breaks, they got to go in. Or it just starts to degrade slowly,
42:25so it starts to rattle more, makes more sound. In other countries, they're much more reliant on
42:29the captain. The U.S., we have this really deep bench. And then you take away one officer, it doesn't
42:35really matter. Take away another officer, it still doesn't matter. Because everyone just sort of,
42:39they fill up into the ranks. And we practice it. We're always saying like, well, if you were me,
42:44what would you do? If you're the captain right now, what would you do? And we kind of see, okay,
42:47how are they thinking? How are they solving the problems? How are they managing the crew? How
42:50are they managing the problem? What tactical decisions are they going to make?
42:59The average age of a submarine force is getting older and older, because we built up a whole bunch of
43:04submarines during the Cold War. And so the average age came down. Now it's getting longer. We're not
43:09replacing them as much. During the Cold War, there was a clear threat, Soviet Union. We were avowed
43:16enemies. And so there was a bipartisan consensus in the country, in Congress, that we need to spend
43:24money by submarines, because we knew how potent submarines were at deterring war. And then when the
43:33Soviet Union disintegrated, that sort of monolithic enemy went away. And so now we have terrorist groups
43:42or pirates off of Somalia. Submarines are not the optimum weapon for dealing with those kinds of
43:48stuff. So this united front to maintain a healthy submarine force fell apart. Now we see the rise,
43:58again, of bad actors. I'll call them bad actors. Potentially China, certainly Russia. So now there's
44:05re-emerging this consensus that, hey, we really need to get our submarines going again. It's expensive,
44:12but you get a lot of bang for your buck when you buy a submarine. There are advances in submarines and
44:18U.S. submarines. It's the same trends you see with automobiles to all electric. Santa Fe had these big
44:23steam turbines. And so the reactor heated water, turned at the steam, and we did two things with
44:28the steam. One, we ran these turbines that made electricity, and then we ran these big turbines
44:32that went to this propeller. It's more efficient if you just make all electricity, and then you have
44:37the electricity to drive an electric motor. It's a more complicated problem, so that's why we haven't
44:42done it so far. But we're now, it's one of the things we're heading towards. I think submarines, just like
44:48drones or autonomous self-driving cars, the same thing's happening under the water. If you don't
44:57need to put people on a submarine, you can do a lot more with the submarine, because a lot of the
45:04equipment on the submarine is there to keep the people alive. But the people are the ones that fix
45:09the submarine. But the argument is, well, I can buy a hundred of these underwater drones, so to speak,
45:16or one big nuclear submarine. I mean, who knows? But look what Ukrainians are doing with their drones.
45:25I play with AI every day at home, and it's fun. And AI certainly makes the bad guys smarter too. And
45:31for me, the worry would be A, spoofing one of these messages that tells the submarine,
45:36your new mission is to go over here. It puts the submarine out of position,
45:41so that they can do whatever, something. It's just any interference like that, which gets through
45:47the regular filters and using AI to get better at that would be scary. I think it's a lot harder now
45:54to be a submarine officer, maybe, than it used to be. I can tell you, when I started, I mean,
46:00we were on a mission. We felt like we were the spear tip of democracy. First of all, just the
46:09proliferation of technology, I think, makes it so much, it's very, your brain is always being pulled
46:17in these different directions. And then this overall arching sense of why, like, why am I sacrificing
46:23days of my life? I spent 14 years actually on submarines, and I calculated I spent seven years
46:30underwater in my life. Why do I have given up so much of my life, and for what? I just think it's
46:36harder now to have that really clear sense of purpose. My son was a submariner for a few years,
46:41so, like, I visited this ship. These are passionate, active, thinking young people.
46:49There was no monopoly on this sense of dedication, for sure. The introduction of women on the
46:56submarines was happening about the time that I was transitioning off the submarines and sort of
47:01managing. It was sort of argued that, hey, we can't exclude half the population of smart people
47:09from submarines because we won't have enough smart people running the submarines. The way I thought
47:13about it was I need different ideas and different ways of thinking about the problem, and the more
47:17kind of different people that you get, typically you get more different ideas and thinking about the problems.
47:28Santa Fe is still in operation. She's doing well. I had an amazing time as the captain of Santa Fe.
47:32Three years went by too fast. We went on two deployments. We got the highest score in the history of the Navy.
47:39We turned retention around from 10 percent to 100 percent. I left the submarine and I got awarded a
47:46nice job. I was the inspector for the submarine force and then I became a commodore. So I was getting
47:50promoted. For me, this idea going back to me not telling people what to do and seeing what they came up
47:59with and expressing intent really changed the model. And so now we like to say we're building leaders. It's a
48:06leader leader organization, not leader follower organization. And I feel good about that. I feel
48:12good about these people who had success. Many of them went on to major command. Many went on to become
48:19admirals. Several three at least became admirals. And just from this one submarine crew, I went to the
48:25Pentagon, which was a frustrating time for me. And I was not the best Pentagon officer.
48:29I decided I was going to be more influential outside than inside, which I think is the right
48:36decision. I wrote Turn the Ship Around, which is a story, this turnaround on the nuclear submarine and
48:40this use of the word intent primarily. 2013 published by Penguin Random House. Then I wrote a book called
48:48Leadership as Language, which talks about the way language influences the culture. Turn the Ship Around was
48:54a big success and I've been able to fly around the world and talk to a lot of companies. There's a lot
48:58of interest in creating teams where people are thinking and expressing what they're thinking, not
49:02just doing what they're told. So now I just wrote a book called Distancing, which is really helpful for
49:07everybody including me. We have a superpower. Every human does. And the superpower is that you can imagine
49:16yourself as not you. Because when you go to make decisions or when you go to react to something, we view it from
49:22our position of ourselves. We call it the immersed self. I view it from in here. This is where I'm centered.
49:29But you don't have to. You can pretend you're somewhere else, someone else or sometime else.
49:34But we rarely do it. And it changes the way you think. And you get clearer vision. And I've been
49:39practicing every day bringing it into my own life. People ask me, hey, do you miss it?
49:46And my flippant answer is no. Then I say, well, yeah, I'd love to go back on a submarine. But as a passenger,
49:58as a fly on the wall, I don't want any responsibility. It's too hard. I don't know anything anymore.
50:05But just to see, I almost said the word kids. See the kids operate. Because again, like they're so young and they're
50:13energetic and thoughtful. Just see the crew operate. See them interact. See them do this
50:19really cool mission in the purpose of defending the Constitution, defending liberal democracy.
50:25If anyone has an opportunity, you definitely say yes.
50:29Hi, I'm a producer on Authorized Account. If you like this episode, then you should check out our new
50:33podcast and comment below with the names of people you'd love to hear us interview.
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