Month: December 2025

41 Cold War Sentinels: USS George C. Marshall SSBN-654

The USS George C. Marshall was never built to be admired. She was built to be trusted. Like her namesake, she existed for moments when patience mattered more than drama and restraint mattered more than applause. In the Cold War Navy, that was not a slogan. It was a job description.

Commissioned in 1966, the USS George C. Marshall (SSBN-654) was a Benjamin Franklin class fleet ballistic missile submarine and part of the Navy’s most consequential experiment in quiet power, the forty one boats collectively known as the “41 for Freedom.” Their mission was brutally simple. Stay hidden. Stay ready. Make sure no rational enemy ever believed a first strike could succeed.

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41 Cold War Sentinels: USS Woodrow Wilson SSBN-624

The USS Woodrow Wilson belonged to a generation of submarines that were never meant to be seen, remembered, or celebrated in the usual way. She was built to disappear, to wait, and to make catastrophe unnecessary by making it inevitable in theory. As a Lafayette-class fleet ballistic missile submarine, she formed part of the original “Forty-One for Freedom,” the silent backbone of America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent during the most dangerous decades of the Cold War.

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December 10 in US Submarine History

December 10 tends to sit quietly on the calendar, a date that rarely makes headlines and never asks for much. Yet, across the long and strange saga of the United States Navy Submarine Force, this ordinary wintery day has carried more weight than it lets on. It has seen explosions in cramped early hulls, the smoke of war hanging over Cavite, the long shadow of strategic deterrence, and the uneasy reality that even the most powerful navy in the world still depends on shipyards that run behind schedule and politicians who promise to fix them.

1910: A lesson written in gasoline fumes

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