The military operates at all hours of the day and night, so it uses a 24-hour clock to avoid confusion between AM and PM hours. This clock sometimes causes confusion for civilians, who don’t grasp the concept of “military time.”

The table below provides conversion between military time and standard time:

Military Time	Standard Time
0000	12 midnight
0100	1AM
0200	2AM
0300	3AM
0400	4AM
0500	5AM
0600	6AM
0700	7AM
0800	8AM
0900	9AM
1000	10AM
1100	11AM
1200	12 noon
1300	1PM
1400	2PM
1500	3PM
1600	4PM
1700	5PM
1800	6PM
1900	7PM
2000	8PM
2100	9PM
2200	10PM
2300	11PM

In military parlance, you’ll often hear times referred to in terms of “hours”. For example, 3:00 PM, which translates to 1500 military time, is often stated verbally as “fifteen hundred hours”. Similarly, 6:30AM (or 0630) is stated “oh-six thirty.”

In most cases, military members simply use the local time observed by the region of the world they’re in and convert that time to military time using the table above. However, when planning missions that cross time zones, the military uses Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to ensure coordination among different units.

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