Carrier (1999) (13 page)

 

Tom Clancy:
You’ve been saying all along that you’re going to be trying to man your new generation of ships with fewer sailors doing more jobs than on older vessels. This means that you’re probably going to have to raise the crossbar when it comes to getting new sailors trained. Chuck Krulak has much the same plans for his Marines, and has instituted the
Crucible
program to help form and toughen his recruits. Are you going to do something similar for Navy recruits?

 

Admiral Johnson:
It’s a work in progress. We have upped our own crossbar. Let me give you a couple of quick examples. I talked earlier about the young men and women who come into the Navy from the upper parts of the demographic profile. These are really smart, well-schooled young folks. What we do with them then is send them into a recruit training experience that is a very different, very positive, and very challenging experience.

 

Tom Clancy:
Obviously, the Navy has had a rough and rocky time integrating women into the force. Yet, one gets the feeling that the Navy is farther through the process than perhaps the other services and that you’ve paid a high price to reach that goal. Is it your opinion that the first-stage initiatives for fully integrating women into the combat force have been successfully completed?

 

Admiral Johnson:
Absolutely. We’re through that. As a good example, the CVWs and carriers are already fully integrated. CVW-11 just came back off deployment on the
Kitty Hawk
[CV-63] fully integrated, and it was a marvelous deployment for them. Our surface combatant integration program is going well, though the pacing item is that we want the ships to be properly built or modified so that the habitability standards we have established for the Women at Sea Program are followed. In addition, the crew must be shaped the right way, so that the proper critical mass and makeup of female personnel is maintained. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do that, and we’ve learned how to do that. We’re a little over halfway through that initiative right now, and it’s going well.

 

Tom Clancy:
As you go out into the fleet today, are the sailors having fun doing their jobs?

 

Admiral Johnson:
I think that, overall, the forward-deployed forces are having fun. They’re working hard, making a contribution; they’re at the tip of the spear executing their missions, and they’re doing the things that they came into the Navy to do. On the non-deployed side, we’re doing pretty well, but we’ve got some work to do, some taking care of business. We owe those personnel a reasonable pace when they’re not deployed and we owe them ships and airplanes that are properly maintained. Those are the challenges that I’m working on right now. The “tip of the spear” is doing great. The non-deployed part of the force is doing well too, but I think that I owe them a bit more than they’re getting right now.

 

Tom Clancy:
Obviously, the last ten years have been a roller-coaster ride for senior leaders in the services. Could you look into your crystal ball, and tell us what new roles and missions that you see the Navy taking on as it moves into the 21st century?

 

Admiral Johnson:
Well, to start with, I don’t want to lose any of the core skills that we have right now. I think that we would be very shortsighted to lose any of those capabilities. ASW is a classic example. A lot of people think that you can “take your pack off” now and not worry about it.
I do not concur!
We’re putting great focus and effort into undersea warfare and specifically ASW. We’re the only ones in the world who can do that. That’s Navy stuff! That gets back to my operational primacy guidestar: “We can never take our eyes off of that ball.” The truth of it is, those core combat skills are things that we need to maintain. You’ve asked what is new. I give you one word: TBMD. That’s something fundamentally new and different from what we are doing now. It’s a brand-new capability that will reside in our fleet.

 

Tom Clancy:
To wrap things up, I’d like to give you the opportunity to speak your mind about your vision for the Navy. What would you like to say to the readers, sir?

 

Admiral Johnson:
I think that we’ve touched on the big things already in this interview. One point that I would hope to make is that the capability that CVBGs and the Navy in general give to the country and the world is vital. We’ve talked a lot about the equipment, and that is vital. But I think more than anything, we’ve got to really represent all the people in the Navy. That’s the story. When you go out and “tie on” with one of those groups, you’ll see that people are the magic that makes it all happen.

 

For the first time in almost a decade, the Navy seems to be on a steady course, with a plan, and with stable leadership to guide it through the uncertain waters between the 20th and 21st centuries. Like the early mariners who navigated from star to star, Admiral Johnson has found a constellation for the Navy to follow to the future. Along the way, he has proven himself a quiet but effective warrior. In a time when the Navy needed a champion and hero for the wars on the banks of the Potomac River, they seem to have found a winner—a steady hand on the helm, to guide the Navy into a new millennium.

Wings of Gold : A Naval Aviator’s Life

The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(James A. Michener, 1953)

 

 

 

W
hen James A. Michener wrote these words almost forty-five years ago, carrier decks were straight and made of wood, and the first generation of jet naval aviators were still learning to fly off them. Carriers, jets, and piloting have changed greatly since then, yet the words ring as true today as they did then.

Naval aviators are a national treasure. They are, first of all, America’s front-line combat aviators. Much like their Marine Corps brethren, when there is trouble out there, they expect to be the first called. Though this is an attractive challenge for some people, there is more to the naval aviation profession than just being first in line to be shot at. Flying for the sea services requires unique dedication and skills (such as exceptional eyesight and hand-eye coordination under stress), and demands sacrifices that other military pilots don’t even have to imagine—all of which has endowed naval aviation with a (mostly) well-justified mystique.

Flying on and off aircraft carriers is a big part of that mystique. There is an old saying among pilots that flying is not inherently dangerous, just very unforgiving. Though there are no truer words, there are also notable exceptions—“trapping” aboard a rolling and pitching aircraft carrier deck on a stormy night, for instance. It is this skill—landing aboard a moving flight deck in all sorts of conditions—that most clearly differentiates naval aviators from all other pilots. There is simply no way to compare flying from a runway on a land base with the stress and responsibility that sea service pilots have to contend with every time they launch. Every time you take off from a carrier, you leave knowing that you might not find your way back onto the “boat” and will have to eject into a hostile ocean. Clearly, there is more at stake than just a $50 million airplane (and a career). Mastering the stress and responsibility of such flying requires a special kind of flier.

Fortunately for Navy fliers, achieving that mastery is not laid solely on their shoulders. They don’t have to do it alone. Since naval aviation is only a fraction of the size of the U.S. Air Force, everyone knows everyone else—and pays attention to everyone else. It’s a lot like being part of a college fraternity (for good and for bad). Or—to put it more precisely—U.S. Naval aviation is a collection of small communities (F-14, F/A-18, EA-6B, etc.) in which an aviator spends his or her life for upwards of two decades. The good news here is that there’s lots of support. The bad news is that aviators are hugely competitive. Your peers are always keeping score.

Such a world creates larger-than-life personalities—powerfully evolved human beings at the top of the food chain. To succeed you need a cast-iron ego, a lightning intellect, an excess of ambition, and fluent social skills. And the most successful have the ability to spread all this to others in their profession.