Thibaut Delloue
Author and Advocate
I am a former naval officer and author who writes about the Navy and issues facing sailors and veterans. My articles and narrative nonfiction have been featured in publications like The National Interest, Task & Purpose, War on the Rocks, the U.S. Naval Institute, and The War Horse.
My first book, The Wardroom: An Officer’s Tour at Sea and the Crisis of the US Navy, is now available. Thank you for visiting!
About the Book
The Wardroom
A naval officer recounts his deployments aboard a US Navy destroyer and parallels his story with the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain in 2017.
A First-hand Account
The Wardroom recounts Thibaut's tour aboard the destroyer USS Carney, at the time one of only a handful of warships permanently stationed in the US Navy's European fleet. Deployed from 2015 to 2017, Delloue sailed across Europe from the English Channel to the eastern Mediterranean, confronted Russian battlecruisers off the coast of Syria, and fought ISIS in Libya, all while struggling with an unhinged captain.
A Story of the Navy
More than one sailor’s narrative, The Wardroom explores the enigmatic world of Navy surface warfare officers. Delloue’s tour aboard the Carney paralleled the 2017 tragedies of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain, two separate collisions in which seventeen sailors lost their lives. His story shows how the Navy's broken culture and declining training standards led directly to these incidents, and what the Navy can do to fix it.
Latest Blog
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What I Learned from the British Navy
In 2017, as a naval officer serving his first tour aboard the destroyer USS Carney, I sailed to the southern coast of England to take part in the Royal Navy’s famed Flag Officer Sea Training, or FOST. One of the most renowned training programs for maritime warfare among NATO Navies,(...)
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The Most Shocking Military Accidents of Our Time
The day after the USS John S. McCain collided with a cargo ship off the coast of Singapore in August of 2017, I began a course at the Navy’s Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. The school’s commanding officer gathered all students and staff into the auditorium to(...)
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What SWOs Can Learn from LCS
During my tour as navigator of the USS Coronado, an Independence-class littoral combat ship in San Diego, I became all too familiar with the many challenges facing the LCS program. Yet for all the controversy, LCS has demonstrated a surprisingly better model for officer training and watch standing in the(...)
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