
DATE: Wednesday, October 8, 1997            TAG: 9710070307

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A17  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: SPECIAL REPORT: THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NAVY SAILOR 

SERIES: FUTURE OF THE FLEET 

SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  362 lines

THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NAVY SAILOR

First, there's the man/dog theory:

``The ship of the future will be crewed by one man and a dog. And the dog is supposed to bite the man if he tries to touch any of the equipment.''

Then, there's the man/machine theory:

``As machines get smarter, ships' crews will have to be smarter, too.''

Brett Frakes is definitely a man/dog man. At 5 years old, this son of a son of a sailor man comes to first grade at Shelton Park Elementary School with a stuffed dog that has been cuddled by four generations of the Frakes family.

The Navy, likewise, embraces generations of sailors. But how it will embrace smarter ships and higher-tech weapons along with sailors is a subject of debate.

Will tomorrow's sailor have to be smarter than his ship? Will he need a college degree? Or just a can opener for the dog food?

Will she be older than today's teen-age recruits? Will a smaller, more selective Navy squeeze out minorities and young adults from single-parent families?

How the Navy answers those questions may help chart its course for decades to come. Its answers may determine how well the sea service keeps pace with fast-moving changes in the technology it uses, the mission for which it prepares, the world it patrols.

Because Hampton Roads, already the Navy's biggest port with 122,714 sailors, promises to strengthen its status as the fleet's hometown, those answers also will decide whom our future neighbors will be.

In 2010, Brett Frakes will be prime recruiting age. With his military upbringing, chances are great that Frakes is a sailor of the future. He got a red star and a check mark on his early first-grade papers - good grades. And he already has his dog.

"The forces will have fewer, better-educated people, more of whom make the Service their profession, with much more `machine power' at their disposal and more responsibility in the use of that power.'' - prediction of the National Research Council

Two schools of thought wage a cerebral war over the sailor of 2010. One school is firm in its opinion that sailors will increasingly be recruited from college campuses or in mid-career from civilian jobs.

The other holds that ships, not sailors, will get smarter - and that all the sailors will have to do is plug and unplug the software. And feed the dog.

Rear Adm. John B. Foley III, assistant director of the Navy's Bureau of Personnel, is firmly in the smarter-sailor school.

Foley expects the typical recruit of the new century to have the equivalent of an associate's degree, or at least some college credit. Only about 1 percent of Navy recuits have community college experience now.

And the recruit will continue his or her education, Foley notes, pointing to his own experience. When he skippered his last ship, the cruiser Monterey, he said, 26 crewman had more education - master's and post-master's degrees - than he had.

Foley doesn't buy the dog-dumb theory because, he said, maintaining even a high-tech piece of equipment requires people skilled enough to unplug the broken piece and plug in the new one. ``That sounds simplistic,'' he said, ``but the diagnostics that take place within the equipment have to be understood by the young guy or young woman who does the unplugging and the re-plugging.''

The Navy is on the front edge of a sea change, he said, moving from an enlisted force that was largely single, in for only a few years, less-educated and less-trained, to a force of married sailors, many with children, who make the military a career with their higher education and training.

That creates more stability and dependability in the ranks, Foley said. The older, smarter sailors have a tendency ``not to break things.''

The problem: it costs more to train and pay them - basic pay in 1996 was $875 a month for a new recruit, vs. as much as $1,536 a month for an E-7 with less than two years of experience at his job. But all in all, Foley said, the Navy is happy with the trade-off.

He's backed up by Donald J. Cymrot of the Center for Naval Analyses, who worked on a National Research Council report titled, ``Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000-2035,'' and who believes that ships' complements will be smarter.

Those crews have been shrinking for years in response to better technology, he said, and as they have gotten smaller, their training and sophistication have increased.

A co-author on the human resources portion of the report, Cymrot also believes that future recruits will come from community colleges instead of straight out of high school.

On the other side of the debate are those who believe that tomorrow's recruits will be very much like today's, most of whom have never attended college, a declining few of whom have a General Educational Development certificate instead of a high school diploma.

The Navy simply can't afford to operate without a goodly number of low-tech workers, the dog-dumb theorists say. Dr. David Segal, military sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, is happy to run with this pack.

