What I’m about to describe takes too many words to put in the thread title, so I had to be vague. Sorry.
Suppose Joe Soldier (or Joe Officer, as the case may be) gets a hair up his/her butt to try out for some elite position (fighter pilot, Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, Green Beret), etc. I’ve heard that those who fail the initial training or testing period for these positions are made to spend the rest of their careers doing some menial job such as file clerk or paint-chipper. Therefore, wannabes were discouraged from testing, and only those who had the goods and knew it would try out. Reference to this was made in the film An Officer and a Gentleman. The mean dad says to Richard Gere’s character “In my day, if you flunked fighter pilot school they made you a swabbie.” I take that to mean that the practice did exist at one time, but had stopped as recently as the mid 1980’s (when the movie was made). [sub]Yes, I KNOW movies are fiction.[/sub]
So what’s the Straight Dope? Did they ever do this? Do they still do it today? Or are those who fail allowed to go back to their old jobs in their branch?
Before a soldier or sailor can attempt an elite school such as Ranger, Green Beret or Seals they already have a MOS (military occupational specialty). If they should fail during their elite training then they would simply revert back to that MOS.
ie if an infantryman attempts Ranger school and fails he will go back to a regular infantry line unit, typically the same one he was detached from to go to Ranger training.
I don’t know the answer for what happens to those officers who are dropped such schools like flight training. I would imagine they are reassigned as per the needs of the service.
IMO, there’s not much sigma in trying and failing to get in an elite unit, as long as the failure was not because of misconduct. A second failure might be different.
It was my understanding when I was a enlisted man draftee 30 years ago, that if an officer had been passed over twice for a promotion, they were basically dead meat and could expect to never be promoted, and perhaps removed from the service.
I knew a number of Naval officers who washed out of their specialties (such as flight school, Naval Nuclear Power School, etc.) during initial training.
In general, the practice was for them to cool their heels for a few months while applying for a different specialty. If they remained a Line officer, they often switched to SWO (Surface Warfare Officer), driving ships. Some switched to the Staff corps, becoming Supply officers or CEC (Civil Engineering Corps) officers. Many of these officers had successful careers in their second specialty, and there was no penalty for washing out of their first specialty.
(Indeed, promotion boards are primarily made up of officers within a given specialty, e.g. SWOs select SWOs for promotion, and they couldn’t care less if an officer up for promotion washed out of flight training at the beginning of their career.)
HOWEVER, if an officer washed out of their second specialty, they were generally separated from the service, or they became an Admin officer somewhere for the remainder of their short career. These officers generally failed to be promoted to Lieutenant (O-3) and were then separated for failure to select.
NO way, the only punishment is the embarrassment of washing out. If you get a cool duty like that you still remain an officer and officers aren’t typically paint scrapers (unless they go to jail which is another subject entirely) It’s even possible to wash out of something like “fighter pilot” and be reassigned to fly a different plane - depends on the reason you washed out.
Wasn’t “An Officer and a Gentleman” about the Naval Academy? If you wash out of that, aren’t you still obligated to serve out your term as an enlisted man? Are you sure that the line was about pilot school?
I’ll specifically address the “fighter pilot” portion of the OP.
I instructed at a pilot training base for my last three years of active duty, and here’s the way it works:
First of all, all people that go through flight school are officers. The only exception to this is the Army, which trains warrant officers to fly.
If a student washes out of pilot training, they will be given the chance to go into another career field. Where they go will depend on the needs of the service. In the early 90s when the military was drawing down some people who washed out early in the program were allowed to leave the service altogether. In any case, the person would go into another O-1 position. This could be anything from aircraft maintenance, to weather, to supply…you get the idea. They would not be “busted down” to “swabbie”, or whatever the Air Force equivalent of that is.
Now, once someone graduates from pilot training things change. Wearing those wings makes a big difference. If someone goes into training for fighters and washes out of say, F-16 school, the Air Force is not simply going to say “Go be a weatherman now”. They have invested a lot of money and time in this person already (pilot training alone is one year, F-16 school another 6 months). What normally happens is the person gets some paperwork added to their file that says “cannot fly fighters” and is sent off to learn to fly some other aircraft - he can still be useful as a pilot, just not a fighter pilot.
Now if someone is really bad but somehow made it through pilot training (it happens), they can have what’s called a Flying Evaluation Board (FEB). We had a guy in my old C-141 unit who went to aircraft commander school and couldn’t make it through. He failed every checkride and after a lot of extra training and even more checkrides busts they said “uncle” and gave him an FEB. The Board decided that he was no longer useful as a pilot and removed his aeronautical rating (like I said - bad). He came back to the unit and worked as an executive officer for a while until he separated from the Air Force.
FEBs are extremely rare - the “weeding out” process of the commissioning sources (ROTC, OTS/OCS, Academies) and pilot training work very well. Washing out of fighter upgrade is somewhat more common - I know of several people who did this and went on to fly other aircraft successfully.
