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Proceedings editors Fred Rainbow and John Miller traveled to the Pentagon recently for a post-election interview with Acting Secretary O’Keefe.
Proceedings: You signed “ . . . From the Sea” along with Admiral [Frank] Kelso and General [Carl] Mundy, in late September. What is its purpose?
O’Keefe: The primary objective is to chart a course for the Navy in the 21st century, rec- °gnizing that there has to be a fundamentally different focus for the Post-Cold War naval services than dte one that worked successfully during the Cold War. Such a change ls necessary to keep us from trying t° refight the last war.
Proceedings: How did the document §et started? On whose initiative?
O’Keefe: It began nine or ten Months ago, with a conference at Quantico that Secretary [of the Navy Lawrence] Garrett had pulled toother to ask some fundamental questions about the kinds of strate- §*es the naval-warfare communities sdll hold, in light of the dramatic changes we’ve seen after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, among other things.
Under certain scenarios, for example, would we respond to contingencies the way we did during the Cold War era? That Question kicked off a rather vigorous debate.
Secretary Garrett then posed a series of questions about lite composition of carrier battle groups, amphibious ready §roups, and other operational entities that were consid- ®red to be almost untouchable, because they always had een. And that generated another series of debates. So we "'Orked our way through all the warfare communities over past nine or ten months, and came to closure by the er>d of September.
For a starter, we had the Defense Planning Guidance, "'Inch had been produced during the spring, and over the Sumrner we tried to refine some of the basic elements in Program Objectives Memorandum. By the end of Au- SUst, we were rethinking elements of the budget.
All of this finally came to a head at a war game in New- P°rt about the middle of September, in which we tested
the logic of the draft strategy paper against the budget we were then so proud of—all relative to the scenarios we expected to confront. All of these elements eventually came together by the end of September to produce “ . . . From the Sea.”
Proceedings: Where does control of the oceans—the familiar “sea control” mission—play in “ .. . From the Sea?” O’Keefe: It is—in some ways—a given. At this point, there is no superpower other than the United States. A fundamental assumption is that there is no potential belligerent who has the ability to challenge us in the open ocean. We’ve become by definition the preeminent world naval power. Therefore, we ought to be looking at the exigencies that might require other capabilities for other kinds of crises. I think we have sea control covered at this point.
Proceedings: With the change in administrations, how does the Navy keep “ . . . From the Sea” relevant? O’Keefe: There are no specific plans designed to respond to political change. To bring about significant change, there would have to be a school of thought that says, “No, you’ve incorrectly sized up the problems you think you will confront in the future, and we ought to take a fundamentally different direction.” Frankly, I don’t see that as a likelihood. I don’t think there’s any real debate about changing from a global to a regional strategy in U.S. national security policy. This maritime segment of that strategy is uniquely suited for such a change. I think it will be one of the enduring features of what the Bush administration was capable of producing, in terms of a changed world circumstance and trying to adapt to that change. So unless there is a fundamental rethinking of our national strategic objectives, I’m not sure that any adaptation has to be all that pronounced. I don’t believe there’s any fundamental argument on that point.
Proceedings: As we understand it, “ . . . From the Sea” was a mid-level study that came from the commanders, captains, and colonels. Does it have a lot of grass-roots support?
O’Keefe: As best I can tell. There’s no question that the warfare-community conferences held over the last six weeks have been tightly focused on this new strategy. As a result, I think the support is there, generated by the community sponsors themselves. If anything, this acceptance of a mid-course sea change has really been generated by the operators, as well as the strategic thinkers— instead of being driven from the top down by somebody who rolls in and says, “This is how we’re all going to think this week.”
Proceedings: “ . . . From the Sea” speaks to jointness a great deal. How seriously is the Navy committed to play in the joint arena? Will there be structural changes? Flag officer shifts? Changes in professional education? O’Keefe: We’re very well positioned from a training, education, and operations standpoint. The naval leadership is looking at ways the naval services, in most of these scenarios and contingencies, can become an initial “enabling” force for joint operations. We must avoid the historical pitfall of single-service attempts to produce the entire solution from start to finish—without using the extraordinary capabilities that may be brought to bear in that specific case by other services.
