Language is more than just a tool of communication. Ludwig Wittgenstein of Vienna called language the house of thought. Without language one cannot conceptualize. Thus, the limits of language constrain one's understanding.

This all sounds theoretical and preachy, but a member of the Bremerton USSVI recently commented that he understood little of an article he read in the April issue of The Submarine League Review. A perusal of the article, which is not atypical of all lectures, speeches and writings of modern high-ranking officials, revealed that submarine language has changed a great deal in the past fifty years.

This is not surprising and the inability of an old salt to understand the current parlance of the Navy and submarine force is not a condemnation of current jargon or the cutting-edge movers and shakers who use it. Veteran submariners have to live with the fact that the fleet has left them standing on the dock. Be that as it may, it was interesting to review the written speech of Vice Admiral Chuck Munn, ComNavSubFor on pages twelve through thirty one. From the perspective of a reader who is "out of the loop" of current nomenclature several stumbling blocks to communication were encountered.

The Navy prides itself on reducing complicated concepts and titles to their barest elements. It does this by acronyms. When one knows the acronym one is "in the loop" and enjoys the status of being aware of the conversation. Those of us who run up against an unknown acronym struggle with the thing while the flow of the speaker's thought passes us by. Sometimes the speaker is gracious enough to cut us in on the hidden knowledge of acronyms by slipping the meaning into a sentence. For example, COCOM might seem unintelligible, but we find that it means combatant commander. This is a real leg up on the meaning except that the term, combatant commander may leave some of us in the dust.

MCO means major combat ops and of course we all know that ops is short for operations. This bit of knowledge is a small triumph by itself.

Areas of responsibility are called SOCOM, PACOM, EUCOM etc. The meaning can be deduced if one is reasonably conversant with geography.

COATS reduces a whole sentence into five letters. It stands for command control system, modular off-hull assembly and test site. Or, where the attack center is put together.

While the old term, MOT meant middle of target, the new term MOP means measures of performance. And OPTEMPO is another useful acronym, but the reader is left hanging on this one.

One benefit to acronyms is that they reduce the need to worry over spelling. IRC, for example, stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Intelligence is pretty straight forward, but is it I before E, and how many Ns? The problem here is that good parlance necessitates the use of all those French words.

Added to the acronym dilemma, is the nature of speech itself. One talks of littoral warfare, encapsulation, binding energy, training pipeline, point of value creation, rotational platforms, and accession of officers. Even though all these terms can be found in the dictionary their basic meaning has to be applied to submarines and therein lies the rub. The long and short of it is, modern submarine lingo is for modern submariners and those diesel dinosaur sailors of the past will just have to grit their teeth and let the young guys have their Navy.