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CNO: Mentoring key to officer diversity

PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The Navy needs to do more to increase its diversity in the officer corps, from ensign to admiral, the service’s top admiral told a group of minority officers here July 24.

“The time for talk is over,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told attendees at the National Naval Officers Association convention. “The only thing that matters now is action.”

Although Roughead said he thinks the Navy’s enlisted corps is reflective of America’s racial breakdown, he said that only about 8 percent of the service’s officers come from a minority background. There also are too few flag officers and senior enlisted leaders, he said. Roughead called on today’s leadership to help with mentoring up-and-comers, which he said would make them likelier to stay in the Navy and move up into the least diverse parts of the service.

Roughead said he has been conducting “diversity reviews” of the Navy’s officer communities, which include talks with the admirals in charge of different areas of the service to examine their levels of diversity. The reviews are quasi-formal, Roughead said, and don’t involve personnel officials or formal documentation showing diversity breakdowns.

In a brief interview with Navy Times after his remarks to the conference, Roughead added that he was “loath to turn it into some kind of bureaucratic process.”

Diversity is relatively healthy among officers until they reach lieutenant commander, said Capt. Myles Esmele, an NNOA attendee who manages a personnel system for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. After O-4, retention for minority officers drops precipitously, he said, demonstrating the need for senior officials to guide their younger officers into jobs that most likely will yield promotions.

“I’m a case in point,” Roughead told Navy Times, although he added, “obviously, I’m not diverse.”

When he was a lieutenant commander, Roughead remembered, a mentor steered him toward the career track that eventually got him into fast-track commands that set him up to become a flag officer.

He told attendees about several Navy initiatives to get its message to black students in middle and high schools. Big Navy and Naval Sea Systems Command are both in talks with historically black colleges to set up new NROTC scholarships, Roughead said, and officials also want to create Junior NROTC “prep schools” to give underprivileged students extra instruction in math and science.

He also gave examples of missed opportunities for the Navy. A group of inner-city students in Gary, Ind., Roughead said, design and build their own submarine every year as a class project, which includes lessons on navigation, sonar and diving. Although the project is called “NavOps Deep Submergence,” Roughead said, until officials discovered it recently, it had no connection to the Navy.

“How can this be?” he asked.