Perhaps you, or somebody for whom you care, is considering joining the nuclear Navy. You might already have heard the recruiters promising the world. I will provide you with one objective critique of the "nuke" experience in terms of what the Navy promises versus what it delivers.
Author and Army veteran John T. Reed inspired me to write this with his article, "Should you go to, or stay at, West Point?" Mr. Reed's observations about the Army are utterly relevant to the Navy. Peruse his article if you have time.
At the age of 20, I committed to serve in the U.S. Navy via the NUPOC delayed commissioning program. I attended OCS a month after graduating from college, received a commission as an ensign (O-1), served on active duty for 5.5 years, and honorably left active duty as a lieutenant (O-3). I worked on a Los Angeles class fast attack submarine home ported at Pearl Harbor, HI for about 3 years of my active duty experience, which included a 2003 deployment to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The rest of my time was training and shore based work (a.k.a. "shore tour").
My following analysis of what the Navy nuclear program promises to do for you is based on claims presented on the Navy's recruiting websites and my personal recollections of interacting with recruiters. If you are thinking about going the enlisted route, my comments should generally still be relevant, although I highly recommend speaking with somebody who already served as an enlisted nuke. Give no weight to second hand information from spouses and mothers or from promises coming from people still in the military about what service in the program will do for them after they get out.
The Sales Pitch
Reality
The Navy's nuclear program is an elite nuclear engineering program.
FALSE. You will not research or design anything while in the Navy, which is contrary to what the word engineering implies to a student. The recruiters technically aren't lying because the broader, post-academic use of engineering includes what nukes actually do, but the recruiters know they are misleading you.
The Navy will train you to be a nuclear operator. If you want to be a nuclear engineer, get a relevant engineering degree, and go to work for a reactor manufacturer, such as General Electric or Westinghouse.
The program is challenging, but it is not as selective as it advertises. It only requires one semester of calculus and one semester of calculus based physics. I interviewed with the Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion, a four star admiral, with a group of around 20 people. The admiral only declined one interviewee. During my time in the Navy, the nuclear community was actually over-manned with junior officers, so it can't be that selective.
Excitement!!! Being a Navy nuke is soooo exciting!!!!
FALSE. There is no glory or excitement in nuclear operation. It is utterly monotonous, repetitive, and mind-numbing. In the nuclear world, boring
is good.
A typical shift (standing “watch”) involves staring at meters and gauges, reviewing logs of those instruments' indications, listening to people complain about the Navy, listening to people discuss what they will do when they get out of the Navy, and little more.
You might think this is purely a matter of opinion. It isn't. If you don't believe me, ask around. This experience is in no way unique to me or my former submarine.
You will do important work that makes the nation and world safer.
HIGHLY DEBATABLE. I'll leave it at that.
You will certainly be told frequently, once you're in the military, that this statement is true.
You will be highly desirable to civilian industry after you leave the military.
MISLEADING. Some companies, such as General Electric, like recruiting former military officers. Note that I write “military officers” generally; not “Navy nuke officers” in particular.
I am aware of only one industry that specifically wants former Navy nukes—the commercial nuclear power industry, including supporting services. If you know for a fact right now that you want to climb the operations ladder at a civilian nuclear generating station, the Navy might be the way to go.
The idea that all, or even most, employers will crawl over each other to hire you because you were in the nuke program is unequivocally FALSE. Employers look for directly relevant experience on your resume. If it isn't there—and it probably isn't if you're trying to do something dissimilar from what you did in the military—you will most likely not be interviewed.
You will gain valuable leadership experience at a young age.
TRUE-ish. The Navy delivered on its promise of putting me in charge of people at a young age. However, I would not say that this equates to leadership. What I really learned, mostly by trial and error, was the art of supervision.
Enlisted caveat: While this is a benefit for young officers, it is a detriment for enlisted submarine sailors. Supervising reactor plant operations is primarily the role of the officers lowest in rank and seniority. This means that enlisted nuclear personnel constantly have to deal with the least experienced, least knowledgeable officers to get anything accomplished.
Driving a surfaced submarine is an amazing experience.