``The assumption has been that the higher-tech you get, the higher mental aptitude you need for your personnel. I'm not convinced that that's true,'' Segal said.

``The Navy, in particular, has historically had a tremendous need for a large, unskilled labor force: swabbing decks, chipping paint. If you start recruiting sailors with college degrees, and tell them they're going to spend a lot of time chipping paint and repainting, you're going to have some significant retention problems.

``Not everybody in the service has to be a rocket scientist, even if they have a lot of rockets.''

"The 1997 sailor of today is better-equipped and smarter than anything we've seen in the past. We have to ensure that we keep those guys, absolutely.'' - Rear Adm. Stephen H. Baker, commander, Operational Test and Evaluation Force

Today's Navy is looking for more and more young recruits interested in nuclear engineering and advanced computers.

``With the Navy's cutbacks, we're looking for very high-quality people now,'' said Petty Officer 1st Class David L. Wallace, head of the Norfolk Recruiting Station. ``The qualifications this year are a lot higher than last. We're looking for more people to go into advanced electronics, advanced computers, nuclear power.

``In the future,'' he predicted, ``everybody's going to that high-tech stuff.''

In September, Wallace took a step toward completing his goal by signing up Marlin Belber, a senior at Maury High School. When Belber completes the school year - and his chemistry, engineering and trigonometry classes - he'll enter the Navy to pursue his interest in nuclear engineering.

Belber can accumulate money for college while he's a sailor - one of the big incentives for scholars to join the Navy - and he can get some hands-on experience on warships or submarines. With college degrees becoming ever more common, sending a bright high school student straight into the Navy after graduation is not such a bad career move, some say.

Keeping them then becomes the concern. The Navy loses part of its investment in educating and training these sailors if they leave the service early in their careers for civilian high-tech jobs.

Rear Adm. Stephen H. Baker believes that the chance to work with rapidly advancing technology fosters retention. Cmdr. Gerard Roncolato, commanding officer of the destroyer The Sullivans, takes the opposite view.

``We are attracting sailors and officers to be warriors, and we're not teaching them as such. They're disenchanted because what they are is administrators,'' Roncolato said at a Naval Institute symposium last month in Virginia Beach.

What everyone can agree on is that fewer sailors will be needed after the turn of the century. The Navy in 1996 had 411,850 active-duty personnel, 354,109 of them enlisted. It plans to cut 11,000 uniformed positions in 1998 and another 6,000 in 1999. Adm. Jay L. Johnson, chief of naval operations, has suggested that more reductions can be expected in subsequent years.

But not too many. Capt. Scott Slocum, deputy director for the recruiting command in Washington, said that with ships being designed for smaller crews, it would make sense for the Navy to get smaller.

``But there's another whole other set of players here. And that's the Congress that's said, `Thou shalt not go below 395,' - 395,000 people in the Navy,'' Slocum said. ``One reason we're recruiting so hard right now is to comply with the law.''

The Navy relies heavily on tuition money as a recruiting incentive. Beginning in 1999, the Department of Defense will raise tuition assistance from $2,500 to $3,500 per year for undergraduate programs. Cost of living is not the only reason for the change: In some parts of the country, unemployment is so low that even fast-food chains are offering scholarship programs to recruit workers.

There's a limit, however. ``We don't want to have a whole bunch of Ph.D.'s out there,'' Foley said. ``We can't afford it.''

As the Navy moves toward recruiting only the best and the brightest, the pool of potential candidates is proportionately smaller, said Lee Hunt, former director of the Naval Studies Board, an arm of the National Research Council.

``Fortunately,'' Hunt said, ``there don't have to be that many.''

"We've got to start figuring out how we employ them in a way that is much closer to the limits of their ability than we had when we were taking smart kids out of high school and having them chip paint and swab decks and do security patrols continuously for a three-year stint.'' - Rear Adm. Dan Murphy, director of surface warfare plans and policy

At Shelton Park Elementary School in Virginia Beach, 77 percent of the students come from military families, many of them with enlisted parents. It is reasonable to assume that many of this year's first-graders here also will wear Navy blue in 13 years or so.

