How does someone joining the military get to be an officer? The ways I know about are through the various academies and college ROTC programs. A co-worker and former army captain told me about the Green-to-Gold program through which sergeants could be commissioned. But if Joe College Grad completes basic training, they don’t automatically pack him off to OCS or grant his request to be assigned to OCS, do they? Did they ever? Is it a matter of what billets they need to fill?
Thanks,
Rob
In the US there are generally four ways to become an officer:
Attend one of the military academies (West Point, Anapolis, Air Force Academy, Coast Guard Academy).
Go to a regular college and join the ROTC.
Obtain a college degree and then apply directly to Officer Candidate School
Enlist in the service and then apply for OCS after meeting the educational and other requirements.
To address this: being a college grad does not automatically get one shipped off to OCS – you have to apply for it. Lots of college grads choose to enlist rather than going for a commission for a variety of reasons. For example, maybe they want to do a highly-skilled MOS which would only be available to an enlisted person.
If you really want to become an officer, the best way to do it is to get accepted into an officer program before you enter the military.
If you are already in the military as an enlisted person (college degree or not), the military has very little incentive to advance you into an officer program unless you demonstrate superior performance and leadership ability.
I knew a sailor once who enlisted in the Navy after having received a B.A. degree in English. He applied for officer programs on a regular basis the whole time I served with him. However, he was just an average to below-average performer (which was perhaps due in part to his disillusionment with his position in the Navy), and so he was never was even so much as recommended by his command for officer training.
Attending a service academy is probably the surest way to get a commission, but it is very competitive, and you have to meet strict age guidelines. Also, you cannot already have a college degree.
Better than joining ROTC after getting to college is to apply for and get a 4-year ROTC scholarship prior to entering college. When I was in Navy ROTC (NROTC), there was a distinction between “scholarship” and “college program” students. There was a competitive bottleneck between sophomore and junior year for college program students. Only the top college-program performers were allowed to stay in ROTC, whereas all of the scholarship students were automatically continued. The difference was that the scholarship program was competitive from the start, whereas anybody could join the college program. Also, only the scholarship program covered university tuition. Again there are age guidelines, and you can’t already have a university degree.
This is the next surest way to a commission, by a distant margin from the first two. Because there is a 4-year pipeline for the first two, the number of officer candidates accepted into OCS can vary widely depending on the needs of the service. If the service has enough officers in the pipeline from the first two sources, the OCS spigot can be all but cut off, and it can very difficult to get accepted. This is the only sure commissioning source for college graduates, though.
As I noted previously, this can be a real crapshoot. An average performer is likely to remain enlisted. Note that applying to OCS is only an option for enlisted service members with college degrees. Enlisted personnel without degrees can apply to a service academy or BOOST, the latter of which (for the Navy) leads to an ROTC scholarship.
Unless things have changed in 20 years the Air Force OCS people get the last shot at jobs such as pilot and navigator. And if you do get picked as pilot you won’t get the latest planes. The best slots go to academy people and then ROTC people. Not sure if the Navy and Army use that same system.
I am pretty sure that at all 4 of the academies the order in which you pick your job and location depends on your class rank. If you are a top student you pick first. If you are not a good student you take whatever slots are left when you pick.
Some professional degrees will get you entry as an officer. I think JAG corps enter as O2, with an automatic promotion to O3 in six months.
Those commissions will never lead to command authority, though, will they?
I think it depends on the branch. I heard a Navy JAG officer once say that his dad, a career Marine, told him to join the Navy after law school and not the Marines, which surprised him. He said that a Navy JAG would basically be put through a course where he was taught basic military discipline 101, who and who not not to salute and so on, but joining the Marines is joining the Marines. If the powers that be decide they need a field artillery or infantry officer more than they need a lawyer at the moment, then that’s where you’re going. “Every Marine a rifleman” and such, I suppose.
Former Navy JAG here.
The Navy/Army have separate “staff corps” for their legal personnel (also for medical and civil engineering folks). Staff corps officers are lower in precedence than “line officers” (the real “warfighters”, in current jargon), and cannot command operational combat units, but they can and do exercise “command authority” over other officers and enlisteds within their staff corps community: for example Navy JAG Corps officers can aspire to be commanding officers of Naval Legal Service Offices, and Navy doctors/nurses can rise to be commanding officers of Naval hospitals/medical centers.
The Air Force doesn’t have a separate JAG Corps, but their lawyers are designated “Judge Advocates” and IIRC their management and administration are pretty much as if they had their own separate JAG Corps (ex-AF JAs, if any, out there please correct me if wrong).
Marine lawyers all go to OCS (assuming they’re not Academy or NROTC graduates) and The Basic School, and are basically Marine Corps line officers (well, duh! The Marines don’t have any staff corps–they leave that crap to the Navy). Not only can a Marine lawyer be assigned to an infantry, air, artillery, or armor billet as the needs of the service require, some of them are badass enough that they actually request to be assigned to combat units and move, in their careers, back and forth between legal and non-legal assignments. It’s my understanding that the Coast Guard manages their legal community in a similar manner, and it’s not unusual for a Coast Guard lawyer to do regular sea tours in various cutters (eventually rising to command at sea), while rotating to legal officer billets for her/his shore assignments.
