High ranking officers aren’t typically ‘cruising home’ to retirement, but maintaining a career longer than 20 years. Officers not selected for promotion may be maintained if they are within 2 years of retirement.
Based on casual observation I believe the typical career would put an officer with no prior enlisted service at around LTC at 20 years. Prior enlistment changes this. I suppose you could work out the theoretical lowest rank for a retiring commissioned officer from the youngest age of enlistment and maximum age of commissioning. My WAG would be CPT.
I hope responding to all these in separate posts isn’t too big a no-no.
From a utilitarian perspective ‘up or out’ makes a great deal of sense.
Your otherwise-qualified soldier will be replaced by a younger, fitter (on average) soldier you can pay less. This new soldier also has the possibility of attaining higher rank that the previous soldier was ill-suited for, allowing you to replace your retiring senior leaders. If your low ranks stagnate with just-capable enough bodies how do you create future leaders?
You may have heard that people aren’t exactly breaking down the doors of U.S. military recruiting stations lately. Why not keep an excellent soldier at a rank he likes if he doesn’t want to be promoted?
A SPC (P) with 15 years would not be allowed to reenlist for 6 years. You cannot reenlist for longer than your RCP would allow. I am not sure of the RCP for SPC, it may not even be possible for them to stay in until 15 years at that rank.
Certainly, when there are man-power shortages every factor in recruiting and retention are adjusted. These include lowering recruitment standards, increasing enlistment and reenlistment bonuses, extending RCPs, and allowing more waivers. All of these are occurring.
I don’t believe that any excellent soldiers are currently being denied reenlistment due solely to failure to advance. However, ‘up or out’ systems are necessary when you promote solely from within. Turnover is what enables you to find your future Sergeants Major. Whenever turnover ceases, due to lack of enlistees, or lack of vacancies, a crisis is imminent.
I now see that Indefinite Reenlistment is mandatory for all soldiers with >10 years. Indefinite Reenlistment ends no more than 29 days after the appropriate RCP, or as initiated by the soldier’s Voluntary Separation Request.
There are probably exceptions when deployed, so if our enterprising-but-not-promotion-seeking E-4 could figure out how to stay deployed for 5 years, maybe they could swing it.
A good friend of mine is an Air Force Reserves officer. He had to make Lt. Col. in order to get his 20 years. He had two shots to do it with out getting kicked out. He made it on his first try. He told me that just under 50% of Majors make Lt. Col. (in his area anyway) and fewer than 20% of Lt. Cols. make full Col. He is a JAG and they start out as 1st Lt and then make Captain in six months so maybe a regular officer who starts at 2nd Lt could retire as a Major.
Another friend did retire as a Major in the Army National Guard but he started his career as enlisted for a few years first. I bet that someone who started as enlisted and then got a commission could retire as a Captain.
Yes…A captain I worked with was enlisted for much of his early career. He made major before he retired, but he had always planned on retiring at 20 anyway. NG might be different on RCPs anyway.
I agree. I have seen how lack of promotion availabilty ruins a good sailor/marine’s morale.
There are only so many E-7/E-8/E-9 promotions available per cycle, and when someone gets passed over for promotion, inevitably they feel that they are not being rewarded for faithfull service. Sometimes the reason is that there are already too many E-whatever’s in their MOS, and their are very few promotions available that year. “Up or Out” will prevent someone from tying up an E-7 billet for a decade or two (career years 20-30), and causing several otherwise qualified E-6’s to give up and seek employment on the outside.
Up-or-out programs come and go. Sometimes the branch of service is trying to cut back on the number of people they have to satisfy some budget or manning requirement. One way to do that is by attrition, and one way to speed up attrition is with a program like up-or-out. I knew a lot of career E-5/E-6 guys who were just fine with that paygrade. Generally, people don’t want to stay at grades below that because they need the money, and you top out paywise in a lower paygrade fairly quickly.
Hence my suggestion (in post 15) that pay raises continue for those who want to stay at a rank for which they’re well-suited and in which they’re doing a good job.
