WEBB: My impression ( and the answer is probably best received from aviators themselves) is that even though this is a very skills-intensive environment, when you put them on board ship, and also when you consider that the flight itself is such a small part of being a pilot you have to go to a period of compartmentalization and compression before you fly, and then you have to decompress when you get out. And the environment in which you work, the peer environment in which you work is very unique. I would say that it's pretty close to being one of these environments where unit cohesion is equally important as skills.

Q: And women have a hard time fitting in?

WEBB: I think that they do. And yet, there are other areas of flying which I don't think there's a problem with females. This is the kind of an issue where we need to be allowing military people to speak about, without fear of retaliation. And I think one of the greatest things that's happened over the last 20 years is that on these kinds of issues, where you can really get expert testimony, you're only going to get the kind of testimony that is filtered through the political process. The only way to resolve these kinds of questions is to get all of the issues on the table and debate them fairly, and do what's best for the institutions. Let's do best for the service and for the country.

It's a career killer, in many cases, to join this debate in a way that does not further the political agenda. And the end result is, you don't have the debate.

Q: And what is the end result? What is the consequence of not having the debate?

WEBB: Well, as it was mentioned before, you get a lot of ham-handed policy, and perhaps some wrong policy. I'll give you a very good personal example. When I wrote an article about women at the Naval Academy in 1979, I used it essentially as a microcosm for the "women in combat" issue, which was coming up before the Congress that fall. The end result of this piece, I was shocked. I was absolutely astounded that the Brigade of Midshipmen went bananas. Apparently, they started chanting in the mess hall one night, "Webb was right. Webb was right." They shouted down the CNO.

Now, why did that happen? The reason that happened was because conversation on the issue, even back then, had been so suppressed that it was bottled up inside them. And I ended up being banned from the Naval Academy for four years. When I was invited back, there was this great announcement that I had never been banned; they had simply turned down 17 requests for my appearance on a case-by-case basis. If they had been smart, what they would have done after I wrote this article would have been to invite me into the field house and maybe Gloria Steinem, and get some very sensible person in the middle of this issue, and have a panel discussion, and ventilate everyone and make them feel like this wasn't something that was being forced down their throat.

Somewhere between what I was saying and where I ended up as Secretary of the Navy, there is a logical policy that could be found that would implement Congressional direction and still preserve what I'm talking about. And I made some changes when I was Secretary of the Navy, in order to do that.

Q: When you were Secretary of the Navy, you increased the number of women in support roles, toward the end of your tenure. Right?

WEBB:I did. I did.

Q: Tell me about that.

WEBB: And I'm very comfortable with what I did. And this goes exactly to what I'm talking about.

Q: Exactly. Yes.

WEBB: There are a number of things that I did on the women's issue, but there are two that I think sort of bracket this whole equation. The first was, it was demonstrable by the time that I got to be Secretary of the Navy that women at the service at the Naval Academy were impacting negatively on preparation to be officers in the military side. I say it's demonstrable because the class standings at Marine Corps Officers Basic School went from consistently top half, all the way down to consistently bottom half. I knew these questions were going to come up for my confirmation hearing, so I asked them to do a matrix of the standings of Naval Academy graduates at Marine Officers Basic School from 1965 to 1986 the average standing. And the reason I thought this was important is, Marine Corps Basic School is the only school probably in the military that brings in all different officer accession products. It mixes them and then gives you a class standing. I was my class honor man when I graduated Basic School, and that's one of the things I'm proudest of in my entire life. There's such a tremendous number of really, really quality people there. It was a very competitive environment, with people that you respect for the rest of your life.

Up until 1978, the Naval Academy graduates always averaged top half. After '78, they never averaged top half. And in fact, the Class of 1986, as I recall, the last class on the list, had averaged the bottom 40th percentile. So after four years of military preparation they go down and compete with people who've just come out of ROTC, OCS program, former enlisted programs, and they can't even make the top half. It goes back to what I was writing about. I didn't pick the title on that piece. I wasn't simply saying, "Ah," you know, "get them out of here." I was saying, you can't stress the males in a way to filter out the people who can't handle stress and to kind of temper the steel, if they're in a male-female environment. You can't do it.

The indoctrination, the military indoctrination process, plebe indoctrination process in the military environment at the Naval Academy had deteriorated to the point that they were not tested; they were not stressed enough to really find out what was inside themselves. And that's less of an issue if you're going to do something that, you know, that's not as leadership-intensive as the Marine Corps. But it was a very good place to truly measure what had happened. It goes back a little bit, because the argument when the women came in, "Well, why don't they put women in their own living environment?" Because the problem isn't in the classroom. The problem is in all of these things, plebe year is a year long. Someone can walk in your room 24 hours a day. The whole idea was to keep pressure on you for 24 hours, to give you more that you could do to get to you in a way that went to your weaknesses. If you're smart, get to you physically. If you're a jock, get to you mentally. Get to someone. Put them under pressure. Make sure that when you turn this individual over to the children of the mothers of America who were paying the tax bill to put you through the school, that this person, you can guarantee, will at least give you a minimum standard. That was the whole deal. And it clearly wasn't happening.