Joint and combined operations are the wave of the future. We must be sure that we are not duplicating efforts, paying several times over for capabilities that already exist in the Defense establishment. I think that the senior uniformed leaders of the naval services are becoming more relevant in that process. They must be able to serve as unified commanders afloat, or maybe even ashore, whatever the circumstances. I think they’re very well attuned to such possibilities.
Proceedings. Does the fact that the aircraft carriers are not mentioned up front in this document indicate a willingness on the Navy’s part to reduce the number of aircraft carriers?
O’Keefe: Not at all. The carrier will continue to be the premier asset it always has been. We no longer say however, that every single contingency, crisis response, or hot dust-up requires the calling in of a composite air wing with a carrier battle group, or with a Marine amphibious ready group. That is a thing of the past. Unified commanders now must think more in terms of the most likely circumstances they will face while they are calling in forces to respond. To avoid overkill they must pick and choose among the assets that the naval services can bring to bear, instead of just giving a set-piece answer: “Bring in the full load.”
Fifteen years ago, the solution always was to send in the carrier group. There was never any hesitation even when we were either drawing down the force or resizing it. We would dial 911 and say, “Send in the whole carrier load.” As a result, during the 1970s, we wound up with sailors who felt abused and misused. After several long deployments, they’d say, “No, thank you, I ve had quite enough of this,” and leave the service. Today, the unified commanders must select contingency forces wisely, given the wide range of scenarios we’re going to be facing—and that we’ve already seen over the past three years. If the only solution each time is to call in the entire carrier battle group, they will wear out their forces in a hurry. They must take the responsibility of making certain we don’t do that.
The LHDs and other large-deck ships from the am- 74
phibious ready groups should gain more prominence, be- . cause they could offer exactly the right kind of response j in some circumstances, where overwhelming air superiority is not required. In short, we must avoid waking up and realizing that all we have left is a three-quarter scale ( model of naval forces designed for World War III and the Cold War scenarios. We face completely different circumstances today. There’s no need to stretch the force beyond its human and material capacity, to counter a threat that no longer exists.
Proceedings: Do you foresee a time when the routine six- month cruises of the amphibious ready groups and the carrier battle groups might be modified into random deployment patterns or spot responses to crisis? Today, for instance, it might become thinkable to gap the coverage in the Mediterranean—and that was generally unthinkable during the Cold War.
O’Keefe: I’m hesitant to sign up for changes in the operational deployment patterns—in terms of personnel tempo—until I get a better feel for the ways unified commanders may respond to this first challenge. The temptation is not necessarily to shorten those deployments— more often it’s to lengthen them. And every time we have done that, it has proved a disaster. Six months seems to be about the limit, in terms of readiness, training, quality of life, and all the other things that the battle force has to maintain. If we start tinkering with that, and trying to stretch it a little bit here and a little bit there, we will end up with the same kind of morale problems we confronted years ago. Retention rates would drop right through the bottom.
Proceedings: There’s been a lot of budget pressure on naval aviation. Can the Navy and Marine Corps get the aircraft they truly need?
O’Keefe: Oh, I think so. “ . . . From the Sea” focuses on the kinds of scenarios that call for shorter-range strike capabilities than the Cold War used to demand, pointed more toward closeJair support missions. The long-range joint strike mission is one we still must prepare for, but it no longer has a set-piece answer based on past assumptions- New opportunities now exist to use stand-off cruise missiles or to use the Air Force for some types of missions formerly required of carrier-based aviation.
This means that we now can begin to focus specifically | on fewer types of aircraft we want to maintain. Over the years, we found that maintaining a varied inventory of single-purpose aircraft forced us to shoulder very high op' erating costs in terms of training requirements and the logistics pipeline. Today, however, the likely scenarios call for a fixed number of responses, all well within the range of an F/A-18 aircraft. You still need to have F-14s for the purpose of longer range activity as well as some other purposes, but no longer as the principal aircraft of the future.
