Navy Secretary Backs Women in Combat Role

Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe said Wednesday that the Navy should permit women to fly combat aircraft missions and to serve aboard all Navy ships, including submarines and amphibious vessels.

While O’Keefe’s comment during his final days in office are not binding, they do signal a changing attitude among top Navy officials, indicating that efforts to expand the role of Navy women probably will not meet with the same opposition that they have in the past.

His remarks, made in an address to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., are in sharp contrast with the recommendations of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, which urged President Bush in November to keep the military services’ combat aircraft closed to women pilots.

Bush has said he will defer a decision on the issue to the incoming Administration of President-elect Bill Clinton, who many Pentagon officials expect will support giving women a wider range of options in the military.

O’Keefe, a political appointee who will leave office with the Bush Administration, said that he favors expanding “the role of women in combat in all the armed forces, including permitting women to fly combat missions, as well as to serve in all naval vessels.”

He added that the Defense Department should “require the registration and potential conscription of women on an identical sociological basis as men,” a proposal that has raised an outcry among American conservatives.

O’Keefe also disclosed Wednesday that he has laid the groundwork for possible legal actions against those accused of assaulting women at the 1991 convention of the Tailhook Assn., a group of Navy and Marine Corps aviators. In a message to all Navy personnel Tuesday, O’Keefe ordered the chief of naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps each to designate a single officer who would determine the appropriate form of disciplinary proceedings for each Tailhook offender.

The order came as the Navy and Marine Corps awaited the results of an investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general, Derek J. VanderSchaaf, into the events surrounding the alleged 1991 Tailhook assaults. The long-awaited report is not expected to be released until next month.

O’Keefe’s predecessor, former Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III, asked VanderSchaaf to conduct an independent investigation of the Tailhook incidents after an earlier Navy inquiry was strongly criticized as inadequate.