Boarding a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic – Smarter Every Day 240

**Sanitized Transcript:**

**DESTIN: (NARRATING)**
This is the USS Toledo, a U.S. Navy Los Angeles-class fast-attack nuclear submarine. We’re about to get onboard. [HELICOPTER FLYING] Thank you. My name is Destin. Arnell, I’m the chief of the boat. You’re the chief of the boat? Nice to meet you, Arnell. Absolutely, no problem. All right, following you guys. We have to use this door over here. [HELICOPTER IDLING] Normally, you guys would’ve come in through here, but we’re not high enough in the ice right now, so there’s a little water over our shipping hatch. So we can’t open the normal hatch. Great. Sounds good. There’s a drop-off. Look up. I’m Shane. You want me to go first? Sounds good. Cool. Here. Make sure you take a good step, a good grip. Nice to meet you. What’s your name? Caleb. Nice to meet you, Caleb. Your steps are right there, and then the rungs are on the left side. On the left side? Do you see them? Yeah. Got it. When you do go down—when you get down to the second set, they rotate. Yeah? Just be careful about that. OK, sounds good. Can I take my gloves off or leave them on? You can leave them on. All right.

**MAN:**
Hey, how’s it going? You got some bags for me? The bags will be coming after me.

**DESTIN: (NARRATING)**
To enter the submarine, I had to climb down a ladder from the top of the sail down into the heart of the boat. Now when I did this, remember, I was going from a negative 30-degree environment. So I kept having problems with my camera fogging up. All footage you’re about to see has been cleared through U.S. Navy OPSEC, or operational security. That being said, the Navy has not directed my speech or the content of this video. I am free to say whatever I want. [LOUD CLATTER] I got it. It was just a hammer. [LAUGHTER] How’s it going, sir? Good. How are you? Doing well. Welcome aboard. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Welcome. So Chop’s going to take care of you for the next 24 hours. All right. So we’re going to come on down this way. This is our executive officer’s state room. He’s asleep currently. So we’re just going to—I’m going to have the guys sneak in and drop your bag off on your rack. You’re going to be sleeping on the top bunk in here, OK? We’re going to go ahead on down the stairs here.

**DESTIN: (NARRATING)**
Now’s a good time to point out that every once in a while, you’ll hear a female voice. That’s Public Affairs Officer Lieutenant Michelle Pelissero. Her job is to make sure I don’t have any operational security issues while I’m on the boat. She’s awesome. When I first got on board, the medical officer handed me a dosimeter so that they could monitor the level of ionizing radiation I would be exposed to while on board. Turns out, it’s nothing. He explained that I had received more cosmic radiation on my flight to the sub than I would during my time onboard. And then, Chop gave me a tour, so I’d understand where I was at on the boat. All right, so this is the crew’s mess. Food mess? This is as real as it gets right here. This is as real as it gets? What’s up, guys? How’s it going? You doing all right? So this is just like where people hang out? Can I go look at the—? 100%, sure. The map? Yes. Hey, I’m Destin. What’s up? Pleasure to meet you. What’s up, man? [INTERPOSING VOICES] I’m Destin. How’s it going, man? We’re here? Yep. How many levels are there? So there are three levels. There’s three levels on the ship. Right above us, there’s going to be Control and the Radio room. This is the Crew’s Mess. We call it the middle level. And the lower level is where most of the engineering guys work at, and the weapons handling guys, so the torpedo men.

**DESTIN:**
Chop explained that there are three levels to the submarine: one, two, three. Right now we’re in the center of the boat, and he explained that about a third of the crew sleeps at any given time. And then he took me to get a peek at what that looks like. This is where the majority of the enlisted crew sleeps. So there’s going to be people sleeping in here right now. But I just want to show you, kind of, how the guys live in here.

**DESTIN:**
OK. Cool.

**CHOP:**
You’ll see there all the rack curtains are shut, all their uniforms are hanging up. Don’t want to wear your uniform when you’re in the rack.

**CHOP:**
Yep. And they have three high on each side, going all the way down to the room. And then if we go in here, there’s going to be a bathroom that kind of splits forward and aft crew’s berthing that all these guys share. So you want to go take a look at it?

**DESTIN:**
Yeah. No?

**CHOP:**
All right. Don’t want to wake ’em up? You don’t want to go to that end. [LAUGHING]

**DESTIN:**
Chop continued the tour by explaining that for security and safety, I would not be allowed near the reactor compartment or the aft engine room. After that, I was trained on what to do in the event of a fire, which we’ll talk about later. And then it was time to dive. Just tell me when you’re ready.

**CHOP:**
Ready, sir.

**DESTIN:**
Ready?

**CHOP:**
Yeah, ready to dive.

**CHOP:**
The ship is rigged for dive, with the exception of arctic full blow and a sounding of 1490 fathoms beneath the ship. Check with Charlie water depth. I intend to stationary dive the ship to 180 feet.