The AFX will have to be more than a replacement fof the A-6. We must work with the Air Force to make it a replacement for the F-l 11, the F-15-E, and the F-l 17. We 1 also must address the medium-lift requirements. Th^
. . . we've learned a very valuable lesson about walking the fine line between Total Quality Leadership . . . and the dangerous practice of sitting around and resorting to groupthink ...
V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft is only one of several candidates we’re looking at. It’s not a fait accompli. We’re going to develop it, see what the state-of-the-art will bring, and determine whether we can reduce the unit cost of whatever aircraft produces the best medium-lift results.
We have to put a lot of attention into medium lift, owing to the age of CH-46. But there will be only a handful of specific aircraft programs, designed to cover a wider variety of missions than what we’ve seen in the past. If anything, I think it’s going to be an easier kind of future to be preparing for, with a markedly different threat.
Proceedings: For many years, the Navy has had an internal problem of parochialism within its ranks, moving away from that in some ways through the recent OpNav reorganization. Are there any other plans to increase interoperability within the Navy?
O’Keefe: The primary thing to drive that will be the reorganization—not only in its impact here in Washington but also in how it’s being dealt with out in the Fleet. In just the past four or five months, there has been a noticeable difference in the deference shown here in Washington to the Fleet operating commanders. Now there’s a novel turnaround for you—the very idea of bringing folks in from the Waterfront to testify on Capitol Hill! In turn, the operators are questioning their own communities, and improvising interoperability in ways we never could have by top-down force feeding.
For instance, submariners have come forward and said, “Here are some ways we can be more useful in future scenarios by carrying stand-off cruise weapons.” They are Using platforms that did quite nicely at hunting Typhoon ballistic missile submarines, but they can do many other things as well. Now they’re out there seeking new missions, instead of having some advocate here in Washington telling us why hunting Typhoons is so important.
Proceedings: It’s time for the T-word question. How do you see the Tailhook controversy playing out?
O’Keefe: The most important thing to remember about the issue is that it’s not solely about an incident that occurred in Las Vegas in September 1991. If that were the case, we would have settled this question many months ago. Instead, Tailhook lit a firestorm about a larger societal issue: sexual harassment. It has become a lightning r°d for debate.
To me, the bigger issue is one of setting proper standards of conduct for naval officers that, in turn, become societal standards. I believe that our society has always held men and women in uniform to a high set of cultural standards. That imposes tremendous responsibility over and above the demanding and hazardous things we ask them to do. In terms of gender bias and related issues, we •tiust be the standard bearers for society, and as an institution we are bound to profit from the self-examination now under way.
As for what actually occurred in Las Vegas more than a year ago—the Defense Department’s Inspector General still has it. They’re looking at everybody who may have had anything to do with it. When their report comes forward, we must deal with it expeditiously, keeping the focus on the primary question of setting appropriate social standards, as opposed to dealing with an isolated set of cases. It is important to remember that more than 99% of the naval service were nowhere near that Las Vegas hotel. Yet they are the folks who are being asked to set new standards and adopt new cultural values. They’re doing an extraordinary job of it. I’m highly impressed with the way our people have taken on this challenge, even while suffering a painful black eye for the actions of a few.
Proceedings: There’s another T-word to consider. As the Navy advances its Total Quality Leadership [TQL] program, there has been a perception—among many people in the aviation community in particular—that there has been a disconnect between the stated aims of TQL and the handling of the Tailhook investigation. Perhaps things got off the track. How do you get back on track? And is TQL still relevant?
O’Keefe: In this case, we saw a collective failure and a breakdown of TQL. As best I can reconstruct the investigation, after hearing the evidence and going through all the material, is that everybody thought the other guy was in charge. Nobody ever came to closure. The result was, by anybody’s standard, a complete disaster.
