Ask someone in the Navy what a T-AO is, and odds are they will respond with “Tactical Action Officer.” They are right on the money but fail to recognize the other important meaning of T-AO, with the distinct tac separating the first and second letter. T-AOs are a class of supply ship, the Navy’s oilers that come alongside a warship during an underway replenishment. Operated by Military Sealift Command and staffed by civilians, T-AOs are an enigma. We can think of them as the Navy’s own Mary Poppins—they help us in our time of need, seemingly out of nowhere, then vanish to assist someone else.
So in 2016, when then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that the Navy would name its second John Lewis-class T-AO after Harvey Milk, perhaps it did not generate as much buzz as other up-and-coming ship announcements. T-AOs are poorly understood within the Navy, just like the significance of Harvey Milk.
What’s in a Name?
Elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, Milk rose to prominence in the 1980s as one of America’s first openly gay public figures. The Navy has recognized other leaders with nontraditional identities in the same way. DDG-107’s namesake is Vice Admiral Samuel L. Gravely, the first African American officer to command a Navy ship. DDG-70 pays homage to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a female flag officer famous for her computer programming ingenuity. Indeed, as time marches on and social norms progress, the honorees of ships have become increasingly diverse.
Going Further with Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion initiatives are well-intentioned. They remind us that it is a sailor’s merit—and not her race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, or political stance—that makes her worthy of promotion and opportunity. They also teach us that for a person to thrive in the workplace, he must feel safe and not discriminated against. The problem is that with overuse, any language loses its potency. “Diversity and inclusion” have become such tired buzzwords that many in the sea services have stopped listening. Rather than hold a genuine understanding of diversity and inclusion’s importance, some pay lip service to the popular idea out of fear of what might happen if they do not (i.e., cancel culture).
At the officer level, the Navy needs to divorce itself from surface-level diversity and inclusion training. The solution lies in lengthening diversity narratives to include history. More specifically, when conducting D&I education, the Navy should answer the question “How did we get here in the first place?” This is best done by using examples of diverse individuals within military history and connecting them to the service’s past and present personnel policies. In this process, the Navy’s storytellers bring their audience to terms with armed forces’ dark, discriminatory years, while emphasizing the service’s progress in uplifting diverse personnel and the heroic agents of change who fought along the way. The result: A bridge between the armed forces’ (and American society at large’s) prejudicial past and today’s commendable D&I initiatives, satisfying the question, “Why is diversity important? Why should we care?”
Lieutenant Harvey Milk
Take the social studies lesson that exists in Harvey Milk. When mulling over namesakes for T-AO-206, the Secretary of the Navy did not pick a random gay man who was in the public spotlight five decades ago. From 1951–55, Lieutenant Harvey Milk served in the Navy onboard the USS Kittiwake (ASR-13), where he specialized as a dive officer. He may have been a squared-away shipmate, passionate about the naval service and a devoted leader, but none of that mattered. After four years, Lieutenant Milk received an other-than-honorable discharge for being homosexual. In 1977, he pivoted to a different area of public service and was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Sadly, Milk’s tenure lasted just one year—he was assassinated in 1978.
Milk’s story is a microcosm for a larger discrimination issue that plagued the armed forces for decades- the zero-tolerance policy for LGBTQ service members. In 1992, the General Accounting Office (now known as the Government Accountability Office) reported that the Pentagon spent approximately $27 million annually discharging gay and lesbian troops out of a misguided belief that homosexuality inherently undermined good order and discipline within the military. The Department of Defense (DoD) was not alone in this impression. American society has long portrayed queer people as particularly unable to control their romantic urges, more so than their straight counterparts. That underpinned the DoD’s rationale for the multimillion-dollar discharge project—whereas straight service members would rarely (if ever) sleep around with one another, thus compromising the chain-of-command and a professional work environment, LGBTQ service members were destined to do just that. Queer soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were dismissed as liabilities for decades, regardless of their demonstrated competence and dedication.
