Male and female officers will get the same housing arrangement. Neither will get preference.
If you will open the article again - you can click on the graphic. This shows a reconfiguration that divides a berthing compartment. Men will not be hot-bunked. If you read the article it is stated that is not an option.
In fact, men will come out ahead since they will have fewer men sharing the same size head and # of showers.
This is not rocket science.
LOL, no kidding? Bless you JAM, you'll try your darnedest to cloud an issue won't you?
I think everyone else here understood that a "sailor" is enlisted personnel, and a "Department Head" is an officer. You're just doing your usual marginalization of an issue where the facts are clear and unfortunately contrary to your agenda.
You might want to read the "whole" article to see the hot racking issues.
The enlisted issue
Bringing in enlisted women is a tougher issue. It’s going to take money, modifications and careful training, both admirals said.
“We’re not going to see a young female sailor swinging her seabag on her shoulder and walking aboard the USS Maryland next month,” Harvey said. “But we will — it will be a couple of years. We have to recruit, bring them in the program.”
Having that lead time, he said, will give manpower planners a chance to move forward “in a thoughtful, very controlled, very deliberate manner.”
Probably the most critical lesson learned in the surface force, Harvey said, is the need to have strong officer and senior enlisted leadership in place before bringing in junior enlisted women.
That’s because incidents of pregnancy and fraternization are less frequent in crews with strong female leaders onboard.
“It can’t be ‘I’m the woman on the submarine’ — that’s just a terrible burden to put on everybody, particularly that young woman,” Harvey said.
He said it will take some time to build a “critical mass” of female leadership needed to seed the integrated crews.
“You’d have to get at least a small cadre of female chiefs or first-class petty officers, and those, of course, would have to come from other parts of the Navy initially,” Donnelly said. “Then they would have to have sufficient time to qualify in submarines in order to have, I think, the credibility as leaders on the ship, and that takes some time.”
Converting into the submarine community at the E-7 or above level would be difficult, according to a retired senior submariner familiar with the Navy’s plans. He asked not to be named because of his continued ties with the Navy.
“Really, to be in the chiefs’ mess on a submarine you already need to be qualified in submarines — if you’re not, you would be a burden more than an asset,” he said.
He said it would make sense to convert experienced petty officers and grow them into submarine chiefs.
But even as they’re building the enlisted leadership picture, officials also must work on the other piece — recruiting junior female submariners from the street.
For many of the nontechnical ratings such as yeoman and culinary specialist, that could be fairly easy and quick, as it would require only about six months at “A” school and the six-week submarine school in Groton, Conn., as happens today with male sailors.
Donnelly said it was too early to say which ratings will be open to women. But over time, all submarine ratings could be open, the retired sub source said.
But to truly build a proper representation of women in the submarine force, the source said, women must be recruited and trained in technical ratings, too.
Training female sailors in highly technical ratings has been a challenge on the surface side. Of the 12,845 nuclear-power-qualified sailors, just 752 are women and 241 of those are in training. Only 22 are chiefs, and two are senior chiefs; there are no female master chief nukes.
Growing female enlisted nukes will take time. It takes about 18 months once a sailor reports to nuclear power school in Charleston for that person to join a sub crew.
Enlisted modifications
The other issue, besides personnel, will be to modify enlisted berthing on the Ohios. Donnelly said the volume of that hull allows for relatively uncomplicated modifications. But fairness is key to any change.
“I would not entertain a solution that forced the men to hot-bunk on one of those ships. So we’ll do this right, and the right answer is give the women their own head,” he said, “and make sure the men aren’t inconvenienced or treated unfairly in any way.”
As they exist now, the modification plans are little more than drawings, as money can’t be committed prior to congressional notification.
“We haven’t actually gone to the ship design engineers,” Donnelly said.
The timeline is somewhat flexible for enlisted berthing modifications, which could be completed on the boomers during their refueling overhauls. The four SSGNs already completed their midlife overhaul and conversion. There are also shorter yard periods when the work might be done, depending on the complexity.
Donnelly estimates the cost of those modifications at $8 million to $10 million. But he offered a warning.
“Those prices never go down,” he said. “They always go up.”
