I watched Pete Hegseth’s speech about the Iranian ship yesterday and found myself becoming distracted by something rather odd. Not the submarine bit. Submarines sinking ships is, after all, what submarines are designed to do. Sailors have known this for about a century and the whole thing tends to be handled with a certain professional understatement. What caught my attention instead was the way he began talking about bomb weights.
Quite a lot of bomb weights, in fact. Two thousand pounds of this. Several thousand pounds of that. Delivered with a sort of energetic enthusiasm that reminded me faintly of a man explaining the horsepower of his new ride on mower. And as this catalogue of explosive poundage went on, a small historical memory started stirring somewhere in the back of my head.
Because there is a rather well known precedent for this rhetorical device. Adolf Hitler had a habit during the early war years of doing exactly the same thing. He would stand at a podium and start listing the weights of German bombs destined for British cities. One thousand kilos. Two thousand kilos. Delivered with the same dramatic cadence of someone unveiling an impressive new industrial appliance. The point was not military explanation. It was theatre. The audience was meant to feel the scale of destructive power through the numbers.
Now before anyone gets too excited, I am not suggesting Pete Hegseth is Adolf Hitler. That would be absurd. For one thing, Hitler usually built up to his bomb statistics rather than launching into them halfway through a press briefing. The resemblance is purely rhetorical. When politicians start reciting the specifications of explosives with visible relish, it produces a tone that sits oddly with the subject matter.
The slightly funny thing is that the genuinely interesting part of the episode is the submarine. Submarines are frightening not because of the size of the bang but because they are quiet and patient. They do not make speeches about bomb weights. They sit somewhere cold and grey under the ocean, do their calculations, fire a torpedo, and then disappear again while everyone else tries to work out what just happened.
Which is why naval announcements normally sound calm to the point of boredom. Professionals talk about objectives, threats, and outcomes. They rarely sound like someone reading the specification sheet of a particularly exciting firework. Somewhere out there there will be a submarine captain who carried out the operation with total composure and then went back to the routine of the control room, someone probably putting the kettle on while another officer checks the charts.
Meanwhile in Washington the speech had drifted into something that sounded suspiciously like a monster truck rally for explosives. Bomb weights, enthusiastic cadence, the faint sense that the speaker was enjoying the description a little too much.
Naval warfare, historically speaking, has generally benefited from the opposite tone. If your briefing about a torpedo attack begins to sound like a wartime propaganda speech about the size of the bombs, it may be a sign that the presentation needs a small adjustment.
The submarine, after all, already did the impressive part. The rest of us could probably manage with a slightly quieter explanation. In fact I suspect the submarine crew themselves would have preferred it that way. They probably heard the speech afterwards while making tea and quietly wondered why anyone felt the need to start announcing the poundage of the explosives.
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