In several circles, she's the odds-on favorite to be the Defense Department's first woman four-star flag officer. She is the former Commander of Naval Training Center Great Lakes and was the first Commander of the Naval Service Training Command. She was also Commander of the Naval Personnel Development Command and served as the Director of Navy Staff. Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau is currently Deputy Commander, U.S. Transportation Command, which manages global air, land, and sea transportation for DOD. She met recently with Proceedings Senior Editor Fred Schultz at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington before a flight back to her headquarters at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois.
Proceedings: How did someone who was born in San Antonio, grew up on the Hudson River, and graduated from Eisenhower College in New York's Finger Lakes region end up making the Navy a career?
VADM Rondeau: My father had been in World War II, and both my father and mother were civil servants. So the whole notion of public service was attractive. I was also fascinated by American history, even as a little girl. And any history of almost any nation includes military history.
My parents took us to West Point for Sunday summer concerts, and my father took me to the museum there. I sang "The Messiah" with the Corps of Cadets for two years. They had no women back then, so they brought in girls and women from high schools and colleges who could sing. West Point was very familiar to me, and as a result, the military environment was not uncomfortable for me.
I went to Eisenhower College toward the end of the Vietnam War, when the draft was ending and nobody was joining the military. Well, I did. A classmate friend of mine joined the Coast Guard, and he and I were the only two from our class who joined. I had been accepted to go to graduate school, but I didn't have any money. So I began asking myself what I should do. My sister was on a full Navy scholarship for nursing out of Hartwick College, and she suggested I take a look at the military.
I interviewed for another service and did horribly. I did not interview well, and I tested very badly. I then went to the Navy office and took the test, which was more about aptitude and actually tested my strengths. I did very well.
Before this I had done job interviews from college, and everybody wanted to start me out at a low clerical level across the board, in what at that time were traditional roles for women. The Navy said it would bring me in as an officer and treat me as an officer. This gave me a sense that the Navy wanted me and that I would be part of the larger culture.
Proceedings: As a woman, what were your impressions of Officer Candidate School [OCS]?
VADM Rondeau: The only avenue for me was OCS. West Point and the Naval Academy were both closed to women. And I could not even have gone in through the ROTC program. Had I been allowed to go to into an academy, I probably would have applied to West Point. I had read about the great West Pointers MacArthur and Eisenhower and Bradley, and that appealed to me.
Back then, OCS expanded or contracted depending on what the end-strength requirements were, and it still does to some extent. It's also a fast way to make officers. You can do it in five months versus four years. When I came in, this is where minorities and women went to be trained for a commission. I was in the second co-ed OCS class.
Proceedings: How have women's roles evolved since you were commissioned in 1974?
VADM Rondeau: Women's roles—and men's roles, for that matter—have changed constantly over time. At the time I was commissioned, boys never went to home economics class to learn how to cook. Now they do. Roles evolve depending on the culture or because of economic or social changes. As I said before, I grew up during the Vietnam era, but I also came of age during the Civil Rights movement, a time of tumultuous changes in this country.
The feminist movement was becoming more aggressive. But when I first came into the Navy, the traditional roles for women were still in place—administrative support, supply, logistics, personnel. My first job, however, was on a four-star staff as the communications security officer. I filled a Fleet lieutenant's job. All of a sudden, I was put into a quasi-Fleet-support role. That in itself was an indication of change.
Also at this time, women officers could not wear khakis. We had to wear skirts, and we had to wear gloves. If you were pregnant, you were forced to leave. This became a big issue after Vietnam, when the Navy was losing so many people. Not only was it cutting personnel, it was losing them, too. So the Navy was forced to find ways to retain its people.
Women have had other biases to contend with. Before Title X was finally in place, women were not allowed to go to sea or fill combat roles. So it was really a struggle for women to become operational. I remember not receiving the Navy Achievement Medal. My bosses had put me in for it, and I earned it. But a four-star admiral wrote on the top: "No officer who's never been to sea should ever get a personal award." I've never forgotten that. It was telling. I understood that he had a view deeply embedded in his experience. What did that mean to me? That meant I had to also think about my own experience and apply it broadly.
Yes, I was disappointed. But at that moment I decided I had to stretch myself out of my current experience and seek to understand things intellectually and emotionally through empathy and through observation. I decided I needed to immerse myself in the environment around me to understand the people and know what was going on. I began to do things unconventionally.
I went on board ships tied to the pier at Pearl Harbor and sought out peers to ask questions. "Tell me about what you do as a combat systems officer. Tell me what you do as a gunnery officer. Show me the bridge, and show me what happens there." By getting out from where I was and going to where I needed to be, I began making a name for myself on the waterfront and started to develop a reputation.
