THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 31, 1996 TAG: 9607310410
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 95 lines
Almost two months after President Clinton nominated him to become chief of naval operations, Jay L. Johnson gets his first chance today to share his vision for the troubled service with Congress, the fleet and the American public.
Johnson, 50, will face questioning beginning at 1:30 this afternoon by the Senate Armed Services Committee, a panel generally supportive of the Navy. A floor vote to confirm him as successor to Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda could come before Congress breaks Friday for its August recess.
There is no outward sign of controversy about the nomination. But Johnson may be questioned closely about his attendance at meetings of the Tailhook Association, the naval aviators' group whose 1991 convention was marked by sexual assaults on dozens of Navy and civilian women.
Johnson was not implicated in any wrongdoing at that year's gathering - he reportedly attended on orders - but the secretary of the Navy placed in his permanent record a letter of caution criticizing his failure to do more to stop the mayhem.
Johnson also may be questioned about his former status as a paid director of United Services Automobile Association, an insurance firm that caters to the military. Within hours of Johnson's June nomination, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond questioned the admiral's directorship; Johnson appears to have defused the issue by quitting the board.
Early this year, Johnson was Boorda's choice to be vice chief of the Navy. Since his patron's May 16 suicide, he has been acting CNO, managing the Navy from a Pentagon office down the hall from Boorda's while keeping a low public profile.
That will change with today's hearing, as Johnson is called on to discuss everything from the affordability of a new generation of attack jets, to the quality of housing at Navy bases and the future designs of aircraft carriers and missile-laden ``arsenal ships.''
``It's a critical time in that there needs to be a reaffirmation from the leadership (that sailors) haven't been missing a beat out there,'' said retired Adm. Stanley Arthur, another former vice chief under Boorda. ``Maybe things haven't been happening quite as well in Washington as they should have, but we're continuing to build a very strong Navy.''
Virginia Sen. Charles S. Robb, an ex-Marine who also will be among Johnson's questioners today, said the admiral ``clearly has a challenge in terms of restoring full public confidence in the Navy.''
Robb said his biggest concern is whether Boorda's death and a string of scandals that preceded it are pushing valuable sailors and airmen out of the service.
Particularly in the case of aviators, ``we spend enormous sums of money in training these people,'' Robb said. ``You just don't replace assets like that easily, quickly or unexpectedly.''
Johnson won his fourth star earlier this year after a similar hearing, so he and the committee members should know one another well. Even so, the senators submitted more than 200 written questions on personal and policy matters to Johnson in advance; he insisted on drafting his own responses rather than relying on staffers to prepare answers for his review.
Beginning with the Tailhook scandal and continuing through a rash of crashes early this year, many of the Navy's most-publicized troubles have involved aviation. Though a recent survey cited encouraging progress in its handling of sexual harassment cases, the service remains deeply divided over those issues and the assignment of women to fly its combat jets.
Elaine Donnelly, a conservative activist whose ``Center for Military Readiness'' has accused the post-Tailhook Navy of putting women in jobs they can't handle, said Johnson should tell senators he will end ``the political correctness that seems to permeate the cancer of information in the Navy.''
But several recently retired Navy leaders suggested in interviews that tensions over the role of women and sexual harassment are on the decline.
Boorda, who said in the weeks before his suicide that he was disappointed by his inability to get the Navy beyond Tailhook, actually ``was making great progress,'' asserted retired Vice Adm. Tony Less, a former commander of the Navy's Atlantic Air Forces.
Less suggested that Johnson underscore the Navy's determination to punish harassment while stressing that the incidents that have soiled its reputation ``are the result of the actions of a very few.''
Assuming he's confirmed, Johnson will be the first aviator to serve as chief of naval operations since 1982, but the seventh to get the job since the end of World War II, said historian and author Norman Polmar of Alexandria. The surface warfare and submarine communities each has advanced five admirals to the Navy's top job during that span.
A major challenge for Johnson, Polmar suggested, may be in maintaining or enlarging the Navy's share of increasingly scarce defense dollars. Until his appointment as vice chief, Johnson had not held a major job in the Navy bureaucracy; he remains relatively inexperienced in the ways of Washington.
``It's a major problem,'' Polmar said, both because of continued infighting in the Navy and competition for dollars among the services.
To afford just the new planes they want, at least one Pentagon study suggests, the Navy and Air Force will need larger acquisitions budgets in the years after 2002 than they had during the peak years of the Cold War.
``The hard part,'' Less said, ``is how to fit modernization budgets and operations budgets and worldwide demands for naval forces - 20 pounds of forces . . . into a 10-pound bag.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Adm. Johnson by CNB