**DESTIN:**
All set, submerge ship.

**CHOP:**
Submerge ship, aye, sir. Dive, stationary dive the ship to 180 feet.

**DESTIN:**
Stationary dive the ship to 180 feet. Dive aye, [INAUDIBLE]. Stationary dive, stationary dive. [HORN SOUNDING]

**DESTIN: (NARRATING)**
There was a lot going on during the dive, and we’ll cover this in a future video. But I got to talk to the captain a little bit. He’s been a submariner for 20 years, and he’s got a degree in physics and a master’s degree in engineering. To be given the command of a fast-attack nuclear submarine is a responsibility reserved for only the best in the Navy’s Submarine Force. Now that we’re underway, it’s time for us to go down to the wardroom, which is where the officers hang out, and speak to the captain about the challenges of being under ice.

**DESTIN:**
We’re on the USS Toledo. This is Captain Castellano. And thanks for having me on board, sir.

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Oh, good morning.

**DESTIN:**
Yeah. I hear the— I hear the ship creaking right now, by the way. Is that because—

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Yeah. We’re deeper. We’re coming up to a little shallower depth. So that’s the hull, actually expanding.

**DESTIN:**
Expanding and contracting?

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Yeah. It’s not a— that’s just not a big deal for you anymore, is it? [LAUGHING]

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
No. The Navy allowed me to come out for ICEX. And it’s amazing, but it’s very different than anything I’ve ever seen.

**DESTIN:**
Yeah. We are under the ice in the Arctic.

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Yeah.

**DESTIN:**
There’s something weird to that. I mean, it’s— It’s very weird. It’s very unique. This is actually the first time I’ve ever done this, also. Very challenging environment, very unique environment, just to be underwater with several feet of solid, year-long ice over your head. It really changes how you operate. You don’t have the option to just come to the surface or come to periscope depth, as you normally would if you had a fire or some kind of casualty, or needed to communicate. That option’s gone because you’re covered with ice for weeks at a time. So that changes how I think about things. That changes how we operate the ship. And we practice a lot. We prepare for any kind of casualty that occurs. But it is a very challenging environment in that respect. It’s also a challenging environment— the reason we’re up at ICEX in the first place is to learn how to operate in this environment, to learn how our sonar system is going to operate differently because of the challenging and quickly changing sound speed profile of the water. When you’re up under the ice, even the salinity— stuff we usually don’t think about—

**DESTIN:**
Like the salt in the water?

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
The salt content of the water— that’s something that’s usually pretty normal, pretty steady across the ocean. But up under the ice, because of the fresh water at the top, the salinity changes all throughout the depth column. So that’s one thing we have to learn how to operate and learn how our weapons systems work, learn how our sonar systems work, learn how it affects the ability to ballast the ship properly, to maintain depth. Because that changing salinity changes the density of the water, which affects both how sound propagates through water, and it affects how the ship can maintain the proper depth, because that density constantly changes. It can change by 10,000 pounds in a second, and you have to constantly account for that.

**DESTIN:**
OK. So the Toledo is an attack submarine.

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Mm-hm.

**DESTIN:**
So I assume your mission is to attack. [LAUGHING]

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Sure. We can attack.

**DESTIN:**
So what are you doing?

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Well, our missions are highly classified, so I can’t go into detail about what we specifically do. But I can tell you the missions that we train to, tracking submarines, shooting submarines, tracking surface warships, engaging surface warships, intelligence gathering, Tomahawk strikes, special forces insertion. Those are the things we train to and are good at it. The main point of a submarine is, you know, anything that you don’t want the enemy to know you’re doing, you put a submarine there. Because wherever we’re at, no one knows we’re there. And that’s the main power of a submarine is, you don’t know if there’s a submarine lurking close by to take you out.

**DESTIN:**
So stealth.

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
Stealth. So that is what we do. Typically on mission we get, you know, tasking, and it’s very broad in most cases. And, hey, there’s a couple of discrete things, missions we want you to accomplish. But other than that, we’re not talking back— we’re not reaching back to home. We don’t— once we go on a mission status, we don’t communicate, because that can give away that stealth that I just talked about. So we’re pretty much operating autonomously when we’re at our mission areas, until the mission is complete.

**DESTIN:**
You’re given those orders at some point in the past. You go under. Once you’re underway, you have the orders, but you have to make decisions and you don’t talk back.

**CAPTAIN CASTELLANO:**
No. And sometimes you would, obviously if there’s— certain things happen. And we can always passively receive new stuff from off-hull. So we’re constantly receiving intelligence updates, any kind of changes to what the priorities are. But no, like, one of the great things about this job is, they put a lot of trust and confidence in us to be able to make those decisions on, hey, I see A, B, and C happening. I think B is more important, so I’m going to go do B.

