WEBB: I don't think that anyone in the military would seriously question civilian control. The question is, who and how this fits into the Constitution. Civilian control is exercised by the Secretary of Defense and his staff and the other civilian appointees inside the Pentagon. The role of the Senate in promotions is essentially two-tiered. At the upper echelons, for the key jobs which have political connotations, they should bring these individuals in and ask them questions that go to national policy. The Senate has a treaty-making power, etc.

But when you get down to the level of commanders and captains, that's the function of the promotion boards. The promotion boards receive written precepts from each service secretary that implement existing laws, give them very specific instructions about different things to look for that are of importance to the civilian world. It's not a totally removed process. The promotion board then has to report out to the service secretary.

Once that happens, in my opinion, if you break that apart by putting a separate level of political approval and that sort of thing, two things occur. The first is, you are invading the jurisdiction of the military in a way that threatens the heart and soul of what makes it work. The second thing is, you bring this over to the Senate, you have a real danger of politicizing the military environment by this layer of political judgments that conceivably can be put onto it.

Why is it that the Senate staffers have the objections that they do right now, to the cases that were already approved inside the military promotional process? My theory is that the Senators, the key Senators, feel politically vulnerable because of their own political constituency, and are almost obligated to make these objections. They should not be in it. If they feel strongly that the military service improperly promoted people, then it should be a vote of confidence between the senior leadership of the military service and the Senate. I have to tell you, this is something that I would have fought tooth and nail if I were still a service secretary. And I would have spoken loudly about it--not that I haven't now.

Q: What does the Stumpf case tell you?

WEBB: You know, I'd rather not focus on one individual. I think that there are a number of individuals who were in that situation who were harmed. And as an offshoot, there were others not specifically in the flagging situations, who were harmed. Captain Mark Rogers who was a brilliant officer, absolutely a brilliant officer, had his name plucked off of the promotion. He was the first individual promoted to admiral in the list that came out. And because he had made some off-color comments running the White House military staff, that were reported through the White House, had his name yanked by the Navy leadership, rather than seeing him and fighting for him. There are a number of cases that fall in this category.

And there's an oil slick effect. You may have a number of cases right here that are formally flagged, which in my view, a Constitutional intrusion. But it has a chilling effect on other cases, on the part of senior leadership when they're looking at people. "Oh, are we going to send this name up? What are they going to do?" You know. Something came in on the hot line etc.

Earlier, you were asking about the impact of these sorts of things on the, what you were calling the warrior culture.

I think a way to say it in more analytical terms is, it has a very clear impact on the command relationships when you can have all of these different penetrations for reasons that really don't have to do with military performance.

Q: You're telling me Stumpf doesn't stand alone.

WEBB: Exactly. And that's not in any way to demean his contributions. It's just that there are so many people. Captain Rogers is not in the flagging thing specifically. But this is a guy who won the top two leadership awards the Navy can give out. He was ahead of his year group every time he got promoted and is an incredible gentleman. There's so many of these guys, Jack Snyder is another one. So many of these people who really were CNO potential people basically, when this happened, out of their loyalty to the service, decided not even to publicly denounce what was going on. Loyalty to their service, protect their family, take the hit.

Q: You're telling me something that I hadn't thought of until now. We had come up with a statistic that four times as many admirals were destroyed by Tailhook as by Pearl Harbor. But, you are talking about a whole other level of guy in this.

WEBB: You're talking about three different levels of people. First, the people who were directly destroyed, in terms of their profession, by Tailhook. Second, the group of people who have had their careers ruined because of the implications of Tailhook in terms of how command deals with other issues, that won't stand up for them if anything starts to get hot. And then the third is the really strong, qualified people who look at this and say, "This is not the Navy that I loved, and I'm leaving on 20 ." People who could have been admirals and who could have been in a position to turn things around 5-6 years from now.

Q: When you say, "when things really get hot", what do you mean?

WEBB: If there's an issue of political correctness that's going to hit the press that the wagons are circled, and a lot of good people are thrown to the wolves.

Q: Now you make me think about Rebecca Hansen, Senator Durenberger, and Admiral Arthur. Am I in the right territory here?

WEBB: One of many. I think a very egregious case. I think Stan Arthur's and Jack Snyder's cases were the most egregious in terms of not showing loyalty to people who have demonstrated everything, all the way up to being selected for admiral.

Q: Tell me your perception of him.

WEBB: I have a tremendous amount of respect for Stan Arthur. He worked for me in the programs area and then in the logistics area, when I was Secretary of the Navy. I did not have a special bond to him so that the fact that he was Stan Arthur alone caused me to want to help him and to speak about his situation. But I did observe him. And I observed him in a staff capacity. He was terrific. At the same time, he'd flown more than 500 combat missions in Vietnam and had more distinguished flying crosses than anyone I've ever heard of. He was a tremendous pilot, combat pilot. He did what this country wanted. He was extremely well seasoned, to coin a phrase, in terms of being able to have the maturity and the wisdom to run the Pacific command, which is one of the most complex commands and has many of the most volatile international environments with the Korean situation, China, the way that it's going, Taiwan, etc., etc. He was an ideal fit. I was shocked to hear that his name had been pulled and the circumstances under which it had been pulled, which were absolutely ridiculous. I wrote a personal letter to the Secretary of the Navy, keeping it out of the communication system in the Pentagon. Had it hand delivered to him, rather than sending it even through his staff.

Q: Why?