Almost every Brigadier General that’s ever been promoted from colonel to the one star has already served 20 years…it takes a long time to reach general officer rank, and the selection process with the general officer boards can be quite political.
Oh, and forgot to add: you can achieve rank right at the time of your enlistement if you have some college or a college degree. I had several guys in basic training with me that already were E-3’s (PFC).
I did 5 years in the Army and left as an E-4. They wanted to reenlist me, offered me an E-5 promotion and a pretty nice bonus, but I wanted to go to college.
I would suspect that that would be viewed as rewarding someone for not taking on more responsibility, something that is against the grain of military-think. The goal is to create a fighting force that is strong on leadership skills and to reward those who demonstrate those skills. While what you’re suggesting sounds simple, it would basically require a complete restructuring of the promotion/pay and incentive programs that now exist. I doubt there would be much interest just to accommodate the few underachievers who want to stay put.
Nitpick: an US Army E-9 is a Sergeant Major. A Command Sergeant Major isn’t a rank but an administrative position as the senior enlisted advisor to the commanding officer of a command unit typically of regiment or brigade size or larger. A CSM is typically an E-9, but can be an E-8 (1SG or MSG) in battalion size command. Similar positions are held in the USAF (Command Chief Master Sergeant), USN (Command Master Chief Petty Officer), and USMC (Command Sergent Major), usually advising the C.O. of a wing, large boat or small battle group, and battalion sized command or larger, respectively. Note that NCOs holding these positions are not referred to by their position but by rank:[ul][li]Army: Master Sergeant[]Air Force: Chief Master Sergeant or ‘Chief’[]Navy: Master Chief Petty Officer or ‘Master Chief’[]Marine Corps: Sergeant Major or (atypically[sup][/sup]) Master Gunnery Sergeant or ‘Master Gunner’[/ul][/li][sup]*[/sup]Master Gunnery Sergeants are typically an occupational speciality MOS and thus are not placed into administrative positions, whereas Sergeants Major are the enlisted command occupational track. However in some specialty commands it may fall onto an MSG to act as the CSM.
There is a Sergeant Major of the Army, and Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, and Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps) who all report and act as advisors on enlisted affairs to the chief commanding officers of their respective services (who serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Although these are the elite enlisted positions to hold in their respective services, these are still E-9s and technically the same rank as any other MSG/CMSG/MCPO/SGM/MGSG. These are staff (administrative) and not command positions and so these could not be said to be any higher rank, either figuratively or in practice.
Elendil’s Heir’s question about the “up and out” philosophy has already been suitably answered, but that has never stopped me from elaborating. There are several reasons why this is an entrenched philosophy and, frankly, good policy. For one, it prevents soldiers/sailors/airmen/Marines from becoming too complacent in their roles. An army/navy/air force/marine corps is supposed to be a professional and efficient organization that maintains training and operational reliability, not a half-way house for overgrown man-children who can’t cope with life on the Outside (though it often seems to resemble the latter).
Forcing people “up or out” breaks the oft-endured tedium of peacetime military life and encourages cross training which is vital to both maintaining an esprit de corps and an organization that can fill gaps when losses occur from casualties, unexpected burdens, or mismanagement. Being able to shift senior NCOs from, say, light infantry to intelligence analysis to logistics as demands require offers a lot of flexibility, especially in an expensive modern military establishment. It varies on the service and MOS but most senior NCOs will have held three or four distinct operational specialties, and therefore are able to do the kind of crosstalk with other units within a command that officers (which typically hold only one or two specialties, and are often focused on command and management) cannot, or at least not at the level of detail required to coordinate activities.
Finally, as previously noted, it makes holes for junior enlisted personnel who do have ambitions to move up. Because the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) for a command is pretty much rigidly defined by the executive command structure, you can’t just float people around positions that others currently occupy. Having someone stay in an E-5 or lower billet for a 20 year stint would create a bottleneck through qualified positions that up and coming enlisted personnel need to occupy to obtain experience and advancement points. A proper military is a well-run machine, and if your cog doesn’t fit it’ll get jammed and broken, then tossed aside. Whether you think this to be right or wrong, that’s how such a massive and complex organization as a modern army or navy functions effectively, and is probably the reason so many vast non-military organizations (i.e. corporations and government bureaucracies) work as poorly as they do. Military life is a big pain in the ass, and a lot of things are done for no particularly good reason at all, but everything is (more or less) done by rules in a book that anyone can read, rather than the arbitrary whims of an executive or stockholders.
