Women Serving on Submarines Is Right, Says Navy Secretary

Assigning women to serve aboard submarines “is absolutely the right thing to do -- and it's going to make us a better Navy,” said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus in a Luncheon speech April 30.

The former Mississippi governor and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, soon to observe his one-year anniversary in the Navy's top civilian post, made the remark on the day the service began selecting the first group of women to perform submarine duty. Although the Navy announced its intention to lift the ban on females in submarines in February, Congress had until April 30 to intervene.

Noting that the Navy has “an impressive group of young women” to choose from, Mabus said that the initial group will be selected from the Naval Academy, Navy ROTC and Officer Candidate School candidates, as well as lateral transfers from other vessels. They will be deployed to ballistic-missile and guided-missile submarines.

The Navy has 20 years of experience with women serving aboard surface ships, Mabus said. “Frankly,” he added, “we could not run the Navy without women.”

In another current issue affecting the Navy, however, Mabus deferred comment on the service’s role in cleaning up the giant oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. Although it is providing more than 1,000 personnel and scores of ships and aircraft to the effort, Mabus said only that the Navy is “only one piece” of the overall effort, which is led by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Whatever Homeland Security requests, we are furnishing,” Mabus said.

In prepared remarks, Mabus spoke of his signature initiative: weaning the Navy off its consumption of fossil fuels. Because the Navy uses one-third of the Defense Department’s fuel usage, which in turn accounts for 90% of the government’s consumption, he called greater fuel efficiency a “strategic imperative.”

The Navy’s first goal, he said, is to “within 10 years, have all energy usage – both ashore and afloat – come from non-fossil fuel sources.”

Mabus pointed out that in its history of energy usage, the Navy changed from sail to coal in the 1890s, from coal to oil in the early 20th century, and then partly to nuclear in the 1950s. Although in each case critics objected to abandoning proved technologies, “every time they were wrong,” he said.

Among his answers to questions, Mabus -- a Naval officer in the early 1970s – said:

• The Navy’s 30-year plan for shipbuilding, which calls for 320 ships by 2020, will emphasize “stable design” to limit cost overruns and price increases.


• The price of oil needs to be $150 a barrel to warrant conversion to a nuclear-powered fleet, but the Navy “is not ruling out any type of propulsion” for future ships “except to move away from fossil fuel.”


• Despite multiple deployments, Navy and Marine personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan “are the most skilled and resilient people I’ve ever seen...The morale, level of recruitment and retention that's going on in the Navy and Marine Corps is simply astounding.”