The Insidious Communist Littoral Threat!
Say what you like about the Cold War, but it’s done wonders for women’s career advancement in the Navy.
Mind you, under the water it’s not a Cold War. We drylanders always had legends about sirens and mermaids and selkies and other people of the sea, but it wasn’t until World War II that we actually found any. Or at least, it wasn’t until then that any scientists found any.
Luckily for us, unluckily for the mermaids, the Nazis were the ones that found them first. I say ‘luckily’ because the folks that live in the sea weren’t always thrilled with drylanders. There have been bad incidents, on both sides. Nobody’s hands are clean — but the Nazis had very dirty hands, and to them mermaids were just another breed of Untermenschen. When the mermaids realized that us and the Brits — oh, and the Soviets, too — were doing our level best to kill the filleting bastards, well, the enemy of my enemy is my military ally, right?
And that would have been fine, if only the damned Commies hadn’t gotten a bug up their collectivist asses about spreading the message of the global revolution to the oppressed proletariat laboring under the waves. Or, if you don’t believe in that particular flavor of ideological bullshit: creating deniable allies who could mess with American shipping and naval units. Whatever the reason, pretty soon we and the Russians were picking sides and propping up allies. Better war below the waterline than above it.
Or at least that’s the strategy.