If anything, we’ve learned a very valuable lesson about walking the fine line between Total Quality Leadership, which results in agreement on the objective and means of attaining it, and the dangerous practice of sitting around and resorting to groupthink—deciding that somebody else must be taking care of the parts that I am not handling. Someone has to be in charge—that’s the real message.
Proceedings: The President-elect has made statements supporting a change in existing policy regarding homosexuals serving in uniform. If a new policy is established, has the Navy thought about how it might be implemented? O’Keefe: I hope that the new administration will permit a long and comprehensive debate on this issue, which has a tremendous emotional impact on our people. I don’t think that any evidence suggests that there is an aim of denying anybody a right to his or her sexual preferences. But for most officers and enlisted professionals I’ve talked to, there is a real concern over the apparent inconsistency with good order and discipline. I think General Colin Powell has very articulately captured the essence of this concern in his public statements.
. . . be very careful whenever we move the debate from military capabilities to societal issues. When you start using the Department of Defense and the uniformed services as a debating ground for societal questions, you risk detracting from the central mission of the military ...
It is tough, after getting people to join the service and then spend six months at sea, living in very close quarters, to say, “Oh, by the way—pay no attention to the announced preference of your shipmate.” That appears to be something that is very hard for a lot of our people to accept and to deal with.
r E. HUNTINGTON
So I would hope that the next administration would very seriously think this one through. Something that may seem to be a socially correct thing to do may not be in the best interest of the larger objective—maintaining truly effective armed services. When you really look at the evidence out there, it invariably points to the fact that there’s a very emotional reaction to this issue—one that could affect the primary objective of the military establishment.
Especially when deployed, military people live in such close quarters that they must have complete trust and confidence in each other. I think it’s a little bit too easy for the nine-to-five office workers to sit around and make such profound judgment calls without full understanding of their impact. So I hope they would be very careful about the way they undertake this initiative, because it could really very seriously undermine the already fragile morale that’s out there right now. There’s an interesting correlation: The most authoritative people who speak on this issue are the ones who have spent no deployed time at all. We’re talking about very important cultural issues here. It’s prudent to handle them one at a time.
Proceedings: Going into a parochial area—what is your opinion of the Proceedings forum?
O’Keefe: I think it’s a very beneficial one. It’s a useful way to activate debate and hear the wide range of opinion that exists in the ranks. In this era, that is going to be more pertinent to where we’re going than perhaps ever before. So I applaud it and I encourage it.
Proceedings: There’s a Navy tradition when leaving a command to turn over a Pass-Down-The-Line Log to the
person relieving you. Such a log typically highlights the strengths on which to build and identifies unfinished business or action items. Would you identify what you believe to be the Navy’s strengths and the high-priority items? O’Keefe: At high noon on 20 January, I’m going to leave
here with mixed emotions. In the last six months we’ve turned the corner on some issues and some concerns that—if it had not been for an atmosphere of adversity—may never have come to closure. In that adversity were some tremendous opportunities to debate and to reconcile some issues that perhaps we couldn’t have settled if we had gone about it in a less emotional way. In that regard, I’m glad to see some of the progress we’ve made over the last six months, but I’m sorry it had to be done within a context of adversity.
So my log would say “Do not be afraid of the adversity that is yet to come— whatever it may be—because in that adversity will be the seeds of opportunity for settling long-standing arguments, issues, and problems that have seemed to defy solution far too long.” The second log item would be a warning to “be very careful whenever we move the debate from military capabilities to societal issues. When you start using the Department of Defense and the uniformed services as a debating ground for societal questions, you risk detracting from the central mission of the military.” You have to be prepared for not only the positive developments that come from such debate—and we’ve had success in responsibly addressing racial questions and drug and alcohol abuse, among other things—but at the same time you must be prepared to deal with the impact on morale that often accompanies change. This doesn’t detract from the larger good in these debates, but we must be mindful of the impact. There doesn’t seem to be as much sensitivity to that point in as there is the zeal to go out and use the armed forces as the incubator for all the social questions of the day.
So as a consequence, I think the log would read, “Be careful of what you ask for—you just might get it.”