``Tell me some words that start with the letter `N','' teacher Kathleen Gallaer told her class one September morning. She repeated what her students called out: No. Nicholas. Not. Naughty. Nothing. Nest.

And then: Nautical.

``Oh, yeah,'' Gallaer said. ``That's a good one.''

As these children grow up, the standards for acceptance into the Navy likely will be getting tougher. The recruiting standards their fathers or mothers met a few years ago are already obsolete. With a smaller force now, the service can afford to be more selective.

No longer can judges order ``jail or sail'' for young delinquents. The Navy won't take them.

``We only want those who are truly volunteers,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Lindsey Lester-Brutscher, director of the Recruiting Command's policy division. ``We will not enlist anyone where it is a condition of the court (to) enlist in the armed forces.''

The policy of accepting youngsters who would otherwise go to jail ended some years ago, she said.

Recruiters have a thick guidebook on criminal offenses, and they look up each would-be salt's transgressions to see whether his crime is acceptable or reason to show him the door.

``We prefer to have people who don't get in trouble at all with the police,'' said Cmdr. Thomas L. Sparks, commanding officer of Navy's Richmond Recruiting District.

``But I'm a realistic person. We recognize that drugs, marijuana in particular, is out there in the schools and young people do try that. But if they disclose it and it wasn't anything beyond marijuana, they can still come into the Navy.''

That's a big switch from the Vietnam War era, when the draft was in effect and the military relaxed standards to get warm bodies into uniform. About 360,000 previously unqualified persons entered the armed services - and the Navy ended up with drug abusers and violent offenders in the fleet.

The advent of the all-volunteer military in 1973 and the recent downsizing of the force has led to higher entrance standards and the ability to pick and choose among sailor wannabes.

The Richmond Recruiting District, which covers 90,000 square miles in several states and includes Hampton Roads, will put 2,000 people into the Navy this year. The 200 recruiters in that district expect to do the same next year. And in the future?

``We'll probably see a small decrease, maybe 10 or 15 percent over the next three or four years,'' Sparks said. ``The Navy is getting smaller. So that will be a direct reflection on recruiting.''

Educational requirements are tougher now than in the past. There are Navy jobs (called ratings) that are off-limits to those with only a GED. On the Navy entrance exam, GED holders must score at least 50. Those with a high school diploma need only score 31.

``We turn away more people than we accept because of academics or police involvement or whatever,'' Wallace said. ``For every 30 people that come in my office, I have to turn away 21.

``The people we're putting in now will be the future Navy. That's why we're putting in smarter people now.''

The recruiting command's Slocumsaid that 95 percent of this year's recruits will be high school graduates and that half of the recruits will score in the top two categories of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (50 or above on a 99-point scale).

``I can't imagine over the next 15 to 20 years that we will have any significant improvement in the kinds of quality we have in the Navy today unless we throw whole scads more money at it . . . and that's not going to happen,'' Slocum said.

Then there are those who believe in smart ships.

Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, a Navy futurist working on the concept of ``network-centric warfare'' - in which computers, weapons and sensors are linked to pool information on the battle area and attack the enemy - believes that training will always be important in the Navy, but will not become any more so after the year 2000.

``If it requires years of training, it's not high technology,'' he said. ``If it requires a mountain of spare parts and to be immediately connected to the repairman, it's not high technology. We want to use the high technology to drive down the training costs.''

The list of critical ratings can change weekly, Sparks said. Right now, the Navy is looking for advanced electronics, cryptography, sonar technicians, ballistic missile technicians, air rescue swimmers and interpreters for Naval intelligence.

``We're looking for people that speak Asian languages,'' Sparks said. ``Korean, Japanese are two of the big ones. Farsi. If you could speak Croatian, the Navy could use you today.''

With the Navy increasingly being used for peacekeeping missions around the world, and with the likelihood that tomorrow's wars will be fought on multiple fronts, it is likely that the need for interpreters, at least, will remain steady.

``You never know where the next hot spot is or, for that matter, where you're going to pull into port,'' Sparks said.