**DESTIN:**
So the whole time I was onboard, I accepted that I was under ice, which is kind of like swimming in a pool with a pool cover on, but I could never really visualize it, because there are no windows on a submarine. It wasn’t until I got back topside that I was given footage that showed me the reality of the situation. This opportunity arose as a result of the Navy’s ICEX exercise. It’s a joint military and civilian exercise, meant to demonstrate Arctic region capabilities and perform scientific research. It is a part of a multi-national coalition. I’m on a Zoom call with Lieutenant Bradley Howard. Thank you for being with me.

**LT. HOWARD:**
Thanks, Destin.

**DESTIN:**
OK. So it’s my understanding that we missed each other at Camp Seadragon by a day.

**LT. HOWARD:**
Yep. You flew up with my research advisor Henrik and two of the students, Oscar and Ree, in my lab. And then I flew with another student, Dan.

**DESTIN:**
To be clear, the Navy did not set up this interview. Lieutenant Howard emailed me after she saw the last video, and we wanted to talk.

**LT. HOWARD:**
Yeah. I was not expecting to be interviewed when I emailed you though, I’ll say. [LAUGHING] I was, like, just use my drone footage. It looks really cool.

**DESTIN:**
So you’re in the Navy. You are active duty Navy. You’re not in a uniform right now. Why?

**LT. HOWARD:**
So the Navy gave me a really awesome opportunity, after I was done with my first sea tour to go get a master’s degree. Right now I’m a grad student at MIT in the MIT Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Joint Program. So I applied to MIT and they accepted me. And the Navy said, “That’s awesome. Go be a civilian for two years.” I’m still on active duty, but I don’t wear a uniform to class. And basically when I’m done, having this amazing opportunity to get my master’s degree, I will go back to the submarine, doing what I love as a department head.

**DESTIN:**
This isn’t a recruitment video, but it sounds like you got a pretty sweet gig going on right now.

**LT. HOWARD:**
So everybody was speculating on what Henrik was doing there. And you’re on that team. And you were, like, doing research with him. Can you briefly explain what was going on?

**LT. HOWARD:**
Sure. Basically what we were doing up there was demonstrating a concept for under-ice navigation that is almost as good as GPS.

**DESTIN:**
Oh, I see. Because if you go under the ice, you can no longer see satellites.

**LT. HOWARD:**
Right.

**DESTIN:**
So you have to figure out another way to figure out where you are under the ice. And that’s why being in a submarine under the ice is such a big deal.

**LT. HOWARD:**
It is, yeah. Being underwater in general is a big deal, but especially under the ice where you don’t have the option to come up, and correctly understand where you are with GPS is especially important.

**DESTIN:**
Had you not sent me this footage, I would not have known what it looked like under the ice. Because when I was on the submarine, I couldn’t see anything. So what am I looking at here?

**LT. HOWARD:**
We brought our AUV, autonomous undersea vehicle, on the Macrura with us from MIT. Macrura is being deployed from the hole that we had at Camp Seadragon. So it’s slowly moving down. We’re pushing it down with a weight right now. But at a certain depth, the mission kicks on and the tail cone takes over and it drives itself down to go do its mission.

**DESTIN:**
So you guys are controlling it, like a video game.

**LT. HOWARD:**
No, actually it’s fully autonomous. So we can talk to it once it’s deployed, but it has a preloaded mission plan that it executes. And we can update it, but it doesn’t need to talk to us all the time to know what it’s doing.

**DESTIN:**
So it’s time to understand the command structure on the boat. Now I knew there were officers and enlisted service members, but I didn’t really understand the exact functions of each. The enlisted personnel have specialties with specific job functions like torpedoes or engineering. The officers manage these enlisted personnel, and they plan missions and provide and assign tasks. There are three main positions of leadership on the boat. Of course, the captain sets the objectives, and then you have two people that carry them out. You have the executive officer, and you also have the chief of the boat, otherwise known as the COB. The COB on the Toledo is Arnell Brantley. He’s a master chief, which is the highest enlisted rank in the Navy. I learned very quickly that he knows everything about the boat and everything about the entire crew. All throughout this video series, you’ll see that he’s an extremely humble guy, but what you don’t realize is that he commands respect in every room he walks into, both from the enlisted personnel and from the officers.

These are the chief’s quarters, where the senior enlisted personnel come to blow off steam. Let’s listen to Arnell talk about his role on the boat.

**ARNELL:**
So you are the bridge between the officers and the enlisted.

**ARNELL:**
I am. So we have, basically on the boat what we call the triad. So there’s the captain, the XO, and then there’s me. So captain’s on top. And then me and XO on the side. I’m like the enlisted advisor on the—I like to say, the people problems. I do people problems. And anything that’s going on, I take care of that. The executive officer, he takes care of, like, all the training, getting people, dealing with stuff. And we basically— we’re the bridge to get the information to the captain, to help him make an informed decision on anything that he wants to make, so I’m just the in between. I like to call myself everybody’s dad.

**DESTIN:**
Somewhere in