In a cavernous hall at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, a diminutive woman stands ramrod straight in front of some 600 young men and women. In a clear, loud voice, she thunders: “Who’s the heart of the Navy?”
“We are,” rumble back the soon-to-be sailors.
The woman shouts louder: “Who’s the heart of the Navy?”
“We are,” blasts back the reply from the sea of chambray blue.
The woman is Ann Rondeau. That’s Rear Admiral Ann E. Rondeau, to be exact, the commander of Great Lakes Naval Training Center, the largest military installation in Illinois and home to the only Navy boot camp in the country.
This gathering of recruits one day before boot-camp graduation is a weekly event, a pep rally of sorts. The recruits pitch questions. Rondeau tosses back answers. It’s a verbal volley that captures the mood at the base.
“Where do we stand on Iran and Iraq and the war?” asks one.
Questions about Osama bin Laden, the Philippines, the Saudis and the heightened security at at Lakes quickly follow, with talk of courage and competency and core values peppering Rondeau’s straightforward replies.
“A knowledgeable warrior,” she says, wrapping up the Q&A, “is essential.”
In as little as three weeks, some of the young people sitting in the bleachers could be on a ship, serving a role in the battles wracking Afghanistan. And that, says Rondeau, has prompted changes in the training and the tenor at Great Lakes.
“There’s an edge to the sailors here at recruit command [that] is probably fed by a number of things,” says Rondeau. “Frankly, it’s simply because they could be putting their lives on the line.”
Great Lakes Deputy Commander Capt. David O’Brien agrees: “The stuff we teach them here takes on more of a real meaning because they may be fighting a fire on a ship or taking care of a wounded shipmate sooner than they thought.”
Great Lakes, a 1,600-acre “campus” edged by Lake Bluff and North Chicago, has been the Navy’s only source of enlisted manpower since 1994. Training of sailors is at its heart. For Rondeau, Great Lakes’ third female commander in its 90-year history, the post is a plum.
“This is a great opportunity,” says Rondeau. “You cannot find a flag command job that affects our Navy so broadly.”
Several weeks ago, Rondeau was nominated for promotion to two-star admiral, another accolade in her 28-year military career. Rondeau — “I’m a very happy 50,” she says — has earned handfuls of medals, is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been a commanding officer at bases from Tennessee to Italy.
Before arriving at Great Lakes, she was at Pearl Harbor, overseeing bases throughout the Pacific fleet, from Japan to California, Washington State to Singapore. When she arrived at Great Lakes on Nov. 9, 2001, the Navy was busy reassessing its training for the war on terrorism and, more pointedly for the Navy, in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, a warship that was bombed by terrorists while docked at a port in the Arabian Peninsula.
“After USS Cole, the Navy became more focused on antiterrorism force protection,” says Master Chief Jon Thompson. “Now, when you have a U.S. ship that is not in a home port or a Navy port, it requires you have a small boat in the water 24 hours a day for protection.”
Providing sailors who have reached a high level of swim proficiency has been one training priority; so has increasing security on ships–and training sailors for it. One of Rondeau’s first moves has been to set up a strategic training analysis cell to determine how to deliver more efficient and effective training.
Rondeau’s day is jammed with back-to-back meetings, with staff, with recruits, with those who oversee the day-to-day operations of the base and those who oversee the academics.
In a darkened room one day last month, projections flashed on a screen as she listened to presentations from an MBA from Kellogg, a specialist in surface warfare, and a psychologist, among others, on matters affecting junior officers. She clips through meetings with a certain precision, asking questions, expecting answers.
“I’m famously a macro-manager not a micro-manager because I don’t know enough to be a micro-manager,” says Rondeau. “Everybody knows more than I do in their areas, so my job is to enable them to make things happen.”
“She maintains the focus of what is important and what we should keep important,” says Thompson.
“She’s unlike any other flag officer I’ve ever worked for,” adds Lt. Cmdr. John Wallach, assistant chief of staff for public affairs. “I know I work for her, but she makes me feel like I work with her.
“For her staff members, she has almost unqualified trust at the beginning–until you show her otherwise,” Wallach adds. “Show her otherwise, that’s when you’ll have problems.”
Says Rondeau, “I fundamentally do trust [my staff] and fundamentally also respect them. And because of that, though, I have a really high expectation. I have had a number of people say to me, `I’ve never worked this hard and yet had this much fun.’ And I think that’s an ideal environment.”
Not all business
One finds out quickly that Rondeau — despite the salutes that snap when she passes, despite the “Yes, ma’ams” and “No, ma’ams” that punctuate conversations–is not averse to a lighter approach to life.
At a staff meeting, when talk of corporate management techniques led to a discussion of Harley-Davidson, Rondeau interjected this anecdote: “I’ve got a scar on my ankle from once burning my leg on the exhaust pipe of [a motorcycle]” she says. “I dated a guy who had a Harley.”
