I have nothing against instructors using the name of a military unit to sell either their own hand-to-hand combat system or one that is used effectively by that unit. Not at all. For the most part, I see this as a marketing thing and each instructor/author has to make decisions on that front.
If you want to connect a USB device to an HDMI device then you must use a converter box. This is a set of electronics that change the protocols and signals. The only adaptor which works is the DVI-HDMI ones.
SSDs can operate much faster than even the USB 3.0 interface... so the USB interface itself may well be the bottleneck (or limiting factor) in a setup including an external USB-attached solid-state drive. You can help to some extent by using eSATA to connect the SSD. eSATA is much faster than USB 3. Note: The performance penalty caused by the USB interface is not likely to be noticeable by users in the normal course of computer use. But it would certainly be during benchmarking.