Recognizing Harvey Milk with T-AO-206 was reparation paid to not only Milk’s living kin (his nephew Stuart Milk was at the ship’s christening in San Diego), but to the service’s entire LGBTQ community. When the champagne bottle was smashed against the hull, what Milk’s nephew and LGBTQ onlookers heard the Navy say was, “We’re sorry that we didn’t let Lieutenant Milk do his job because of his sexual orientation. We’re sorry that he couldn’t rise through the ranks because of who he loved. We’re sorry that we wrote him (and everyone else like him) off based on one deeply personal quality alone. We’re really trying to do better.”
Looking Forward
This story arc can be replicated with almost every diverse category in the armed forces. The Honorable Lloyd Austin’s ascension to Secretary of Defense matters because in 1925, official USMA policy generalized African American service members as a group “from which we cannot expect to draw leadership material.” In pre-civil rights America, this reflected societal misconceptions concerning an entire group of loyal citizens’ intelligence and capability. The consequences of these attitudes and policies cannot be understated—African American service members’ ability to fulfill their military potential was limited because of it. The anonymous first woman to graduate from Naval Special Warfare school matters because as recently as 2015, every woman was barred from applying for direct ground combat positions even if she was physically capable. Again, this ties into a wider American history of relegating women to behind-the-scenes support. One could go on with more examples ad infinitum.
In what forum would these diversity discussions take place? First, a one-credit hour D&I seminar should be a part of every officer’s education. It should be positioned as an U.S. military history course, and not as a half-hearted mandatory training PowerPoint. To that end, the exact course name matters a lot—it is what each student will base their first impression on. It has already been established that while “diversity and inclusion” is an important concept, the wording itself is predictable, weak and does not capture attention. Instead, the name should have connotations of strength and fortitude while simultaneously reflecting the topic of diversity and inclusion. A soft pitch: “The Evolution of Manpower: Changing Faces in Military Leadership.”
Instruction-wise, it should be taught differently from an average history course. There should not be just one textbook that the curriculum revolves around. Students should consume a plethora of media: Books, articles, film, series, and podcasts. Some valuable learning materials could include Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town by Carol Lynn McKibben, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America by Nathaniel Frank, the History Channel documentary Honor Deferred (2006), and Serving in Silence: The Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995), just to name a few.
No professor can be expected to speak on every critical topic. Although the course would have a primary instructor for grading and accountability purposes, it should be conference-style where guest speaker subject-matter experts are brought in (or video-called in) as much as possible. There is no dearth of qualified people in this realm: Representatives from the National Naval Officers Association, whose mission is “to enhance Sea Service operational readiness by supporting, recruiting, professional development and retention in an effort to achieve a diverse officer corps that reflects the demographics of our Nation,” scholars from the Naval History and Heritage Command, think-tank researchers, civilian sociologists, diverse leaders currently serving, and many more.
Stories Across the Sea Service and Beyond
Lastly, the course content need not be confined to the Navy. As stated in the previous cases of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Retired Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, there are diversity lessons in all areas of the military worth telling. Discriminatory policies usually spanned the entire DoD. By the same token, diverse figures’ stories of triumph are scattered throughout all military communities. In the team sport that is the U.S. armed forces, a win for one is a win for all—let us highlight D&I victories in all our sister branches.
In August 2020, Midshipman 1st Class Sydney Barber became the first African American female brigade commander at the United States Naval Academy. During an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Barber proudly claimed, “I get to walk here and be at the Naval Academy and be someone’s wildest dream,” alluding to the reality that African American female leadership at the Naval Academy had been all but impossible for generations past. Somewhere across the country, another midshipman attended her ROTC unit’s annual Dining Out with a female companion by her side. She slept easy that night knowing that her commanding officer would not investigate her choice to bring a same-sex date to the event. Even thirty years earlier, such a decision could have disenrolled her from ROTC and killed her chances at becoming an officer.
Today, both women and thousands of others can soar to great heights and hope to attain the upper echelons of naval leadership, all because of D&I initiatives. Their contributions to the Navy are not just checking the diversity box. They are fulfilling the aspirations of historically marginalized pioneers who fought tirelessly for a more equitable Navy. Let the long line of the armed forces’ diversity advocates never be forgotten. Let their history be taught.
