It’s the large-scale version of learning to drive the car. Understanding the Rules of the Road, what your vehicle can do in terms of stopping/steering/maneuvering a big metal mass, figuring out how to get from A to B, “parallel parking” at the pier, learning your vehicle’s systems, technology and capabilities, safety practices, emergency skills, and so on.
Driving the ship is just one element. Surface Warfare officers learn to fight the whole ship as a weapons platform, bringing the totality of its capabilities to bear on mission execution, while leading sailors to work in concert to operate the complex systems that propel the ship, operate the weapons systems, analyze the data and produce solutions, communicate with other military elements, and much more, all blue ocean thousands of miles from shore or homeport.
The Ensign standing his or her first Officer of the Deck Inport watches under instruction will eventually progress, through ship tours, shoreside training, multiple exercises and deployments, the formal Surface Warfare qualification, and countless hours of OJT, through increasingly larger roles on the ship, to XO and then CO. That is the way of command at sea.
Watch “Master and Commander,” with Russell Crowe.