Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

Brusque, aloof, but technically expert, he led Sunfish during our first, and highly successful, deployment. I didn’t think twice about how he ran the ship—that was the way things were. Between my first and second deployments on Sunfish, we got a new captain, Commander (later Rear Admiral) Marc Pelaez. One day while we were cruising in the Atlantic Ocean during our training cycle and nothing much was going on, I saw a large merchant ship through the periscope. Sonar had been listening to it but they were not sure of its range because they had been authorized only for passive listening, the normal mode for submarines. I whimsically mused with the sonar chief how helpful it would be if they could ping on the merchant using active sonar, something we rarely did. Captain Pelaez appeared beside me. “Well, why don’t you?” Of course he knew the reason—it takes the captain’s permission to authorize going active on sonar. Sensing my discomfort, he said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training’?” I tried it. “Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training.”