GOTV

Q: With regard to the Senate committee deciding even the middle level, the captains and commander levels.... You're saying, before Tailhook, that wasn't the regular practice?

WEBB: To my knowledge, this has never been done in this century, and probably ever. What qualifications does a Senate staffer have to determine whether or not an individual is qualified to be a commander in the United States Navy? And if you don't respect the leadership that gave you these names, then that should be the issue. The issue should be, "Admiral," we do not have full trust and confidence in what you're doing here." And the admiral should be arguing on the table, adamantly, to defend the list that he has brought over. And the service sector, not just the admiral.

There should not be a certification process. The certification process is we conducted internal investigations in the Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy. And these people were not implicated. And we looked at them in our promotion boards, in comparison with other people. And we looked at them in accordance with all the precepts that the civilian process has dictated would affect promotions. And this is our guy. But I don't know of any case in history where people outside the military have decided who's going to be a commander in the Navy.

Q: And the Navy leadership signed off on that.

WEBB: And thus my speech.

Q: Now, in their defense, it would be argued that the Navy had discredited itself.

WEBB: What we're doing now is, we're just sort of wrapping this ball of string back up. How did the Navy discredit itself in Tailhook? The Navy did not discredit itself in Tailhook. But if they allowed that inference to stand, which they did, then they're in that situation, when they did not defend the culture of the Navy. And I can tell you, that hurt a lot of people who weren't even in the Navy. To see the way that the leadership refused to defend this historic institution with all its traditions, and the traditions that I fed off as a young man. And there was a woman who was had been a professor at the Naval Academy, who wrote a piece in New Republic, which was absolutely silly piece, and not see the Naval Academy defend itself as an institution. And to see the cheating scandal at the Naval Academy, when they couldn't make up their minds one way the other about why they were going to take action against, to the point that institution came under attack because the leadership failed to take care of it. And to see a public affairs apparatus that has either allowed or encouraged these sorts of tactics, going all the way back to the USS Iowa, when the Navy allowed this vicious insinuation to be made against a dead sailor to try to step away from a problem. Those are the kinds of things that create the problems. Not the sailor out there doing his job, that's caused this problem in the Navy.

Q: We keep talking about the warrior culture. The Navy culture, let's say. It's important to know, isn't it, that there is a difference between the warrior culture, the Navy culture, and what happened at Tailhook '91. They're not the same thing.

WEBB: I think that's an important point. Because what happened was as the Tailhook thing was dragged out, the two were combined in the minds of the critics, in order to achieve a totally different political objective. That if we demean the Navy as a culture, the culture at large, then we can remake it with these other political ideas in mind.

Very similar to what happened to the American military during Vietnam. The anti-war movement had to make two points. One, that Vietnam was not an important enough country to fight for. And the other was that the people who were over there fighting weren't capable of doing their job.

You saw the same basic strategy happening after Tailhook. The Navy culture, or the military as a culture, has become less and less understood in this country, as fewer and fewer people have chosen to serve.

even though it may be a false message, is because the people literally don't know.

Those leaders who comfortably claim that the notion of civilian control precludes them from arguing their own case should study the success of the Marine Corps, for this is exactly what it did in the late 1940s when it was threatened with extinction, and in different form it is what Marine Corps leaders continue to do today. Military subservience to political control applies to existing policy, not to policy debates. The political process requires the unfettered opinions of military leaders, and military leaders who lack the courage to offer such opinions are in my view just as accountable to their people as the politicians who have secured their silence. The silence of the admirals as the fleet shrinks and their sailors continue to do more with less has not gone unnoticed. A recent Naval Institute Proceedings article pointing out that only one in ten navy junior officers in a recent study aspires to command -- and that number not even addressing the issue of quality -- is an ominous warning. A lot of reasons were given, but two messages came through loud and clear. The first was that money alone won't solve the problem. Americans have never been mercenaries, and although it is the duty of their leaders to provide for their well-being, they can't simply be bought. The second was an overwhelming disenchantment with the Navy's senior leaders. I recently heard these same two messages again and again during a discussion with junior aviators in Japan.

This evident breakdown in the junior officer corps is deeply troubling, for it hints of a fundamental change in the navy's culture, probably fueled in equal parts by the Goldwater-Nichols legislation and the effect of the Tailhook scandal on Navy leadership. Command is tough, risky, lonely, the most challenging job an officer can have. But it is also the very emblem of traditional military service. It is what dedicated officers have always lived for and aspired to. The greatest experience of my professional life has been the privilege of commanding marines at the platoon and company level. And what is a military service whose leaders do not aspire to command? It becomes a gutless bureaucracy, pushing papers and taking a paycheck. These young officers did not come into the navy with this attitude. The circumstances of their careers have inflicted it upon them.

In 1979 you famously wrote a piece questioning the Army's embrace of females in combat situations. Later you criticized what you saw as hysteria in the aftermath of the Navy's Tailhook scandal. Do you have any second thoughts on those issues?

My view then, and the decibel level was loud on all sides back in 1979 with the Carter administration. The Carter administration had just ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support a political policy that did not exist. They had ordered them to support removing the ban on women in combat. That's when I wrote that piece. And the commandant of the Marine Corps at that time, Robert Barrow, who is one of my all-time Marine heroes, stood up to them. He called me after he had done it. He basically said that the deputy secretary of defense had given them that order and they had all smartly saluted except for Barrow. He said I do not believe that is a legal order, I'm going to have my counsel check on it. If it is a legal order, I'm going to explain to the Congress the circumstances under which I'm obeying it. And they backed off. But that's how high the decibel level was and how much the political intrusion in the military was going on at the time.

// posted by Alice @ 12/21/2005 08:00:00 AM