I earned my surface warfare pin because of the goodness of a Fleet commodore. I told him I wanted to learn about the Navy and about ships at sea. At the time, the Bureau of Navy Personnel had a provision that if you were assigned to a sea-going unit or assigned to an operational unit, you could get your surface warfare pin.
I was doing things that women were not allowed to do, like going on deployments with a VP [patrol] squadron. I was not wearing aviation wings, but I was assigned to the squadron as an air intelligence officer [AIO]. We were seeing a tremendous exodus of aviators—pilots, in particular—to the airline industry.
I was reliable, kind of a special-teams player as well as AIO, and I had done flight schedules and extra squadron duty when the aviators were up flying. One day, the skipper said, "Okay we're going to make you the operations officer." I was probably the only ops officer in naval aviation not wearing wings. But he needed somebody to be the acting ops officer on deployment. That was not about being a man or woman. He said he had aviators to fly the planes. He needed an ops officer, and I was it, which was extraordinary for the time.
Back then in the civilian world, few women were going to law school or medical school. But some women decided to test the system, and that's what makes America great. I wasn't denied very much because I was a woman, even though some policies in place were, shall we say, less than accommodating in the early days.
Proceedings: Like what?
VADM Rondeau: The Navy did not have an ethos or culture that valued women. For one, the uniforms were odd. They were not functional for women officers who wanted to do operational work. And we had no women's locker rooms, gyms, or fitness centers. I guess no one thought women worked out. The Navy is a culture that values sports, but we didn't have women's sports or facilities for them in the early days. Some of the really creative commands made signs that read, "Women's Locker Room" or "Men's Locker Room" and switched them on the door, depending on who was inside.
Proceedings: How did you cope with that lack of accommodation?
VADM Rondeau: I think it was mostly about attitude. Can women be operational? Can women make tough decisions? At first women didn't always do very well with attitude. We did great work but we weren't doing professional things like reading about naval tactics, about maritime and military history. So we could not have a professional conversation about ships going to sea. We did not have the vocabulary, the lexicon, or the roots of our profession that the culture required for acceptance.
I'm not arguing that women should become men and men become women. But back then for women to succeed they needed to be adaptable. Now, young women are joining the Navy in an age when they have girls' sports or women's sports in high schools and colleges. They also have such women role models as lawyers and politicians and doctors and judges.
Think about the women back then who came into the Navy just to serve, with no delusions. At one time, women Navy officers had no expectation of becoming a captain. When I joined, we had something like two woman Navy captains, not counting nurses. They also had no expectations of having command. They just came in to serve and they adapted. They fit in with the least amount of training, and they performed brilliantly.
We did not send the female officers to schools where they could learn their trade or their craft. I went to very few schools as a young officer. It's a different story now for our young women who are so fully integrated and assimilated. I have complete admiration for the women who came before me who had few indications, no assessment, no training, and little acculturation to succeed in this very competitive, performance-driven environment.
Proceedings: You said earlier that you had developed a reputation for being on the edge. Some of the women officers today seem a bit stand-offish about it, saying, "Why do we want to draw attention to ourselves?"
VADM Rondeau: There is stand-offishness, and I have it as well. It took a while, but at a certain point, women decided that they just wanted to fit in. [Former Chief of Naval Operations] Admiral Thomas Hayward once said something along the lines of, "we'll know that women will have made it in the Navy when we're no longer talking about them as women and we're talking about them as naval officers or as Sailors." So that's what you're hearing from women today. It's like any team sport. You don't want to convey a sense that you don't belong to the team. When I said I put myself on the edge, I should have also said that I had great bosses who let me do that. In the larger context of our Navy, I was not shut down.
What you hear from women is all about how they contribute to the team, about how they measure up against their teammates, and about how they add value to the team effort. Good leaders would rather have you not make a big deal about them but rather make a big deal about what was done. All of us want to fit in, and we want to be told that we were a good naval officer, not a good female naval officer.
Proceedings: Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark said a few years ago that the issue of women in the Navy is no longer an issue. Is that true?
VADM Rondeau: Yes, it is. With Title IX changing sports and Title X's changes, access is no longer an issue. Now, it is all about performance. We now say we value women in the Navy. And we value families. We're now talking about parental leave and not just about maternity leave. I'll never forget an article I read in the mid 1990s in Navy Times. In an interview, the admiral in charge of Air Forces Atlantic said something phenomenal was happening in naval aviation that he had never seen before. He was forced to deal with a wave of young male junior officers leaving naval aviation because they wanted to be good fathers, and they couldn't be good parents and be away from home for so long. He said we needed to begin to address this issue.