"When I was in Blacksburg, people used to think I was a cop or something. Especially little kids. Because of the (recruiting) badge, you know. They'd come up and say, `Are you a cop?' and I'd say, `No, I'm in the Navy' and they'd say, `What's that?' '' - Petty Officer 1st Class David L. Wallace, head of Norfolk Recruiting Station

Selling the Navy - to the right people - will become more important in coming years. The Navy already does surprisingly well at recruiting from landlocked states. But if civilian jobs continue offering higher pay than military high-tech slots, the hard sell may become just that.

Passed over might be minorities, who in modern times have been on equal footing with whites in the military and whose representation in the ranks has steadily increased in the past decade. White enlisted sailors, who accounted for three out of four enlisted personnel a decade ago, now account for less than two in three.

But although their test scores have been improving in recent years, minorities often have lower test scores and lower school grades than whites, both of which could slow their acceptance into an increasingly selective Navy.

Analysts Hunt and Cymrot agree that in the future minorities might have a harder time entering the Navy, a place that many have relied on for a hand up in the past.

Poorly schooled, disadvantaged young people will find it harder and harder to get into the service, Cymrot said. ``The trick is finding ways to recognize potential, the quality that lets someone in the third quartile on the Navy's intelligence tests perform, by determination and guts, in the second or first.''

Recruits from fatherless households will present a new challenge. In a report done for the the Army 2010 Conference, a researcher at Southwest Texas State University wrote that, due to rising divorce rates and births to unwed mothers, more than half of the recruitment pool of 2010 will spend a substantial part of their first 18 years apart from their fathers.

Fatherless boys are more likely to have lower grades and more disciplinary problems, reported researcher Patricia M. Shields. ``Is the Army drawing disproportionately from the fatherless? Yes,'' she wrote. ``Compared to the civilian group as a whole, Army (recruits) are more likely to have a `disrupted' family background. In 1993, only 72.5 percent of the recruits' mothers were married at the time they joined.''

The number of women in the Navy is projected to grow, although not too fast, Slocum said, because the number of female bunks onboard ships remains limited. Only 14 percent of this year's recruits can be women.

When the Navy tried ``gender-neutral'' recruiting about three years ago, nearly 20 percent of recruits were women. But that created problems with rotations between ship and shore duty, he said.

"In terms of both economics and force effectiveness, it will be important to keep the people in the forces longer.'' - National Research Council

Once these top recruits are safely on board, the Navy of the future must figure out how to keep them.

That may mean revamping the military pay system and improving family services.

Analyst Cymrot suggests that the Navy needs to offer different pay scales for different jobs, regardless of rank or length of service, to improve retention in critical areas.

The overall goal is to increase length of service, to reap more investment from training dollars. Thirty-eight percent of those enlisted leaving the Navy in fiscal 1997 served between one and three years.

``I think essentially we're going to have to go to market value for these guys, which we aren't doing right now,'' said Capt. John Harvey, commanding officer of the cruiser Cape St. George. ``There are other things we offer. But the retirement benefits for the guys coming in now are vastly different from what I look at. I just think you're going to have to get these very good people in and pay them a fair wage package if you're going to have an all-volunteer force in an era of extended peacetime that makes great demands on them individually and as a family.''

Among the coming years' many challenges, then, is foreseeing what skills and traits today's first-graders, like Brett Frakes, will bring to the service.

Foreseeing whether they're smarter. Better educated. Older. Or not. The sailor of the future, whatever form he or she takes, must be planned into the smart ships as carefully as the computer keyboards are placed.

``Gone are the days when major platforms such as ships could be built under the assumption that crew would be found to perform whatever functions were needed,'' the research council wrote. ``Personnel must now be considered to be integral parts of the overall system.'' MEMO: Staff writers Jack Dorsey, Dale Eisman and Dave Mayfield

contributed to this report. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CORBITT AND IAN MARTIN/photo illustration

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot

Nathan Brown seems to have second thoughts after he signed

enlistment papers at a recruiting station. His aunt Vanessa Bennett

offers support.

BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Brett Frakes, 5, is a first-grader and the son of a Navy man. With

good marks in school and a taste of the lifestyle, he might fit into

the Navy's parameters of a good recruit some 13 years from now.

CHARTS

[For a copy of the charts, see microfilm for this date.]

NAVY MARRIED