You provide great information, Stranger, and I hate nit-picking for the sake of doing so, but at least in the Army, if you have 3 rockers and a diamond, you are called First Sergeant. If you are the Senior NCO of a company sized element, you are called First Sergeant. The exception would be a less formal, “Top.” If you are an E-9, you are called Sergeant Major, regardless of what your duty position is. In fact, I have shook hands with two Sergeant Majors of the Army, and after the first introduction, both were referred to as Sergeant Major.
I was going to respond to Elendil’s Heir’s post about there not being people beating down the doors to recruiting offices. I respect Elendil, and if I noticed your posts more, I would likely feel the same way about you, hdc, but the thing that I want to put out is that the Army is making its recruiting goals, trust me on this. Overfilling the Army ranks is not always a good thing, and one of the end results of it is that there ends up being a higher level of attrition. There are only so many leadership positions to go around and the Army does not need a lot of well seasoned Privates. The Army progresses on the energy and vitality of the new troops.
It isn’t only the Army, there are many jobs in the civilian world in which upward mobility is expected. How many people do you know that have been ringing a cash register at the local burger franchise for the last ten years, or bagging groceries at Food Town for more than a decade?
As to the comment that the Army has lowered its enlistment standards, I have to say that the standards have gotten stricter in some areas. The Army is the only branch that will accept an applicant without a GED, but you must earn one before you can start Basic Training. You must also score higher than most on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. A high school graduate must score a 31 on the ASVAB in order to enlist, a non-high school grad must score 50 or above in order to enlist. (Keep in mind that these scores are percentile based, so a 50 means the applicant outscored half the people that took the test.) There are no exceptions granted for this. Also, the person cannot have any law violations above minor non-traffic. There will be some exceptions granted, but those are few and far between.
Also, the conduct standards for enlistment have actually increased. For example, shoplifting of an item less than $50 used to be no big deal, the latest update of the Army Regulation covering enlistment (AR 601-210) states that in order to put that person in, he or she must be interviewed by a Commanding Officer, high school graduate or not.
I know a lot of people want to believe that the Army is struggling to fill the foxholes and will enlist anyone, but I have been turning away more than I can enlist lately, yet I am still making my mission of putting people in the Army.
As to retention, one of the reasons that the re-enlistment bonuses are so high is that the Army has become such a highly technical field that civilian employers are fighting to hire former Soldiers. They have the training that a civilian employer would have to provide. In order to keep these highly skilled Soldiers, the Army will offer greater retention bonuses.
In the Navy, you will be separated after 10 years(or was it 12) if you were E-4 or below, and 20 years if you were E-5 or E-6(possibly E-7). Its likely that you can get waivers to stick around a bit longer, circumstances depending.
So generally, no, I would say its extremely unlikely to enter at E-1, and stay there for 20 years, at least in todays military. I can’t really conceive of a circumstance where an E-1 who has always been an E-1 would be valuable enough to warrant keeping around.
The feeling’s mutual, I assure you! As ever, thank you for your service to this great republic.
And thanks, everyone, for your responses to my critique of “up or out.” You still haven’t entirely convinced me, but I now have a much better understanding of the rationale behind the policy. Ignorance fought.
an O-1, Ensign, in the Navy if he has no bad marks will be promoted to LtJg in 18 months. Two years later he will be promoted to Lt. From there on in any more promotions will be by a promotion board. I think it is around 8 years after Lt that they are elegible for LtCmdr. When they elegible their name and all officers elegible are brought before a promotion board. Each year there is a definate number of openings for promotion. The board will go through the list eliminating one at a time until they reduce the number elegible to the number of openings.
If you are passed over the first year you are still OK. If the next time you become elegible and you get passed over again it is expected that yu will resign your commission. If you do not then be prepaired