Female mids eager for submarine duty

As top U.S. Navy officials deliberate on a policy change that would allow women to serve on submarines, Naval Academy officials said they've been advised to canvass female students for the possible historic opportunity.

Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a spokesman for the academy, said about "two dozen" senior first-class midshipmen have expressed interest for consideration in these positions.

But if the Navy's decision is to lift that ban for women to serve shoulder-to-shoulder with men on subs, the academy's prospective list likely will be winnowed down to less than a third.

"At this point in time, we anticipate that seven women might get the opportunity," Carpenter said. "If the Navy is to change this policy, we've been told to contribute up to seven."

Submarine duty is perhaps the last bastion of combat arms that precludes women. Regarding Navy gender barriers, the glass ceiling seems more of a glass floor, with sea-level as the threshold. Though the military has recruited women in jobs aboard combat ships for about 16 years, when it comes to submarines - the underwater nuclear-powered attack vessels - women today are still denied duty.

Lt. Cmdr. John Daniels, a U.S. Department of the Navy spokesman, said he could not provide a timeline for a decision on the policy.

"The Department of Defense has to make notification to Congress for there to be a policy change, and so far, notification has not been made yet," he said.

But the academy wasn't the only military commissioning source to receive the request for candidates, Carpenter said. Others, such as the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, also will supply female candidates to join the ranks of the deep, he said.

Academy officials declined to grant interviews with any of the interested women about the issue - they'd rather wait for an official decision to come down from the Pentagon, they said.

"When the Navy selects those midshipmen, they will be the young ladies you'll be able to put a name and a face to as the first to serve in that exciting, new opportunity," Carpenter said.

Retrofitting subs

Early talks of the proposal have suggested that female submarine officers would work in the Ohio-class submarines, which carry up to 24 ballistic missiles with several independently targeted warheads.

"They are the largest class of submarines with berthing configurations that really lend themselves to make this accommodation much easier at this point," Carpenter said. "Everything that I've heard is that it's the Ohio class."

The Ohio submarines have three large logistics hatches that can easily handle the transfers of supplies on pallets, equipment replacements and other machinery.

According to Navy files, the submarines spend 77 days at sea, followed by 35 days at port for maintenance and restocking.

Female accommodations seem to be central to the discourse. Though hardly an individual has raised any scrutiny of a woman's abilities for submarine duty, opponents have expressed concern about the amount of money it potentially would cost to retrofit old submarine designs to keep men and women's quarters separate. Submarines are compact vessels with narrow halls, bunks stacked sometimes four beds deep, and tiny lavatories.

Active Department of Defense consultant William J. Andahazy, a Grasonville resident who used to be on the House Armed Services Committee more than a decade ago and involved in propulsion designs for ships and submarines, is one of many who has voiced his opposition to the policy change for financial reasons. Andahazy said the cost to make alterations to existing vessels could range in the high millions.

"I'm only concerned about the value added to accommodate a handful of women," he said. "Why now when the budget is so challenged? I'm objecting to laying that on the taxpayer right now."

Utilizing women

But to others, the policy change is way overdue. Annapolis resident Sharon Hanley Disher - who graduated from the Naval Academy in the Class of 1980, the first class of women to graduate from the institution - wrote a book titled "First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy," published in 1998.

"It's been a long time coming," Disher said. "Finally - it's very gratifying for me to see the challenges we faced and the attitudes changing."

As one of 81 female plebes at the academy, Disher said she and her cohorts often encountered resistance. At the time, women still were not allowed to participate in combat duties, and for that reason on its own many of their male counterparts at the school, as well as the public, resented them. Though some of the men on campus befriended the female mids, others were "very mean-spirited."

"We were at an academy school to train as combat leaders, when we were, in fact, not going to be able to serve in any kind of combat," she said. "It was like they would say, 'Why are you here? You're taking the place of some guy who could actually be protecting and serving the country.' "

For Disher, the issue is even closer to home than her empathy for other female mids confronted with a glass ceiling. Her husband is a submariner, and he, too, supports sharing duties with co-ed counterparts, she said.

Short on recruits

While some opponents are touting the drawbacks to opening submarine jobs to women, there may be another benefit for the Department of Defense.

In September, too few qualified seniors at the academy requested submarines as their first choice. Though the Pentagon requested 125 officers for the nuclear training program, the Naval Reactors program - which is one of the three schools a submarine sailor must complete - only accepted 92 mids.

Because of this, the academy would come up 33 candidates short. To address this concern last month, Capt. Stephen Evans, the academy's director of professional development, wrote to seniors, preparing them that some would not receive their first-choice career assignments to compensate for the submarine program's lack of recruits.

Disher believes that lifting the ban on female submarine sailors would greatly increase the talent pool from which the Navy can choose its crews for the program.

"Fifty percent of the population is women, and they should pick from the best and brightest people who really have a desire to serve," she said.