TRUE. My best Navy memory is of the time I stood “Surfaced Officer of the Deck” as we approached Australia. The weather was great, and the water was calm. The continent was rising up in front of me. I hadn't been qualified to do this for very long, but at that moment it was just me, another guy serving as my lookout, and the $900M warship upon which I sat.
If only these types of things had occupied more than about 0.12% (literally) of my total time in the military . . . (sigh).
You will see the world.
NOT GAURANTEED. This is a crap shoot. When I deployed in 2003, the political climate did not favor us visiting many ports. Submarines also have special needs that prevent them from visiting some ports where surface ships or non-nuclear ships are free to dock.
In general, I recommend against joining any branch of the military to “see the world.” If you have the resources, check out the Semester at Sea. You will visit more of the world in a few month than you will visit in a decade of military service.
The pay is good.
TRUE (by common standards). I earned more money than all of my college friends my first 5 years out of school. If I had stayed Navy and returned to Hawaii for another submarine tour, I would be earning solidly over $100k per year and paying only about 15% in taxes because a good chunk of military income is tax free.
By comparison, I'm paying about 34% in taxes now. That means I'm keeping about as much as during my later years in the Navy even though the my pre-tax income is much higher. It has been a kick in the balls.
The NUPOC program also allowed me to exit college with zero debt and money in the bank. I'm very thankful for that. College debt is a serious problem for many 20- and even 30-somethings these days.
Keep in mind that money is only one factor you should consider. Military personnel tend to work very long hours. For much of my time in the Navy, I would have been happier to work half the time for half the money. How much is your life worth?
I hope you find this helpful. If there is sufficient demand, I will address additional areas of concern. In conclusion, here's a satirical video from The Onion that demonstrates exactly what the military is really like. It's about the Army, but the Navy is the same (minus the combat).
We all use e-mail now, and many of us use instant messaging services like YM or AIM. Let's keep three things in mind:
Popular e-mail services like Yahoo Mail, Gmail (Google), and Hotmail (Microsoft) are free because the providers retain on their servers everything you send and receive. This includes anything with personal data, such as resumes. They data mine everything to create marketing profiles of their users, which they are free to sell, and the servers are vulnerable to exploitation by hackers. Digital storage is cheap, so nothing ever goes away. You might one day have something you wrote years ago used against you.
If you use wireless internet connections, plucking your data right out of thin air is pretty easy because you're broadcasting ordinary radio. Anything not encrypted is plainly readable to interceptors.
The government of the United States of America has already decided to ignore the 4th Amendment by asserting that spying on citizens without warrants is necessary for our "security."
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." --Ben Franklin
Fortunately, we can all take some easy steps to protect our privacy.
Instant Messaging
Two completely free, open source pieces of software are the only things necessary to protect your IM conversations. The first is Pidgin, a universal chat client. The second is the Off-the-Record plugin for Pidgin.
Pidgin is an application, not a service. It does not require you to register for anything. Pidgin enables all your chats to run in one application. For example, if you IM on YM and AIM, you don't need a separate program running for each of them. Pidgin does it all, and more. You can try it out without deleting your other chat applications. Download Pidgin, and install it.
Once you're up and running with Pidgin, you've done 99% of the work necessary to secure your IM conversations. Complete the process with these two steps:
On the "Logging" tab of Pidgin's preferences menu, disable logging if you do not have a need to be able to read past IM conversations. It is on by default. This step is optional, but encrypting your online conversations is less valuable if a complete transcript will be stored on the hard drive of any of the participants.
Download the Off-the-Record plugin (OTR) for Pidgin. Read the instructions on the website, enable the plugin from Pidgin's "plugin" menu, and configure it. Ubuntu users should note the OTR likely was part of the default installation prior to version 9.10. You might need only to turn it on.
That's it. Whenever you chat with somebody else using OTR, you will have the opportunity to encrypt your data transfers, including files sent between chat clients. You will also find that many people welcome the opportunity to chat securely and are willing to download this software to do it. You can continue chatting as normal with people who do not use Pidgin or OTR.
