In my military career, I was frequently deployed on the US Navy’s massive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers into combat and on more routine peacetime missions.

I embarked in the USS Abraham Lincoln as a commodore in the late 1990s, and I sailed around South America in the USS Eisenhower as a four-star admiral in command of US Southern Command in 2009. These are fearsome machines of war, apex predators at sea with significant land-attack powers as well.