WASHINGTON — At a press conference today, Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, revealed that the U.S. Navy’s enlisted ranks were, in fact, entirely made up.

“Gotcha,” Caudle said.

Flanked by grinning senior Navy leaders, Caudle explained that the service’s bewildering enlisted hierarchy — long a source of confusion for the other branches — was actually a prank as old as the nation itself. An accompanying press release from the Office of the Naval Historian stated that the elaborate hoax dates back to Revolutionary-era tensions between Esek Hopkins, the Navy’s first commander, and Gen. George Washington, owing to the latter’s preeminence and nominal control over the Continental Navy.

In a letter to his wife, Hopkins reportedly wrote:

“Gen’l Washington is a pricke. He bears himself with such sanctimony one’d think the Almighty’d granted him command by thunderbolt. In truth, the man’s a pompous, overweening popinjay, and I’ll be damn’d if I heed the counsel of so preenin’ a fop — leastwise not one who sees the Navy as naught but his waterborne mule-train.”

According to historians, Hopkins devised the “improv’d ranke” system during a binge on plundered Bahamian rum with his crew. In notes from his logbook, he described with great pride the petty ruse played on “that right bastard with wood’n teeth and a disposition to match,” tricking the famously straight-laced Washington into inadvertently using the foul language of a common sailor.

Of the Navy’s most basic enlisted rank, Hopkins wrote:

“I’ll name ‘em Seamen, spelled right but soundin’ wrong — and next time the goode Virginian’s troops need their arses saved, he’ll be beggin’ me fer all semen he can get, with nary a clue he’d saved his boys, but made an arse of hisself. The joke’ll outlive us all.”

Hopkins further decreed that enlisted sailors would simply invent their own ranks as they saw fit, but present them “solemn as Sunday,” ensuring soldiers would assume any confusion stemmed from their own ignorance rather than Navy fuckery. As the prank evolved through the 19th century, limited standardization was introduced to better conceal the deceit, generally restricting ranks to a few capital letters followed by numbers that looked official enough from a distance.

“My Labradoodle’s name is Mr. Gumballs and I was born in 2002,” explained MRG02 Bethany Evanchuk, a public affairs E-3 taking photos at the press conference. “It just felt right.”

Her supervisor, BBC69 Carissa Nowak, said such choices were common.

“We usually just pick something we like,” she said, declining to explain hers.