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CNO: Future Navy needs more minority admirals

The Navy’s top admiral has set “benchmarks” for the percentage of nonwhite admirals he’d like to see in the service within 30 years, according to a set of internal Navy messages that appeared Thursday on the Internet. The messages direct subordinates to use the guidelines in considering which officers to recommend for promotion.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead has set goals for an admiralty in 2037 that is 36 percent nonwhite — specifically, 10 percent black, 13 percent Asian or Pacific Islander and 13 percent Hispanic, according to an e-mail to admirals dated Feb. 27. The message was signed by Vice Adm. John Harvey, who was then chief of naval personnel. Harvey has since become director of the Navy Staff.

Capt. Jack Hanzlik, spokesman for Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Mark Ferguson, said the benchmarks were unofficial and emphasized they are not quotas. They reflect projected trends for those groups in the U.S. population, Hanzlik said, with the idea that the makeup of the Navy’s officer corps should mirror American society.

Commanders should keep those percentages in mind as their nonwhite subordinates make career decisions, Harvey wrote, in keeping with the Navy’s larger goals of increasing diversity in the mostly white officer corps. The message tells admirals that they should know their nonwhite commanders and captains by name; asks what the recipients are doing to help the nonwhite O-5s and O-6s get promoted; and what their commands are doing overall to help promote the nonwhite officers.

A conservative Navy blogger, who posts under the name “cdr salamander,” obtained Harvey’s e-mail and posted it Thursday. Also posted was an e-mail from the office of Navy Installations Command, directing captains to pass up the names of O-5s and O-6s in a “must promote” or “early promote” status and note which ones were “diverse.”

Navy sources confirmed the messages were authentic. A spokesman for the National Naval Officers Association, the largest U.S. group of minority Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard officers, did not respond to a request for comment by Friday afternoon. Spokeswomen for Roughead did not respond to requests for comment.

According to information from the Defense Manpower Data Center, provided for a Sept. 9 congressional hearing into Coast Guard diversity, about 13.9 percent of the Navy’s officers, or 7,137 of 42,343 officers, identified themselves as belonging to minority groups.

In the third quarter of this fiscal year, manpower officials report 8.19 percent of officers are black, 5.73 percent are Hispanic and 3.98 percent are Asian-Pacific Islander. In the admiralty, that drops to 6.5, 1.2 and 0.4 percent, respectively.

Roughead has been outspoken in recent weeks on the issue of diversity. In a list of preapproved quotations sent to Navy public affairs officers earlier this month, Roughead endorses a variety of approaches for attracting more nonwhite officers:

“I believe the policies that we have in place have to attract and be consistent with the type of force we have, but they also need to take into account what motivates young people and what causes them to want to serve and then continue to serve.”

Harvey’s message cites Roughead’s “benchmarks” as the example commanders should follow in increasing diversity in the Navy officer corps, which Roughead and other top commanders have set as a top priority. To that end, Roughead has conducted “diversity reviews” of each of the Navy’s major commands — including the surface, aviation and submarine forces — to get a sense of how well the careers of nonwhite officers are progressing. The Navy has declined to release the results of Roughead’s reviews, or talk generally about diversity in the different warfare commands.

Each Navy division has its own “benchmarks” for officer diversity, Harvey wrote, but at the O-5 and O-6 level, commanders should follow Roughead’s percentages.

“This goal is what you should measure your officer corps against. There is no need to create a new benchmark; certainly the benchmark itself should be a discussion topic, but no need to create a new goal that differs from CNO’s stated targets.”

Roughead first spoke publicly about the diversity reviews in a July appearance before the NNOA in which he charged white commanders with mentoring their subordinates to point them in the right direction. In particular, too few black lieutenant commanders were staying in the Navy and going on to become senior officers, Roughead said, so their commanders should counsel them about what jobs are likeliest to get them promoted.

But Roughead told Navy Times after that speech that the diversity reviews were “quasi-formal,” without the involvement of Navy Personnel Command or statistical breakdowns about numbers and names of officers.

Roughead told Navy Times he was “loath” for his diversity reviews “to turn into some kind of bureaucratic process.”

DISCUSS: Diversity in the ranks