E-mail security with GnuPG
"Perhaps you think your e-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something?" --from "Why I wrote PGP" by Phil Zimmermann
Encrypting and digitally signing e-mail using PGP, an open standard for encryption, isn't much more difficult than encrypting your IMs. Read the Wikipedia entry about PGP to get an idea about how it works, and then follow the steps below. Everything you need is free, but you will need to register for a new e-mail account if Yahoo Mail is all you have now.
Install, or verify you have installed, a mail client. For Windows users, I recommend Thunderbird, made by the company behind the popular Firefox web browser. Linux users might have Evolution Mail, which also works well. Outlook or Windows Mail do not integrate easily as described below. Get Thunderbird, and save yourself the Microsoft hassle.
Configure your mail client with your e-mail account, and verify that you can send and receive e-mail using your mail client.Here is how to configure Gmail. You'll have to search the Windows Live website maze to find the right setting for Hotmail (search for "POP3"). Yahoo Mail offers the capability to read mail with a mail client only to paying subscribers, which includes about nobody. If you have your own website, your host should provide information about how to check your e-mail, including mail client settings.
Download and install Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG), the free, open source implementation of PGP. Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, frequently come with Seahorse installed by default. It you already have Seahorse and Evolution Mail, you have everything you need. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
If you installed Thunderbird, install Enigmail. This binds GPG to Thunderbird so you can use them seamlessly. If you're using Seahorse, read that program's manual pages.
That's all the software you need. Read the directions associated with the various components, and generate a public-private key pair for your e-mail addresses. That's it.
One downside is that you must have access to your private key to read mail encrypted with your public key, and you will probably only keep your private key on your primary personal computer. This is usually not a big problem, but keep it in mind if you need to receive e-mail while travelling. Encrypted messages will look like gibberish if you read them with a web browser.
Also keep in mind that having a secure connection (https) to your webmail is not the same thing as encrypting your messages. Anybody with access to your mail provider's servers, including employees and governments, can read your unencrypted messages, as can anybody along the delivery path once your message goes out unencrypted over the internet to the recipient's mail provider. Also, the recipient is not guaranteed to have a secure connection with his or her mail provider, which introduces yet another privacy threat.
That's It
Please comment if you encounter problems following the steps in this article.
I've written an couple of entries about Adam Kokesh, who is a Republican candidate for Congress in NM-3. Today, David Maass of the Sante Fe Reporter penned an article about Kokesh titled, "Republican Dark Horse Winning Over Some NM Voters," which begins like this:
Adam Kokesh doesn’t believe 9.11 was an inside job, doesn’t question President Barack Obama’s citizenship and argues that insurance companies have already instituted death panels. He’s for pulling all combat troops from Afghanistan [and Iraq] and opposes government control of whom a citizen—gay or straight—can marry. In other words, some of Kokesh’s positions are downright liberal. (emphasis added; line-out to correct the original author)
Mr. Maass' article doesn't strike me as biased for or against Kokesh, but I disagree with the way Maass frames Kokesh's platform with the L-word. Politicians and pundits have redefined the terms liberal and conservative so many times that neither has any absolute meaning anymore. Everything is relative now. Whatever the senior elected officials of the Republican Party claim to be true gets labelled as conservative; ditto for the Democratic Party and liberal.
Perhaps what Maass meant to imply is that some of Kokesh's positions diverge sharply from the Republican dogma of the last decade. That is absolutely true, but it isn't because Kokesh is a closet Democrat; it's because there's absolutely nothing conservative about the GOP anymore.
Classical liberal might be an accurate description for Kokesh. However one choses to describe him, that fact that he sounds nothing like McConnell, Boehner, McCain (who Kokesh protested during the 2008 RNC), or any of the other Republican "leaders," is to his credit. The United States of American doesn't need another straight party hack of any variety, and we certainly don't need people trying to destroy civil liberties in the name of "security." We need problem solvers and people who actually believe in the enlightenment ideals embodied by the U.S. Constitution.
Perhaps you, or somebody for whom you care, is considering joining the nuclear Navy. You might already have heard the recruiters promising the world. I will provide you with one objective critique of the "nuke" experience in terms of what the Navy promises versus what it delivers.
I've written an couple of entries about