Getting back to women, being able to fly planes and drive ships is also no longer an issue. We still face some issues now being discussed, like women in submarines and various other roles. But in terms of performance and assimilation, women are fitting in fine.
Proceedings: What about retention?
VADM Rondeau: We still have a problem with how we retain our best talent, male and female. The junior officer of 2007 is very different from the JO of 1987. Frankly, we now have a junior officer corps that has more operational experience, in real operations, than the average senior officer. Even though women's health issues and pregnancy issues still exist, it's no longer about women in the Navy, per se. It's much larger than that. It's what our cadre of young officers says to us. They want education, they want some stability, they want some parental leave time, and they want some of the same flexibility found in the civilian sector. This is part of the conversation about active and reserve. Maybe we should allow JOs to go back and forth between active duty and reserve, rather than taking sabbaticals where they lose seniority. This could allow for accommodations to family or time for that master's degree.
Proceedings: Have enough accommodations been made for women?
VADM Rondeau: For the most part, yes. But nothing ever just disappears. The issues have been addressed over time. When I came into the Navy, it was a drug-infested, alcohol-infested service. And post-Vietnam depression was an issue. We had plane crashes at the time because of wear-and-tear on aircraft. We had a tired force from Vietnam, and we had a force that had racial problems. In some ways, the Navy was on its knees. But the service pressed ahead, and great leaders came to the fore. I think one of the most unheralded CNOs was Admiral Jim Holloway, because he was the leader who helped get the Navy healthy again. Few problems go away quickly. You have to work at it. If you begin to establish a dialog about race or drugs or alcohol or sexual harassment, other dialog occurs along the way. Let's face it. We've been through a crucible of experiences. We went through Tailhook and we went through the explosion on the battleship Iowa, experiences that fundamentally altered our Navy. And we got better.
I am so impressed that we've had leaders—male and female—who have brought our Navy along to a much healthier place. I would put their effort up against any effort by any civilian profession.
Proceedings: What advice would you give to a young woman considering the Navy as a career?
VADM Rondeau: I think being able to laugh is really important. Just laughing and being able to laugh at yourself. We women tend to be pretty intense at times. I once had a guy tell me, "Just lighten up, Ann, and you'll do fine." I've never forgotten that. The young ladies today are so talented. I'd tell them to believe in yourselves, have a good sense of humor, pitch in, and be good to yourselves.
Proceedings: Who were your role models?
VADM Rondeau: [Former U.S. Naval Institute Board member] Captain Betsy Wiley, for one. I was an ensign and I knew all about Betsy Wiley, a woman pioneer in the Navy. My recruiter was also fabulous. She was Carolina Claire, who happened to be Betsy Wiley's sister-in-law. She was a good-looking and vibrant naval officer. The other name that comes to mind as a role model for women is Rear Admiral Bobbie Hazard, who was universally respected by men. Here was an old-fashioned kind of naval officer who had adapted. She was dignified and smart, too. She had a presence and a sense of herself.
I had a lot of male role models, too. Some were mentors, some were tormentors [laughter]. One of the mentors was Rear Admiral Ron Marryott, a fabulous guy. When I was a one-star, Admiral Archie Clemins was also a great mentor. He put me through my paces and made sure I knew my stuff. Rear Admiral Sam Packer did the same thing, as did Rear Admiral Charles Prindle and Captain Ed Gibson. Captain John Grotenhuis was truly the leader who made a huge difference in my professional life. There were so many male peers and other great leaders. And there were always the chiefs and master chiefs, too many to name. I was very lucky.
Proceedings: Is the Navy ready for a woman CNO?
VADM Rondeau: Culturally, the Navy is ready for a woman CNO, I think. We're not yet there in terms of someone who's qualified for the job. We need someone who has gone through the extra wickets. We demand that of a man. We need to know what he did and what he didn't do. We make those distinctions all the time. I think it's going to have to be somebody who's proven herself and done it double. There will be a female CNO, but she must have had the right operational command—a battle group, perhaps.
Proceedings: Is command at sea that important?
VADM Rondeau: Absolutely. That's important for male CNOs. And it's just as critical for the first female CNO or for the first female Vice Chief. CNO candidates must have built reputations. Are they respected? What did they do to gain that respect? We don't have one career path that makes you the Chief of Naval Operations. For example, we won't see a female submariner CNO for a long time. Do I think we could see a female naval aviator or surface warrior as CNO? Absolutely.