And so when I became Secretary of the Navy, one of the first things I did was, I announced that all Marines, all Academy guys who wanted to go into the Marine Corps, would be required to go through what was called a bulldog program, which was an OCS program that the ROTC midshipmen were required to go through. And that lasted basically until I left. But that, to me, was the answer.

Then the second thing, when I was Secretary of the Navy, we had a lot of pressure from DOD about how females would be used, and this sort of thing. And so what I did was I got together 28 top ("top" meaning really operationally tested and respected) men and women: Navy captains and petty officers, the top rung without getting into the admirals. I put together a 28-person commission. I sent them around the world to look at all these different things. I had them report back. Instead of making this a political decision ( go out and bring this back to me), I made them report back through the service-- the specialty chiefs (the submarine, air, and surface chiefs) with their results and their recommendations. I made those chiefs then talk to the CNO, Chief of Naval Operations. They reported to me what their recommendations were. And in some cases they surprised me, particularly on surface. Surface side, they surprised me.

I believed that was the best way to do it, because it did two things. One is, you let the uniformed people decide and recommend the best structure in which they were going to assimilate females. And also, they're coming up with the recommendations, so they're going to be on board. When the result was reported out, the chief of the surface side came in with this thing, and he was saying, "Well, we're going to put women on this and this." And he didn't look terribly happy about it. I said, "Do you support this or not?" And he goes, " yeah, I support it." I said, "Good. You got an interview with the Navy Times, and you're going to articulate this to the Navy Times." And we opened up more billets than had ever been opened up to women. But in my view, we did it in the way that honors the system and gets the right people to participate. And so I backed it 100 percent.

The key question in there was how to define "combat" under Title X, and how you put that into this operational environment. Those were the-- the big questions on the surface side. I did it, and I'm comfortable with the way that we did it.

Q: With regard to the Senate committee deciding even the middle level, the captains and commander levels.... You're saying, before Tailhook, that wasn't the regular practice?

WEBB: To my knowledge, this has never been done in this century, and probably ever. What qualifications does a Senate staffer have to determine whether or not an individual is qualified to be a commander in the United States Navy? And if you don't respect the leadership that gave you these names, then that should be the issue. The issue should be, "Admiral," we do not have full trust and confidence in what you're doing here." And the admiral should be arguing on the table, adamantly, to defend the list that he has brought over. And the service sector, not just the admiral.

There should not be a certification process. The certification process is we conducted internal investigations in the Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy. And these people were not implicated. And we looked at them in our promotion boards, in comparison with other people. And we looked at them in accordance with all the precepts that the civilian process has dictated would affect promotions. And this is our guy. But I don't know of any case in history where people outside the military have decided who's going to be a commander in the Navy.

Q: And the Navy leadership signed off on that.

WEBB: And thus my speech.

Q: Now, in their defense, it would be argued that the Navy had discredited itself.

WEBB: What we're doing now is, we're just sort of wrapping this ball of string back up. How did the Navy discredit itself in Tailhook? The Navy did not discredit itself in Tailhook. But if they allowed that inference to stand, which they did, then they're in that situation, when they did not defend the culture of the Navy. And I can tell you, that hurt a lot of people who weren't even in the Navy. To see the way that the leadership refused to defend this historic institution with all its traditions, and the traditions that I fed off as a young man. And there was a woman who was had been a professor at the Naval Academy, who wrote a piece in New Republic, which was absolutely silly piece, and not see the Naval Academy defend itself as an institution. And to see the cheating scandal at the Naval Academy, when they couldn't make up their minds one way the other about why they were going to take action against, to the point that institution came under attack because the leadership failed to take care of it. And to see a public affairs apparatus that has either allowed or encouraged these sorts of tactics, going all the way back to the USS Iowa, when the Navy allowed this vicious insinuation to be made against a dead sailor to try to step away from a problem. Those are the kinds of things that create the problems. Not the sailor out there doing his job, that's caused this problem in the Navy.

Q: We keep talking about the warrior culture. The Navy culture, let's say. It's important to know, isn't it, that there is a difference between the warrior culture, the Navy culture, and what happened at Tailhook '91. They're not the same thing.

WEBB: I think that's an important point. Because what happened was as the Tailhook thing was dragged out, the two were combined in the minds of the critics, in order to achieve a totally different political objective. That if we demean the Navy as a culture, the culture at large, then we can remake it with these other political ideas in mind.

Very similar to what happened to the American military during Vietnam. The anti-war movement had to make two points. One, that Vietnam was not an important enough country to fight for. And the other was that the people who were over there fighting weren't capable of doing their job.

You saw the same basic strategy happening after Tailhook. The Navy culture, or the military as a culture, has become less and less understood in this country, as fewer and fewer people have chosen to serve.

even though it may be a false message, is because the people literally don't know.

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