I’ve learned, from here, that retirement from the military is different than discharge.
And I’m also aware that Army Officers get promoted or rotated out to reserve status: you aren’t normally allowed to just remain an active officer at the same rank.
So when you are starting out as a Lieutenant, what’s your expectation? If you don’t get promoted to Major, and you don’t want to leave, is what happens to you called “discharge” or is it called “retirement”?
You mention Army, but my knowledge is US Air Force. It’s pretty hard not to make major unless you screw up badly. The US Air Force had a 100% promotion rate to major for all eligible captains recently.
Sometimes there are RIFs (Reduction In Forces) where you can retire earlier than 20 years but at a lower pay.
Another option would be to become enlisted. Your pay would most likely drop; however, at the 30 year anniversary you start drawing retirement at your highest rank.
Of course they can change the rules as needed. After the Cold War, the military was getting rid of people left and right any way they could as part of the “Peace Dividend”. Lately retention has been very bad in the USAF for pilots, other aircrew, and aircraft maintenance people. Hence the 100% promotion rate to major and a lot of bonus money being thrown at the problem.
If you don’t make 20 years you don’t retire. If you are passed over for promotion you are forced to resign your commission. If you have not reached 20 years you are an honorably discharged veteran not a retiree. No retirement pay or benefits.
The answers above, and my answer below are predicated on the US DoD in the last 20-30 years. Different countries and different eras will have different answers. Which one are you asking about?
The typical expectation as a newbie is that if you’re a B+ or better performer and if you want to stay, you’ll have the opportunity to stay to a full retirement with pension and all the rest. If you turn out to be a screw-up, are unlucky enough to be in the wrong spote demographically when a major cutback occurs, or later decide you don’t want to continue with the service, you’ll be pushed out or get out of your own volition. Honorably, but with no ongoing benefits.
US officers leaving the service typically spend a few years in some form of inactive reserve. Which really means only that you must keep DoD up to date on your address and if WWIII breaks out they might call you. Otherwise there’s no obligation or benefit flowing in either direction.
Officers leaving the service may choose to affiliate with the active reserves / National Guard. Assuming they’ll have you. If so you pick up with your old rank & pay, but on a part-time basis with similarly part-time limited benefits. While working you’re earning additional credit towards an eventual retirement pension.
As with the actives, folks can be pushed out of the reserves for individual underperformance or due to budget / headcount cutbacks. Or can choose to quit for any reason.
Bottom line:
Over the long haul from the 1960s to today, the vast majority of Lieutenants and Ensigns who ever started into the services did not retire and were not forced out. Instead they left early of their own volition. In some cases this was because the career prospects looked real bleak due to cutbacks. But mostly it seems it was simply a matter that the deal on offer wasn’t sufficiently compelling and so they left to seek a civilian career.
My uncle was a Navy surgeon and reached, if memory serves, the rank of Captain. He was in for around 30 years; he was in ‘command’ of a naval hospital at some point but obviously didn’t have a path to a sea command, though advancement was not his primary goal, he just liked being a doctor. I guess he could have ended up as surgeon general of the navy, but he was not ambitious in that way. He retired at a comparatively young age because he wanted to make more money for his large family and made some serious bank working a few years for the Saudi armed forces.
If you leave while a Lt or a Captain, you can still transition and have a good and long career elsewhere, often using the military experience as a stepping stone.
As you go higher, number of position reduce and it become much much more selective. 10 Good men for 1 billet kind of thing. A person who leaves as a Major can still just about make a new career. Someone who retires a Lt Col or a Col, is looking at entering the civilian workforce in middle age and with growing children, elderly parents and no roots due to having moved every few years for going on 3 decades. Fun times.
For MilContractors. Who promptly hire many of them.
LSLGuy I would venture people who started up at the same time as you did and stayed in, are now all retired? Or three/four stars?
Now that that’s cleared up, why did Winnie Kirkwood always refer to her husband Gordon as “The Colonel” (even to his face, IIRC) instead of just calling him Gordon, the way Wilbur and Carol did?
That’s my belief. I started active duty 35+ years ago. I know of one squadron-mate and contemporary from my 2Lt. days who made 1-star general. USAF’s website now shows him as retired effective 2011 after 30 years’ service. AFAIK everybody else I ever knew personally finished earlier with lesser rank.
