Your command opportunities were few per career. And there were not enough to go around, and definitely not enough to afford anyone any do-overs. To make O6, and especially O7+, you needed to be in the right place at the right time every time. And to excel all the way.
ISTM USAF was by design more bottom-heavy in officers than Army or Navy. Lotta folks intended and expected to make O3 & bail out a couple years later almost regardless of how good their career had been to date.
There certainly were cadets with their eyes on high rank from the very git-go. But not that many percentage-wise.
If you multiply those out you’ll see that means ~27% of O1s would make O6 if there was no other source of attrition besides failure to promote.
The reality is there are folks who resign for greener pastures in civilian life, there are losses due to the same health problems & accidents that afflict civilians, plus military training accidents, and actual non-training military operations.
That’s interesting. From what I understand, in the Israeli military for officers to advance they have to spend roughly 1/3 of their time in Command positions, 1/3 in Staff positions and 1/3 in Instruction positions. Commanding a company-level formation at a school would count for their Instruction rotation, and be a normal part of an officer’s career track.
On reflection, that’s certainly what’s happening here and I must concede that you’re right. My point of view of the promotions process was of the promotion boards themselves and the data analysis surrounding them. But by the time of their “in zone” board, lots of officers unlikely to get promoted have self-selected separation. I was not taking this population into account. It’s the same phenomenon as O-5s realizing they’re not going to make O-6, I suppose, but much less visible, at least to where I was sitting.
The commander of my first assigned battalion was maybe the best LTC I had in my career. That unit ran like a well oiled machine and morale was high. We excelled at everything with what felt like little to no effort due to how well that unit was run. At my next duty station he happened to be my brigade commander. We happened to have a short personal moment one day when we were out training. He remembered me despite being just a new E3/E4 at the time. He told me he was very surprised to make O6. He figured his career would top off at LTC. He was basically telling me he was about to retire when he was able to extend his career a bit more. He never got his star. He seemed to have all the right assignments including Pentagon and branch time. He was an excellent officer. No black marks that I knew. But it wasn’t enough for flag rank. Maybe because when he started the Vietnam War was still happening but he never got any combat time. Our battalion stayed in Germany and didn’t go to Desert Storm so no combat time there. This was also Aviation so the pyramid is very steep. There are lots of factors that come into play.
A friend of mine was a Lt. Col. Air Force JAG who retired five years ago. He was active duty in Japan for a while and then was in the Reserves. He never happened to get deployed in Gulf War I of the post 9/11 stuff. He said that making COL was impossible as a result. A lot of JAGs volunteered for deployment for that reason. He would have gone if assigned, of course, but there was no way he was going to volunteer.
My wife’s uncle was a high ranking JAG so your friend probably knows him. Some branches are pretty small. For something like JAG the pyramid is very steep. There isn’t a lot of need for many over the rank of O5 or O6.
An interesting chart. I could make a bunch of observations, but I’ll just add one thing. The target selection rate will vary widely by (what the Navy would call) warfare designator. Some designators are more competitive, some have higher attrition etc., so there are some wide variations in selection rate among the job categories.
USAF was similar in my era. We didn’t exactly have "warfare designator"s by that name, but the same kinds of concepts applied. Particularly in the smaller corners of USAF, it was very difficult to make high rank just because there were so darn few high ranking positions available, and they tended to stay full.
Said another way, a big corporation has a lot more upper-middle managers than does a small one, compared to the total headcount of the respective organizations. There’s relatively more room for both staff & command O6s amongst the e.g. missileers than the e.g. dentists.
IIRC one of the criticisms of the process back then (and the whole morale problem in the Army?) was that “combat experience was recommended for promotions” so fresh lieutenants were rotated into commands in Vietnam just long enough to check that box so everyone got a turn, without being there long enough to figure out how to command or how to build morale.
In one of the Nero Wolfe WW2 stories, Magor Goodwin is talking to a General who is telling Archie the War dept needs Wolfe. Archie mentions that maybe Wolfe would pay more attention if Archie was a Lt Col, not a major . The general looks at him appraisingly, then asks- How long have you been a Major?" Goodwin answers (IIRC) "three months sir " and the General dismisses the idea with a short unprintable word.
Of course in ww2, time in grade could be and often was waived, but…
