In a wide-ranging interview with Navy Times reporters and editors March 10, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (AW/NAC) Mike Stevens talked about uniform standardization, possible changes to the military retirement system, the plan to put tablets in the hands of Navy recruits and their instructors, and more. Here are excerpts from that editorial board in Springfield, Va., edited for brevity and clarity.
Q. Uniforms are moving toward a standard look for men and women. What will that change for female uniforms?
A. Well, so we talk about standardization and, obviously, we want sailors to look like sailors, right? And to a large extent you want to provide a uniform that, by and large, looks the same. I'm not opposed to the overblouse. Women want the overblouse, they like it. I can remember when they asked for it at a women's symposium a few years back, when we designed it. So if you're wearing a khaki top overblouse or you're wearing a shirt that you tuck in there's some nuances, some differences, but they're not extreme, right?
When you take a dress blues jacket versus a dress blues jumper, there's significant differences in that. And the uniforms that we are going to manufacture for our women sailors will look, for the most part, like a men's uniform but it will be designed, cut and fit [for] women. So they won't — there won't be a unisex dress blue top; there will be a women's dress blue top and there will be a man's dress blue top.
Q. Have you heard any feedback from sailors on proposals to change 20-year retirements?
A. No, the only thing that's really come up is their concern. So we have the current forces concern: "Is my retirement that I'm under right now going to change"? And we tell them no. It's been shared with us from the most senior leaders that it's going to be grandfathered in. So the people that are currently wearing a uniform are thinking about it, but typically people are most concerned about what affects them and their families. So what does it mean for the force coming in?
Well, I don't know because I haven't talked to someone who is thinking about joining the Navy that could potentially fall under this new retirement program. So if you went out, ifyou went out now to someone who was a junior in high school and said, "Hey this is a new retirement model, what do you think?" They'd probably say "Okay," right? Because they only know what they know.
Q. How do you respond to those who say chief's initiation, which you ended two years ago, was a vital part of their development?
A. This is to me — this is more than about a good experience, a bad experience, a better, a less better. This is about progress. This is about progress. So the United States Navy went from sail to coal fire steam, to fuel oil steam, to nuclear powered steam. We went from bi-planes to single-wing planes, from props to jets. We started using muskets; we went to cartridge-fired rifles, single shot, to lever action, to automatic weapons. We went from diesel electric submarines to nuclear powered submarines. We have gone from CPO initiation to CPO transition to CPO induction to CPO 365. It's called progress.
And just like, you know, a sailor that shot a musket during the Civil War or a Marine that shot a musket, right? That was the best darn weapon that we had and it did a wonderful job, right? If that same sailor was alive today and had Facebook they'd be adamantly opposed to automatic weapons, right?
Q. Where are you in the roll out of eSailor tablets for recruits?
A. So the first pilot is relatively small. It consists of two divisions of recruits and the training staff. The staff will have devices as well as the recruits. Recruit Training Command Great Lakes training division and their IT division is finishing up loading the final material on the devices, training material. So a lot of the stuff that they typically would get hard copies of is now loaded on the devices. Well there's [There are] two devices. I can't remember the one off-the-shelf device off the top of my head. And then there's one, there's 50 of them that are being made to mil spec so that we can assess the different performance of the devices. Somewhere in the first week of April we're going to go to RTC Great Lakes and we're going to do a ribbon cutting and roll out the devices.
Q. Would the future of this be that everyone gets one?
A. Oh yeah. So this is a [crawl, walk, run, crawl] process. It won't happen on my watch. I'm just hoping to get RTC going on my watch. But this is -- Sam this isn't a matter of if we want to do this. This is a matter we must do this. To be relevant in the world that we live in today, to be a Navy of the 21st century, we must embrace this technology and we can't let things like security and cost and all that kind of stuff drive the decision. We've got to learn to lead and manage through that. I'm not saying they're not challenges, but to say we're not going to do this is unacceptable. We have to figure it out.
Q. You have a chief serving as a fellow on Capitol Hill. Where do you see that program going?
A. [Chief Legalman Ronald Ratliff] will on the Hill for a year. And it's too early to tell really what we want to do, specifically, because we've got to get the feedback from his experience, both from him and from the office that he worked from. If the feedback is favorable and everybody liked the idea, I'd like to see between four and six chiefs, senior chief petty officers, up on the Hill as fellows. What ratings they come from, qualifications, will be something we have to work out. We haven't got that far yet. He happens to be a legalman and we wanted to do it with someone who was local so we could keep the cost down. He competed with two other people and was selected.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
