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Female sailors could join sub crews by 2011

A handful of female seniors at the Naval Academy or in the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps could very well be the first women to be assigned to a U.S. submarine.

And if initial plans fall into place, those women — joined by some seasoned supply and surface nuke lieutenants already in the fleet — will be included in four crews assigned to two Ohio-class submarines by late 2011.

In exclusive interviews with Navy Times, the heads of Fleet Forces Command and the Submarine Force laid out near-term plans for integrating women into the undersea fleet. The plans, which must be approved by senior Navy and Pentagon leadership, underscore how quickly the service is pushing the initiative.

The interviews also produced a surprising amount of detail, since the statements came less than one week after the chief of naval operations and Navy secretary told Navy Times that they wanted to end the ban on assigning women to submarines. Plans are so far along, admirals said, because they have been working this issue for years.

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• Ohio-class renovation plans

And after leaping one legislative hurdle, the first steps toward integration could happen fast.

The Pentagon must notify Congress of the intent to change policy to allow women on subs, then wait 30 days before moving ahead, and before spending any money. The Navy’s working on that notification right now, said Vice Adm. Jay Donnelly, head of the Submarine Force.

“I would think that would start making its way from the Navy, through the secretary of the Navy and the secretary of defense in the month or so ahead,” he said.

The first women assigned to submarines will be junior officers, said Adm. John Harvey, head of Fleet Forces Command.

“We’ll start with the officers because you can get to it soonest,” Harvey said. “I am very certain that you will start with junior officers that will come in right to the submarine force.”

Both Harvey and Donnelly said bringing female sailors aboard will be more complex due to manning requirements — and more expensive because of berthing modifications. Adding junior female officers to subs will require no money for modifications, they said.

The admirals also said that, in the near term, integration will occur only in the Navy’s Ohio-class submarines, which consist of 14 ballistic-missile subs and four guided-missile subs.

The Navy’s three classes of smaller, fast-attack subs — Los Angeles, Seawolf and Virginia — are another story.

“When you look at the one we’re building now, the Virginia class, that’s what I’d call a mature design,” Harvey said. “Now that we’re in serial production, to go back and undo things to make it viable for females in the crew, that’s a pretty tall order.

“Can it be done? I just don’t know where we are on that and at what cost, etc.,” he said. “But I know we can get at it much more rapidly with the SSGNs and SSBNs, so that’s where the focus will be.”

Choosing the first to go

Donnelly was careful to point out that he was speaking about how the sub force “might” integrate quickly and not how it “will.”

The plan to be submitted to leadership for approval will likely involve integrating four crews at first: the blue and gold crews of a ballistic sub on one coast and the blue and gold crews of a Tomahawk shooter on the other, officials said.

The first group would come from the Class of 2010. Seniors interested in surface and undersea nuclear careers are already undergoing personal interviews with Adm. Kirkland Donald, head of Naval Reactors. Right now, women being interviewed are eligible only for nuclear propulsion billets aboard aircraft carriers. The men are eligible for carriers and subs.

Donnelly said the first female officer cadre would depend on volunteers this school year.

It’s already a healthy pool. In the academy class that graduated last spring, half of the 32 ensigns headed to nuclear propulsion school were women. That bodes well for finding volunteers among this year’s crop of seniors.

“I think it would be possible to go back to that pool [of senior midshipmen] that has been accepted into the nuclear propulsion program with the intent of going into the surface community, to go back and say, ‘Are there any of you that would care to volunteer for submarine duty?’” Donnelly said.

After graduation in May 2010, they would enter the submarine officer pipeline with their male classmates.

“They’d go to six months of nuclear power school in Charleston, S.C., followed by six months of prototype training, followed by three months at the basic submarine officers’ course we teach,” he said. “That’s 15 to 16 months of training before women officers from that class get to their ships. So we’re talking some time in late 2011 at the earliest, or into early 2012.”

Big subs only

The Navy’s three classes of fast-attack subs are tightly packed, making Ohio-class subs roomy by comparison. The modifications to berthing areas to accommodate women on attack boats would be exceedingly expensive and maybe not even possible, according to experts.

On the other hand, aboard the larger Ohios, officer berthing for department heads and below makes integration simple, as it is limited to two staterooms with three bunks and three with two bunks.

The officers would share their existing head, and just use a flippable sign on the door denoting whether women or men are in the head.