“She’s a sailor’s admiral,” says Wallach. “She has a genuine interest in everything, from their life off duty to their education.”
Says Rondeau, “People know that the development of sailors is one of my passions.”
New York’s Hudson Valley was the incubator for that.
“I grew up near West Point. My parents took us to the museum. We went to concerts. We watched the parades,” says Rondeau, who was born in San Antonio. “I was very patriotic when I was a little kid. I made my parents stand up every time the national anthem was played at baseball games. I loved Kate Smith. . . . The icons of America meant something to me.”
Her father, a WW II veteran, died when she was in high school. Her mother remarried when she was in college, this time to a veteran of WW II and the Korean War. Her only sister was a Navy and Air Force nurse. “I think that life is a whole set of things, some more defining than others. Certainly for me, family and my whole family history is a big part of that,” she says.
She has never married. “For no reason,” she says. “Just haven’t been married.” An avid bicyclist, a licensed private pilot and a voracious reader–“Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character” and a book about Richard the Lionhearted, “The Crusaders: Warriors of God” sit next to her bed–Rondeau hopes to squeeze theater and symphony into her packed schedule.
“This sounds kind of hokey, but it’s true: I’m a happy camper in life so lots of things turn me on. I can get pretty pumped up over the smallest little things because the good Lord gave me an appreciation for the gifts of a good life. . . . I’m at peace with myself.”
`Really powerful’
She awakens most days before dawn to check world news via computer, working her way across the datelines from the Far East to the Middle East and Europe. She rarely turns down an opportunity that involves children, one reason she agreed to speak to more than 600 teachers, administrative staff and board members of the North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park on a recent institute day.
Guy Schumacher, the school district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, calls her dynamic, sharp and articulate. “The things she shared were personal experiences,” he says, “but she talked about the youth that she has worked with, the experiences that she has taken on through the Navy and their goals in bringing forth a sense of character and commitment and care. She was really powerful.”
Each year, 55,000 recruits enlist in the Navy for training at Great Lakes, a complex of 1,153 buildings, 39 of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Recruits go through the nine weeks of boot camp or, the “recruit training command.” Classes usually number 94 students with about 80 percent male, with a majority of recruits about 19 years of age. “They’re coming in with purple hair and torn T-shirts,” says Rondeau, with a smile. That doesn’t last long. Soon they are wearing pale blue chambray shirts, dark blue denim pants, highly polished black shoes and classic white cap, dubbed a “Dixie Cup.”
“I don’t know if people on the outside think about these sailors as what they truly are,” she says.
“They see awkward kids out in town or they see guys and gals who are trying to become adults in many ways, and I got to tell you, every single one of them is a volunteer. At some point in time, they made a conscious decision to do this. And they have put their whole selves into it.”
One of the final stages of boot camp involves a “final exam” called Battle Stations, according to Wallach. Sailors can then stay at Great Lakes for further education (it is home to the Navy’s technical training schools for surface warfare and the hospital corps) or head to Connecticut to study submarines or to Florida for an aviation education.
There is a vast building program in progress–new drill halls and barracks, for example–at Great Lakes. Transforming Battle Stations is particularly important. Begun in 1997, Battle Stations runs recruits through 12 scenarios (each based on an actual event such as the Cole and Pearl Harbor) over a 12-hour period to test all the skills learned in boot camp.
The Navy now wants to incorporate entertainment industry technology into the challenge. Instead of testing a recruit’s “abandon ship” skills in a calm, freshwater, heated pool, the Navy is hoping for a saltwater tank with waves, floating debris and flashing lights, for example. The idea phase has been completed; the design and development phases are next up. Originally scheduled for completion in 2007, Wallach says, “they’ve accelerated it and it will probably be finished in 2005.”
The Navy’s bottom line
In her executive-size office, in the base’s red-brick administration building, at the heart of the base, Rondeau’s computer monitor is big, the desk bigger. Her hat with gold trim sits to the side. A framed caricature of Rondeau bears the inscription: “She was our captain of change.” She could be the executive of a mega-corporation.
Both corporations and the military are dynamic organizations where leadership is crucial, she believes. “But we are certainly not a business. Things for us will cost and not be very economical. We spend a lot of money taking care of the quality of life of our sailors,” she says. “Your bottom line is, in a sense, your morale, effectiveness, contentment and proficiency of the sailor.”
With corporations, she adds, “There’s a fundamental obligation to the bottom line. [In the military,] there’s a fundamental obligation to service other than self in our ethic.”
Besides, she says, “The business ethic is not one that we can easily translate because for the business ethic, the bottom line, the greatest risk [is the] the folding of the company, the losing of the jobs.
“But for us,” adds Rondeau, “the ultimate risk is the loss of life.”