As a point of comparison the immediately prior commander of all USAF tactical forces (IOW the head honcho fighter jock) retired as a 4-star in Mar 2017. He started out 2-3 years ahead of me.
Plus/Minus 1 or 2, my generation is all at the DoD old fart’s home by now. Won’t be long and the last of us will also be at the airline industry old fart’s home too.
Not just WWIII. I, a lowly enlisted soldier, was called back after 2 and a half years as a civilian for the Iraq “Surge” in 2007. As I was going through processing, there were several retired officers with us who were called back from the IRR too, including one Colonel Sanders whose name was quite memorable.
I remember thinking, as shitty as it was for me to be yanked out of college and away from my infant child several years after I thought I was done with that whole Army thing, it must have been a lot worse for a ~60 year old man who thought he had retired a decade ago.
That’s kinda funny in a way.
I had been out of the actives and into the IRR for ~18 months when Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait & GHWB decided to push the Iraqis back out. I tried to get back into some flavor of active duty, active reserve, or active Guard. HQ said we have no need of somebody who’d been out so long and was (just) over 30.
It’s amazing how much a few years of real warfare will burn through the actives and the IRR. Your story dates from 2007, fairly early in this unending cycle of bush-league (heh :)) but nonetheless individually miserable and lethal warfare.
I wonder how it looks to the few folks being allowed to separate now in 2017?
So there’s no partial vesting of the pension then? That seems to be basically a pyramid or tontine insurance scam.
In a source dated 1960 I read that military officers in the United States periodically came “into the zone”, at which point they might be promoted to the next rank. They could normally expect three chances, that is, three times in the zone, but if they didn’t get promoted by the third time they were supposed to resign. Do they still get two free “passovers” today?
I never quite understood the up-or-out ethos. I appreciate the fact that they need to make room for new blood, and also that if you’ve been a navy ensign or arm second lieutenant for 20 years there’s somthing wrong. But what if you get forced out for not being promoted, and then the new person assigned to your role can’t handle it? What if you do get promoted, and neither one of you can handle your new assignments? It seems like a waste.
None. 19 years 364 days service = bupkiss. 20 years zero days service = pension and medical care for life. Oh, and for all of those 19 years and 364 days you can’t make tax deductible IRA contributions because you’re “covered” by a retirement plan. ([/rant] in case you couldn’t tell. 
)
As to the up or out, the point is that the only thing an officer was traditionally used for was to command things. If you’re not able to command ever larger organizations as you gain experience, you have no place in the system. And inherent in that ever larger command is that there’s ever fewer of them. We might need thousands of LTs to command the Army’s thousands of platoons. We sure don’t need thousands of generals to command our half-dozen field Armys. Same concept applies for the other services.
DoD has been grappling with the fact that officers do stuff other than command for years. To no good resolution.
The enlisted pipeline has the same kind of problem. The Army, though not the other services, experimented with the “specialist” concept of enlisted ranks that were meant to be lifetime journeymen workers rather than growing up to be team supervisors. Loach can say more than I can, but when I was working with the Army the specialists were sorta second class citizens. The “corporate culture” never really embraced the idea.
The Army also uses warrant officers as a similar lifetime journeyman career path. Which ranks the other services also got rid of years ago.
Ultimately these are tough problems. You don’t want a DoD that looks like the post office; full of lifetime bureaucrats who’ve held the same job at the same desk for 15 years. You want youth and vigor and fresh enthusiasm. The system worked pretty well in WWII wartime when you had large scale combat attrition to winnow the field. Absent the Grim Reaper there needs to be some other force pruning out the field.
I don’t know how common that is, but I certainly* hear* about it frequently enough. If we looked at plot of counts vs time, I wonder if we see a bump before 20.
There is partial vesting now, but that’s a recent thing. For most of the American military’s history, it was cliff vesting as others have noted. Since everyone, (and everyone’s aunt) knew you got a retirement at 20 but got nothing at 19, it’s hardly a scam
ETA: @Ruken
I don’t understand what you’re saying.
DoD does not have any reputation, as some civilian companies did, of selectively shit-canning people just before their vesting date. Rather the opposite.
The attractive pull of the retirement bennie is pretty weak if you’ve served 4 years and are facing the decision to renew your contract or get out. But at least in my era in USAF the conventional wisdom was that once an officer had 12 years in you could screw him (in that era about 95% him) however you wanted and he’d stick to 20 come hell or back-to-back Arctic radar station tours.