WEBB: Because when I left, I left. I don't believe that it is my prerogative to in any way intrude into the affairs of any of my successors. But the situation was so egregious that I just needed to at least attempt some communication.

Q: What did you say?

WEBB: I basically said it's not my style to in any way get involved in the affairs of any successor, but this situation is beyond the pale; and that it is vital to defend Stan Arthur, to go to the mat for him, for the benefit not only of the Navy but of the country; and that if you don't, the Navy's going to pay. I received no response, after which I wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times attempting to put this issue into a context which people would begin to understand what was going on service-wide, or government-wide, as a result of the post Tailhook environment.

Q: How did Stan Arthur and what happened to him, fit into the post Tailhook environment?

WEBB: I think probably in what we were calling category 2. This is a situation where, if you get tagged in any way with an issue of political correctness that the wagons become circled and people in the senior leadership of the Navy have wanted to sort of jettison these issues to not have to deal with them any more.

Stan Arthur is as steady a leader as you could ever hope for. I think another thing that has happened as a consequence of all of this carnage of senior leaders after Tailhook is that other leaders have been hurried along, when perhaps they aren't ready. They're very qualified people, but perhaps aren't ready. The Admiral who became CINC-PAC. He was the individual who went instead of Stan Arthur. His embarrassment when he made the comments about the rape of the Japanese girl on Okinawa, were probably more a function of the fact that he had not been seasoned enough before he reported out there (he was going to be Vice-CNO; he had just made four stars) than they were of his own leadership qualities. You begin to see the collateral wreckage when these issues are dealt with, the way that they've been dealt with.

Q: A lot of people said that Boorda was the right guy at the right time for the Navy. PC, oriented toward bringing the women in, oriented toward showing leadership in a new direction, oriented toward moderating the culture. What do you think?

WEBB: I don't know. I don't think that he was giving the Navy the leadership on these vital issues of its culture. At the same time, I did not know the man personally, and you know, everything that I was, writing and saying at the infrequent times that I step up and talk about it were addressed toward decisions that he was making. I have never tried to get inside his persona. I know something that came out, an anticipated question, maybe. I don't know. Something that came out after his suicide was that there was a group of people in the Navy environment, and sometimes my name was put in, that said that they were offended by the fact that he was not a Naval Academy graduate, that he had enlisted time. And I think that's absolutely absurd. Particularly if you look at my own environment, or the decisions that I've made in my career, I made Al Gray Commandant of the Marine Corps. There was blood on the mat to get Al Gray to be Commandant of the Marine Corps. And Al Gray was a former enlisted, non-Academy graduate. I appointed Dave Jeremiah CINC PAC Fleet, making him the only non-Naval Academy four star at that time. My father graduate from college when I was a senior in high school. This thing about service academies or elite schools is not something that's on my radar screen. If Mike Boorda, with some enlisted time, six years enlisted time, whatever it was, had come in and done the things that I thought were important, I'd have been the first guy standing there, shoulder to shoulder.

Q: Your speech....maybe the only criticism I've heard of it is it so deeply hurt Mike Boorda. A lot of people say, "That Webb speech, that hurt him very badly. That was one of the things that knocked this poor bastard over the edge." What's your response to that allegation ?

WEBB:The speech mentioned no one by name. It was a mirror, as I said before, to the senior leadership of the navy, including people who preceded Admiral Boorda. It was a discharge of a duty toward an institution and a culture that nurtured me, and that I love. And no one knows what causes any individual to take their life. I would be very surprised if the reasons that Mike Boorda or anyone else decided to take their lives were purely professional.

Q: Have they been bringing woment too quickly into the military?

WEBB: My view is that there are two areas of analysis that have to be looked at when you bring women into the military environment.

The first is skills. In an area where units are skills-intensive, you have less of a problem because unit cohesion itself becomes less important to making the unit work. The classic example of that is the medical environment. or whether a doctor is female or not, does not have the same impact on whether a hospital works because the skill, rather than how the doctor relates to a corps man or whatever, is the predominant thing. You see that in other areas in the military, such as the really high tech communications units and this sort of thing, where unit cohesion by itself does not make these units work. And in those areas, there are some problems, but far fewer problems in terms of assimilating women.

The other is the nature of the operating environment. When you go to sea for 120 days whether you are in a communications environment or not, there are, particularly in this age group and the environments from which so many of them are drawn anyway, you get some real volatility. This is the kind of thing that's very difficult to speak about when you're testifying in front of the Senate. But I'll give you an example. I was in the Persian Gulf. I went on a number of different combatants. I spent the night on a helicopter assault ship. And my bodyguard got up at 2:30 in the morning to walk along the corridors and just sort of make his mid-morning patrol, whatever. He walked by several toilet facilities, and he reported to me the next morning. He reported to me the next morning. He said, "I've never seen anything like this in my life." He said, " 2:30 in the morning, every single head was backed up with 20 guys, with a copy of Playboy magazine, waiting for their 5 minutes of privacy." Now, you inject a 10 percent female crew into that environment, and you've got some really volatile "leadership challenges" (quote, unquote).

Those are the two analytical nodes, if you would, that you have to look at, in terms of bringing females in. One is, if you've got a unit that really depends on cohesion more than skills. Infantry units are that way. There are skills areas when you talk about aggregate skills of females. When you've got military units that operate for extended periods of time in isolated environments, you've also got such problems. And they have to be dealt with. We can't just erase them because certain advocates don't want you to recognize those problems.

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