“There is no modification,” Donnelly said. “There is no cost.”

As far as crew composition, Donnelly said, the surface fleet’s 16-year experience in gender integration found about 10 percent to 15 percent of officers and enlisted need to be women. The initial female cadres — in this case, as few as two to four officers per crew — need to have one member who is senior in order to mentor the junior.

“I might be able to find some women supply officers who have been to sea in a mixed-gender crew who kind of know the ropes,” he said, “and put them in that initial cadre along with some nuclear-trained ensigns coming out of sub school.”

Female surface warfare officers coming off an initial sea tour and headed into the nuclear pipeline to be nuke-SWOs might be another source of senior cadre.

Officers will be phased in.

“I think it would be probably multiple ships, not the entire force initially; we need to ramp this up. I’d look to do this on BNs and GNs, multiple crews, in both home ports, Kings Bay [Ga.] and Bangor [Wash.].”

The enlisted issue

Bringing in enlisted women is a tougher issue. It’s going to take money, modifications and careful training, both admirals said.

“We’re not going to see a young female sailor swinging her seabag on her shoulder and walking aboard the USS Maryland next month,” Harvey said. “But we will — it will be a couple of years. We have to recruit, bring them in the program.”

Having that lead time, he said, will give manpower planners a chance to move forward “in a thoughtful, very controlled, very deliberate manner.”

Probably the most critical lesson learned in the surface force, Harvey said, is the need to have strong officer and senior enlisted leadership in place before bringing in junior enlisted women.

That’s because incidents of pregnancy and fraternization are less frequent in crews with strong female leaders onboard.

“It can’t be ‘I’m the woman on the submarine’ — that’s just a terrible burden to put on everybody, particularly that young woman,” Harvey said.

He said it will take some time to build a “critical mass” of female leadership needed to seed the integrated crews.

“You’d have to get at least a small cadre of female chiefs or first-class petty officers, and those, of course, would have to come from other parts of the Navy initially,” Donnelly said. “Then they would have to have sufficient time to qualify in submarines in order to have, I think, the credibility as leaders on the ship, and that takes some time.”

Converting into the submarine community at the E-7 or above level would be difficult, according to a retired senior submariner familiar with the Navy’s plans. He asked not to be named because of his continued ties with the Navy.

“Really, to be in the chiefs’ mess on a submarine you already need to be qualified in submarines — if you’re not, you would be a burden more than an asset,” he said.

He said it would make sense to convert experienced petty officers and grow them into submarine chiefs.

But even as they’re building the enlisted leadership picture, officials also must work on the other piece — recruiting junior female submariners from the street.

For many of the nontechnical ratings such as yeoman and culinary specialist, that could be fairly easy and quick, as it would require only about six months at “A” school and the six-week submarine school in Groton, Conn., as happens today with male sailors.

Donnelly said it was too early to say which ratings will be open to women. But over time, all submarine ratings could be open, the retired sub source said.

But to truly build a proper representation of women in the submarine force, the source said, women must be recruited and trained in technical ratings, too.

Training female sailors in highly technical ratings has been a challenge on the surface side. Of the 12,845 nuclear-power-qualified sailors, just 752 are women and 241 of those are in training. Only 22 are chiefs, and two are senior chiefs; there are no female master chief nukes.

Growing female enlisted nukes will take time. It takes about 18 months once a sailor reports to nuclear power school in Charleston for that person to join a sub crew.

Enlisted modifications

The other issue, besides personnel, will be to modify enlisted berthing on the Ohios. Donnelly said the volume of that hull allows for relatively uncomplicated modifications. But fairness is key to any change.

“I would not entertain a solution that forced the men to hot-bunk on one of those ships. So we’ll do this right, and the right answer is give the women their own head,” he said, “and make sure the men aren’t inconvenienced or treated unfairly in any way.”

As they exist now, the modification plans are little more than drawings, as money can’t be committed prior to congressional notification.

“We haven’t actually gone to the ship design engineers,” Donnelly said.

The timeline is somewhat flexible for enlisted berthing modifications, which could be completed on the boomers during their refueling overhauls. The four SSGNs already completed their midlife overhaul and conversion. There are also shorter yard periods when the work might be done, depending on the complexity.

Donnelly estimates the cost of those modifications at $8 million to $10 million. But he offered a warning.

“Those prices never go down,” he said. “They always go up.”

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