Washing out of pilot training is the most common of all. Some classes will have 30% of their students not make it through the program.
Nametag , An Officer and a Gentleman was about Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS). This is a commissioning source, but different from ROTC or the Naval Academy. In essence you show up (with a 4-year degree in hand, mostly) and about 13 weeks later you’re an officer ready to go to flight school. You have no commitment to the Navy, and if you wash out you are on the street. The only exception to this is if you were on a Navy scholarship during college. They WILL try to get their money back from you in this case.
Not to nitpick, but there is a SEAL enlisted flying program. Very elite and not many people know about. flyboy88 and I had a discussion about this a few months ago on this board (he’s an active duty officer flying out of VA Beach).
And the swabbie thing is, IIRC, old fashioned, as my father used to refer to me that way, however, the pejorative du jour is squid/squidly.
As of about 14 years ago, if you washed out of ROTC (at least Marine Option, NROTC), you either paid back the moola they had spent, or you go to Boot Camp. I had a guy in my unit do that, and he did well as an Enlisted Marine, rose quickly to Corporal.
Just another aspect of this, when I went to school for my class “A” training in the Navy, if you failed out of the program, then you were sent to a ship as an ‘unrated’ sailor. Which means you didn’t have a job specialty, and you were basically just slave labor until you were able to find another rating that you could apply for. It might take over 2 years to be able to get into another training school. So yes, in a sense if you washed out, you would be a “swabbie” for a long period of time.
My soon to be ex husband washed out of nuclear school and a couple of his buddies- they all got to pick new ratings- one went to torpedo school, my husband went to crytography- another went to fort leavensworth for something or other
pilot is correct in everything he said. Getting winged is hard and if you don’t make it, you’ll probably wind up as a ship driver if you’re in the Navy. It’s not a penalty coming from the person assigning jobs. But for those who are lucky enough to get in the flight program, the difference between the two communities (surface warfare and aviation) is huge. The aviation community is more laid back, casual, and friendly. You’ll never see two Junior Officer aviators salute each other if they’re different ranks. Contrasted to the ship drivers, who really eat their young and are more rigid in their social structure, aviation is almost a sublime place to be. Washing out of that world and winding up in surface warfare would be a nightmare (it was for me, anyway, and was a huge motivation to do well in the flight program).
BF, I remember the conversation. I did ask around about that program, but no one I know knows anything about it. Unfortunately, I don’t know any SEALs.
As a nitpick, AOCS no longer exists. It’s been combined with OCS.
Ah, ya ain’t missing much!! Just kidding. I got a bud who is the Force master blaster for them. He didn’t elaborate, seems to be hush-hush. And I’ve shot with his buddy who’s a retired E-7 who flies jets for Fed-Ex…
According to Tom Clancy’s non-fiction book “Submarine”, if somebody in the Royal Navy goes to Submarine School and flunks it, they give them a bottle of scotch (or some other drink, I don’t remember exactly) and boot them out of the Navy completely.
My husband was (until July when he retired) a Supply Corps officer in the Navy. He was also a mustang – navy-speak for an enlisted man who rose up through the ranks and became a commisioned officer. While in Supply Corps school after his commissioning he met a washed-out SEAL and they became friends. This fellow is a great guy who was very frank about his reasons for washing out. The physical part was no problem for him, but when it came right down to it he just found he didn’t have the type of mental attitude to be a SEAL, so he left SEAL training and applied for, and got, Supply Corps School. Some years later, my husband was Supply Officer at the SEAL training facility at Coronado, CA and came to know that community about as well as anyone who is not actually a SEAL can. There is no stigma among the SEALs themselves against students who wash out of training – so long as they don’t wash out due to bad behavior. In fact, they prefer that students who discover that they aren’t SEAL material wash out before training is completed, so they won’t endanger other SEALs or SEAL missions once on duty. That is why the training is so mentally and physically arduous.
UncleBill, Army ROTC did that too when I was in college: those who got any ROTC scholarship would get an enlistment obligation proportional to how much time and $$$ the Army put into them. I knew someone who got ROTC money while in school at JHU and upon washout was pressed into enlisted service. As someone a college grad c. 1989, he was E3 right off the bat and E4 at 6 months, served in Desert Storm.
I believe there is or was the same situation if you wash out of the Academy for reasons other than disciplinary (e.g. flunking) after the Army has invested X time and money on you.
If you’re in a direct-entry commissioning program, flunking means civvy street, just like flunking out of Basic Training would.
Among Army enlisted, an equivalent to the OP “myth” is that automatically, if you flunk AIT school, it’s off to MOS 11-B (grunt infantryman). The reality is that you’ll likely be temporarily assigned to something more akin to “all-purpose menial laborer” until Personnel can place you in another training that fits the needs of the service and your ASVAP score. If there happens to be a war going on, why yes, they’ll take all the 11-Bs we can give them. OTOH this week they may need cooks. Or truck drivers.
