I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

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Langenator
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Langenator »

And I have no idea how the military would have fought WWII if today's up-or-out personnel policies had been in place in the inter-war years. Most of the senior leadership - Ike, Patton, Bradley, Clark, Devers, Eichelberger, Krueger (who had originally enlisted as a private during the Spanish-American War) would have been booted as Captains or Majors. I assume the Navy would have had the same issue.

Although recall would have been a distinct possibility. When I was doing research for my Master's thesis (on War Plan Green), I noticed that the mobilization plans to support a lot of the pre-WWI 'Color' war plans actually had by name rosters of retired and separated officers to be recalled should the plan be put into effect.

But they wouldn't have had the benefit of all that military professional development and thinking/writing/learning time that they did between the wars.
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g-man
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by g-man »

Langenator wrote: Sun Jun 10, 2018 1:52 pm The 18 months to make 1LT, at least, pre-dated OIF by about 5 years, back to 1998. The Army had under-assessed and thus under commissioned new 2LTs in the wake of the early 90s RIF, and 1997-98 was when that started to play out as a shortage of CPTs They bumped the time to 1LT down to 18 months, effective in April 1998.
Good background info, I actually wasn't aware of the 3-year CPT timeline until I started the transfer process in '07. Somehow that had never made it onto my radar prior to that point.
Langenator wrote: Sun Jun 10, 2018 1:52 pm I would have happily stayed on, even without getting promoted.
This. In. Spades. If the Army was smart enough to keep some Captainsaurus-Rexes or Old Iron around (the Brits apparently do this reasonably well, as far as I understood it as of '07), it would indicate that they're finally playing the long-game, instead of this continual knee-jerk endstrength tail-chasing exercise we see again and again. Like I said earlier, it's not like they don't see the shortages (re: 6/6 AZ non-selects all got SELCON)
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Langenator
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Langenator »

There are trade-offs either way. With the current system, the Army ends up forcing out a lot of officers who are good enough to get the job done ath their current grade, but maybe not good enough to get promoted, at least not within the Green Machine's specified timeline.

With no up or out, the promotion rate slows WAY down, because a lot of officers will just stay on until they can't hack in any more,. If you reduce the number of slots open at any given rank, you can't promote as many people. And then you get guys who are Majors for 15 years (or even 2LTs for 3-4 years.) And you lose a lot of talented, motivated, ambitious officers because they don't want to wait around for promotion.

Now, you could ameliorate some of that, especially at the field grade officer level, by turning a lot of the DoD/DA civilian jobs at big HQs into uniformed jobs, IF you can get Congress to go along with upping the end strength numbers for officers. My last job before I retired was at ARCIC (for those non-Army folks, ARCIC is the 'futures' portion of TRADOC - Training and Doctrine Command. LTG McMaster was in charge of ARCIC when I retired.) In the division I worked in (Joint and Army Concepts Division - JACD) roughly half the people were civilians, and of those civilians, all but two were retired officers, and one of those two got out as a CPT I can't think of any reason those civilian jobs couldn't be done by still serving officers. Maybe create some sort of special category, sort of similar to AGR - no more promotion, but you can homestead. This might be especially useful for HQs like TRADOC and the Combatant Commands and their service component subsidiaries. Plus, it provides a 'reserve' of experience officers to draw on if you need to expand the Army (or other branches) for wartime operations.

(Of course, the .gov employee unions would fight this tooth and nail. There are A LOT of civilian employees within the greater DoD, and a pretty good number of those are pretty high GS grades. I think the lowest we had in JACD was a GS-10 or 11.)
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g-man
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by g-man »

Makes sense to me, which means it’s a total non-starter w/ the DoD. That the Federal employees union is even a thing is totally absurd.

ETA: I have no problem with booting anyone who can’t make CPT when the standard has been “Don’t slap a GO, and don’t get a DUI...”. And if the expanded end strength were limited to ‘Admin track’ troops not in the running for commands, etc, the fast burners would still have somewhere to go. But I have no doubt someone would screw that up.
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randy
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by randy »

I understand that, at least at one time, the Israeli Air Force had a two track system for it's pilots: one for the guys with stars in their eyes, and one for the guys that just wanted to fly and had no desire for Squadron/Wing/Chief of Staff of the AF.

I personally would have been good with Track #2. I liked being an intel weenie going between operational and low level HQ staff planning levels, and I like to think I was pretty good at it.
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Langenator
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Langenator »

Well, the U.S. Army does that, at least in aviation - most of the helo pilots are warrant officers, and all they do is fly. If you ever encounter an Army pilot-type CW4, that guy will have a ridiculous amount of stick time.

But the AF, for institutional/cultural reasons, would never go for that. (They're get twitchy thinking about non-officer pilots for UAVs.) And with certain other flying positions - bombardier, navigator - also being reserved for officers, I don't see that changing. (Imagine the weirdness of a B-1 or B-52, or maybe an F-15E, flown by a warrant, carting around officer(s) in the back seat.)

As far as separating guys who can't make CPT...if you got rid of the up or out, that might also be a problem. There have been times in the Army's history when just making CPT could take 10 years. Not because of any lack of ability or performance, but because there were no open spots to promote into.
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Jered
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Jered »

In the 1960s through the 1980s, the Army had kind of a dual track system for enlisted soldiers.

If you wanted leadership, you could become an NCO. If you were good at your job, you could be a Specialist 4, 5, 6, or 7. So, there were two tracks.

That seems to make sense to me, but is something with which the Army did away.
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Wrenchbender1
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Wrenchbender1 »

Langenator wrote: Tue Jun 12, 2018 9:17 pm (Imagine the weirdness of a B-1 or B-52, or maybe an F-15E, flown by a warrant, carting around officer(s) in the back seat.)
Heh.
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Jered
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by Jered »

g-man wrote: Tue Jun 12, 2018 1:30 pm Makes sense to me, which means it’s a total non-starter w/ the DoD. That the Federal employees union is even a thing is totally absurd.
I work for Big Brother, and most of the egregious shit I've seen has been from non-union supervisors.

I think my union has probably saved the government a lot of money, too. They let the agency settle a dozen years of grievances for less than what they were worth. I pity to think how much a class action lawsuit would cost because a lot of it was from violations of federal employment law and not stuff within a collective bargaining agreement.

My favorite is a manager over in Blaine who blew up someone's garage. He kept his job.

Some other manager cost the agency like $70,000 because he discriminated against someone based on his age. They promoted him twice.

In the federal government, the rot starts from the top.
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g-man
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Re: I regret to inform you that you were not selected for LTC by the promotion board...

Post by g-man »

I’ve seen my fair share of stupid shit from people who didn’t have the first clue about being supervisors, much less supervising civilians. And I don’t disagree that there is a ‘shit rolls downhill’ nature to the rot within the .gov. But FAR too many times I’ve seen room-temperature IQ mouth breathers not get fired over a complete inability to do the job because they could just wait for this rotation of leadership to move on. I don’t mean simply sub-par employees... we’re talking full-on oxygen thieves.
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