Cheers,
bcg
The Navy used to have a few mustang programs. One was called NESEP, which was the Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program. If you made the cut, you went to prep school in San Diego. If you made it through that, you went to a four-year University and had to major in science, engineering or math. I made it as far as two and a half years at the University of Idaho before tanking my grades. At that point, you return to the fleet at whatever enlisted rank you’ve managed to achieve to that point. I think the program is now defunct.
There is (or was) also the LDO (Limited Duty Officer) program. Many regular officers referred to graduates as Loud, Dumb and Obnoxious, so you can see that there was little respect for those who came up that way. The program was open to E-6 and above who had top-notch evaluations, but selection was limited to very few each year.
There was also the Warrant program for E-7 through E-9, but you’re really trading off power and prestige to go from Chief grades to Warrant, where nobody respects you.
Not all commissions are the same. A line commisssion will lead to many dirrerent duties including command. A JAG commission means you will be a lawyer. In the TV series Harm had the lawyers marking on his uniform, that means he would have never been a pilot.
A line commission is a star on the uniform. Mine was a line commission, it should have been restricted, should have been EDO ( engineering duty only) I am color blind and never should have been on a bridge of a moving ship at night. I graduated from one of the Maritime Academys.
Things may have changed from when I was applying to college and considering ROTC, but IIRC the college-program students who were allowed to continue from sophomore to junior year started receiving checks from Uncle Sam (a subsistence allowance) for their last two years of college; scholarship students received it all four years. That may account for some of the difficulty for college-program students to progress into the final two years, since Uncle’s investing money in you now. 
IIRC, BOOST has been revamped and changed a bit, and is now “Seaman to Admiral” (the Army has a similar program they call “Green to Gold”). Still, true that it’s a college scholarship/commissioning program.
Cheers,
bcg
Not quite. From what I’ve heard (I never watched “JAG”, it was so unrealistic it made me physically ill), Harm was a former pilot who became medically unfit for flight ops, and transferred into the JAG Corps (where he got the law degree, I don’t know). That’s plausible; in my time in the Navy JAG Corps I served with several lawyers who were former pilots (as well as former ship or sub drivers). None of them was medically unfit, but all of them either went to law school while still in the Navy (either on the Navy’s dime–a sweet deal if you could get it–or via a released time program where they got time off with pay to attend, but had to pay for law school themselves) or got out, got the law degree, and then joined the JAG Corps (a JAGC commission is a sweet deal for prior service officers, because their prior service (officer or enlisted) counts for pay purposes, if not for promotion).
What was really implausible about “JAG” was (or so I’ve heard) an arc in the series where Harm’s medical conditionn was cured, and he got back into the cockpit of a fighter. No. Frakkin’. Way.
Cheers,
bcg
While in the JAG Corps I worked with a Senior Chief Legalman who was selected and commissioned as an LDO(Law); don’t know if the Navy still has that program in place. I later ran into him after his commissioning when I was flown out to do some legal work on the USS America, which was his first post-commissioning billet (that gives you an idea of how long ago I was in ), and over a cup of coffee in one of the wardrooms he told me, kind of wistfully, how he’d lost prestige in going from LNCS to LTJG.
Cheers,
bcg
Musicians, for instance. ISTR reading that pretty much all military musicians have bachelor’s degrees, and quite a few have masters…
Cheers,
bcg
To become a pilot Harm would have to be a line officer. If his health became an issue and he joined the JAG corps, he would still be a line officer serving with the JAG corp.
The pictures from the show that I can find on the internet all show Harm wearing the JAG Corps mill rinde on his shoulder boards.
This means (if the show is following Real Life rules) that he’s a JAGC officer with a designator of 2500 (assuming he’s Regular Navy, 2505 if Naval Reserve). He’d still wear the Naval Aviator wings on his uniform even if he’s not flying (service members get to wear all properly earned qualification badges even if no longer serving in a billet using the qualifications that the badge signifies). That’d mean that he’d transfered from unrestricted line (URL) officer pilot (designator 1310(regular)/1315(reserve) to JAGC officer, which has been done (I knew quite a few JAGs who did so).
For him to start flying again, he’d have to transfer from the JAGC back to URL (pilot). Then he’d start wearing the line officer’s star on his shoulder boards/above the sleeve stripes. I’ve never seen that done in real life (transfer from JAGC back to URL). Of course in TV anything’s possible (including putting a former pilot-now-JAGC-officer in the cockpit of a fighter), so at this point I should be saying “It’s just a show; I should really just relax.”
Strictly speaking, there’s no requirement in the UCMJ (unless they changed things since I was in the Navy, which was well over 20 years ago) that requires court martial trial/defense counsel to be JAGC officers as long as they’re legally qualified (law degree and bar admission) and certified to be trial/defense counsel by the appropriate service Judge Advocate General. If Harm was wearing a line officer’s star but doing legal work along with Navy JAGC officers, that’s quite plausible. I worked at Naval Legal Service Office, Subic Bay, with a lawyer who was a reserve pilot and lawyer who somehow managed to get himself called to active duty and assigned to a JAGC officer’s billet, even though his designator was 1315 (URL pilot).
Cheers,
bcg
Cannot or are not normally expected to? In extremis, would a lawyer officer be held responsible for enlisted? For example, imagine a breakout from a POW camp where the surviving officer was a lawyer staff corps officer, not a line officer.
Very interesting stuff. Thanks.