So what you’d see in the big picture is voluntary separations are monotonically decreasing from year 1 to year 12ish and then level off at very close to zero until 20. Involuntary up-or-out separations have bumps in their road since generally speaking you need to make O5 to be allowed to stay to 20 and that’s only 4 promotion steps you can flunk. In my era in USAF those fell at 2 years, 4, years, 12 years and roughly 16 years’ service. The first two are pretty well fixed across all of DoD for all times. The other two flex up or down a couple years depending on the service and the era. As well the failure rate of the first two is negligible but the others are more like (my era again) 80% & 50% success.
Lastly, although officers don’t have fixed enlistment terms, you generally owe them 4 to 8 years for your initial accession and training. And each time you attend another school, or ship overseas, or change bases, that tacks a couple years on. The commitments generally run concurrently, not consecutively.
But nevertheless, the punch line is that for folks below about 15 years, you can’t up and quit on any given day like a civilian can. You’re almost always still working off the tail end of a prior commitment. Every couple of years you’ll come to the end of what you owe them, or they’ll offer you your next assignment which comes with a 2- or 3-year hitch connected to it. Typically they’ll try to make the next job offer before you’ve lived out your current commitment. That way you’re never free to just walk out.
In my era, upon them making your next job offer you had two choices: take the job wherever doing whatever, or resign. You have 7 days to decide. The job itself might not start for 3 to 6 months. But you need to decide this week. You can see how this lends itself to abusing the 15-year-and-up folks.
Colin Powell in his book described two major Reductions in Force that he experienced.
The first after the Vietnam drawdown. There were too many officers and too few posts for them. The Army did not know what to do with him and sent him to do a Masters and then a White House fellowship. Mostly, to get him out of their hair. He recalled when he returned 3/4 years later he was handed a battalion command, despite never having served as an XO, since due to the RIF so many good officers had left, there was now a shortgage. The description of trying to find good eperienced men for Company Command, a few short years after Vietnam is eye opening.
The second one is post Cold War as CJCS. And his struggles with the Clinton administration, as mindful of his own experiences a genertion earlier, he wanted to make it difficult for talented officers to leave and provide incentives to stay. One of his biggest disputes with the SecDef, who was willing to let anyone walk.
In both cases he states outright that good officers found oppurtunities in civilian life and left, leaving young and or mediocre men behind.
TL: DR, as you go higher the number of spots reduce vis-a-via the number of vacancies. You want to keep the talented and capable officers, the future mid level leaders of the Army around. If you don’t give them good conditins (like reasonably regular promotions), you will lose them.
'Zactly.
Corporations have the same problem: if they offer a buyout or early retirement program, their best workers with the best job prospects elsewhere take the money and go work for their competitors. Meantime the lazy and hopeless stay behind.
Corps can at least recover from their mistakes by hiring in new mid- or upper-level people from competitors. DoD can’t do that. One ill-timed or oversized RIF can cripple the service for the next 20 years. It’s a lot more like a lunatic taking a chainsaw to an ornamental tree; ain’t never gonna be the same after that.
They have that very reputation, which is why I’m wondering what the actual data look like to determine whether it is warranted or if the frequent loud complaints I hear about 19.5ers are just rare but loud exceptions.
I spend 30 years in the military. This belief that there were folks that were shown the door at 19 1/2 years is nonsense. Total nonsense. First, you hit “sanctuary” at 81 years. There have to be significant circumstances to hit 18 and not reach 20. I’m talking UCMJ violations type of circumstances. There is no reason to kick people out that close to retirement. On the contrary, people make efforts to help people reach 20.
But as I mentioned up thread, the cliff vesting at 20 years is ending, so people will have some retirement before 20 now. It will be interesting to see what that does to the force.
As was mentioned briefly there are recent changes to this. There is now some sort of hybrid 401k system in place that I didn’t bother to understand because I retired before it went into effect.
To throw some other scenerios in to muddy the water, when you are talking about the National Guard there are more options. When I was in aviation I saw many active duty commissioned officers resign their commission and go to the Guard as a warrant officer. Some just didn’t want to be active any more, others couldn’t get up the very steep pyramid. This can be done in other army branches that have warrants too but the number of warrant billets are much smaller. It’s also possible to resign your commission and become enlisted. Upon retirement you get paid at your highest rank obtained.