Well I’m not Navy. Everyone else in my family is though. Someone from the Navy may be able to give better insights, but these are mine from being an observer of the Navy.

The Navy will occasionally assign officers that they want for top slots in their hierarchy to areas that they’re not familiar with to give them broader experience. Since a PRT was a joint unit a lot of times, it may have been to fill the requirement for joint operations that Goldwater-Nichols began to require for promotion into a Flag Rank.

The officer may have also been in trouble somehow due to NAVSEA 08 being exceptionally hardassed and was on a punishment detail at the PRT, since if you screw up on a submarine, especially as an Officer, you’ll never hold a posting on a submarine again unless something extraordinary happens. “To err is to be human, to forgive is not Naval Reactors policy” to amend some wisdom that came from the Strategic Air Command.