Zinging Zumwalt, U.S.N.

It was an unusual scene for the Navy, traditionally the nation's most class-conscious service. There was its highest officer, his bushy eyebrows knit in concentration, his head tilted to catch each word, as some 1,000 sailors at the San Diego Naval Station met with him to sound off their gripes --some general, some highly personal --about military life. Quietly and sympathetically, Admiral Elmo ("Bud") Zumwalt responded to each. Clarence Burris, a black cook whose wife had died of cancer and whose three daughters now need his presence, pleaded for a shore assignment, since his ship was about to sail. Zumwalt immediately ordered aides to arrange a change of duty. As he stepped from the stage, the sailors rose and cheered. A tall petty officer blocked his path. "Thank you, Admiral," he told Zumwalt, "for treating us like people."

Although he was promoted to Chief of Naval Operations only four months ago, Zumwalt already has demonstrated that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird acted shrewdly in selecting him over 33 senior admirals. Zumwalt is proving unusually well-equipped in both inclination and experience to tackle the two most pressing challenges now facing all of the armed services: to retain and attract more volunteers at a time of widespread youthful antagonism toward the military, and to maintain U.S. security despite the curtailment of defense budgets.

Electric Feeling. At 49, Zumwalt is the youngest C.N.O. the Navy has had. In his last assignment, as commander of U.S. naval forces in Viet Nam, he toured, almost daily, the coastal bases, ships at sea, boats and barges of his "muddy water" navy. While he plotted overall strategy to check enemy shipping and water-borne infiltration, he gave junior officers and chiefs considerable leeway with tactics for their own vessels. He also heard out their complaints and came away convinced that today's servicemen have "an absolute right to be treated better than they have been --they have volunteered for an unpopular war."

As C.N.O., Zumwalt has effectively applied his philosophical bent--an unusual blend of suave intellectualism in the Maxwell Taylor tradition and a populist disdain for those traditions that demean low-ranking personnel. The result is what the civilian-edited Navy Times calls "an electric feeling throughout the whole Navy." One Zumwalt technique, as at San Diego, has been to visit naval installations to hear out his men. Already he has met with some 30,000 of them. He has also initiated what he calls, a bit stuffily, "retention study groups"--personnel from selected categories who spend a week at the Pentagon to exchange grievances, then present them to Zumwalt in an hour-long discussion. So far, there have been seven such groups, ranging from submarine officers to aviators and fleet enlisted men. In most cases, the wives of the men were invited to make suggestions, too.

Z-Grams. The chance to bend Zumwalt's ear is no mere exercise in catharsis. Out of all the suggestions he has heard, he has so far circulated more than 800 as "greenstripers"--official green-bordered papers calling for reaction from selected commands. Of these, 65% have been turned into "Z-grams," which are direct orders from Zumwalt to effect changes in the service. Already famous throughout the fleet, they are aimed mainly at eliminating many seemingly minor, but unsettling, irritations of military life.

The best-known Z-gram sets a goal of 15 minutes as the maximum time any sailor should have to wait in any line for anything. Others expand liberty for men in port, permit them to wear civilian clothes at all shore installations, create a pilot program to fly their wives and children (at their own expense) to ports where their ships stay. Another offers a Pentagon computer to match up sailors wishing to exchange duty stations; men used to have to engineer their own swaps. Z-gram 35 permits beer-vending machines in enlisted men's quarters and alcoholic beverages in all barracks with individual rooms.

Kremlin Scholar. Even as he moves to take some of the starch out of Navy life, Zumwalt has also taken charge of modernizing its forces to meet its traditional missions. He does not like the Administration's insistence that the fleet be cut by about 30% (from roughly 900 to 600 ships); but if it must be done, he wants to decide how to do it. A former director of the Pentagon's Naval Operations Systems Analysis Group, he was selected to argue with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's computer-conscious experts in their own language. His studies now convince him that more of the nation's nuclear deterrent must be moved to sea with longerrange, submarine-carried missiles. His Navy must produce a ship-to-ship missile, as the Russians have done, and it must improve its anti-submarine forces.

Zumwalt concedes that some of the 18 working carriers could be eliminated. He proposes making the remaining flattops serve a dual role, carrying antisubmarine aircraft as well as jet fighters. Rather than keeping aging ships afloat, Zumwalt prefers to put money into the development of new forces, including more nuclear-powered ships, hydrofoils and vertical takeoff aircraft. He is especially interested in all aspects of electronic warfare and surveillance, contending that if there is a World War III, the relative mastery of electronics will determine the outcome.

Decorated for World War II service aboard a destroyer in the Battle for Leyte Gulf, Zumwalt also commanded a river gunboat that sailed up the Yangtze River to help disarm Japanese forces in Shanghai. There he met an attractive White Russian girl from Manchuria, Mouza Coutelais-du-Roche, who is now his wife. Trim and fit in body, Zumwalt is also a disciplined logician. He won speech and debating laurels at the Naval Academy (where he ranked 34th in his class of 615, but 275th in conduct). An eclectic thinker, he prefers reading contemporary political, sociological and technical works to military history. At the National War College in the early '60s, he studied the politics of the Kremlin. Zumwalt understands the current apathy of many youths toward the Soviet Union's military posture, but predicts that Russian intentions, as well as its growing forces, will become an all too clear menace within five years. Even so, the unconventional admiral argues that the immediate key to a strong and effective Navy lies in the kind of intelligent and motivated manpower it can attract, rather than in its machines. "If we must err," says Zumwalt, "it should be in favor of people rather than hardware."

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