Today we kick off Episode 4 of the 7-part Guest Post series: Military Life: Two Perspectives
I hope you are all enjoying these posts as much as I am!
In case you missed the introduction to the series: Military Life: Two Perspectives with Leto and Avalune
The topic today is Moving in the Military, from Leto’s perspective. Next Saturday, we’ll hear Avalune’s perspective on moving.
Take it away, Leto!
This week Avalune and I will talk about moving around in the military. I know the direction of her post so I thought that I’d explain why the military moves us around so much from a Professional Development angle. It essentially boils down to two factors that intertwine: job and leadership experience.
I’ve spoken about this before but my job encompasses are large array equipment. Most Air Force careers (AFSC: Air Force Specialty Codes, otherwise known as MOS: Military Occupational Specialties in Army/Marine parlance, SWABBI in Navy talk) are similar, but none more so than Communications. Over the course of my 22 year career I’ve gone through three different career field mergers, as well as absorbing two to three different career fields into mine. What that means is that by the time you hit my rank/time in service, you need to understand how a lot of different systems interact to bring the whole mission together. While there are overlapping systems at each base, most bases have different subset functions as their specialties. Part of that is due to base closures consolidating many different skillsets/missions into an ever smaller number of bases, the military not wanting to put all of their eggs into one mega base/basket, as well as the political calculus of not wanting to lose jobs in their districts.
Regardless of those, we want well rounded/developed Airmen and the only way to do that is moving them. Staying at one base for 20 years at a stretch is essentially job knowledge suicide. This is something the Air Force recognized during our war years when we deployed many of our people. Many of them got down range and essentially said, “What’s that? I’ve never seen that. I’ve been at base X for the last 12 years and we don’t work on that.” So while technically that person was qualified to deploy, they’re a waste of space.
Which dovetails into the next item that we want to develop: leadership skills. I don’t know if it was intended, but I think it’s a positive byproduct of the officer system which is mandatory move every 2-3 years. Being around the same people, year after year, has both positive and negative effects. While you do get to know your people really well, that can lead to being too comfortable. It can also lead to cliques forming. Not to say that doesn’t already happen, but the long term effects of those can turn deadly. There’s a safety incident I would tell my students as an example of poor leadership that involved the misfire of the A-10s main weapon, the GAU-8 (BRRRRRRRTTTTTTTT). The incident involved the NCO not following proper technical order procedures during a weapons test which resulted in the gun firing indoors through 5 walls, almost killing 8 people. When they did a root cause analysis of the problem they found that it was poor leadership stemming from a shop that was “too familiar” with each other. Leadership didn’t provide proper oversite. They’d been around each other too long. They’d become too familiar.
Moving people around exposes them to new ideas, new ways of doing things. Maybe that great idea that Sgt Bob had will work well at his new base. Maybe Sgt Jane is the person we need to help course correct Airmen Dingbat. Not only are we moving them around to give them better skills to be able to handle different jobs, but we’re also giving them more times to develop their interpersonal skills so they’ll know how to lead/manage/interact with their people. That in turn produces some really good people… of course on the flip side, we still have some really bad people (for my vets: nope, that hasn’t changed. SSDD) Some are excellent technicians, but they have the interpersonal skills of a brick. Some were great managers (office types), but I wouldn’t trust them to screw in a light bulb. The military isn’t any different from the civilian sector in this regard: you want people who are both job and human competent. It’s something that we continue to invest a crazy amount of money to figure out how to do. I like to think that, on par, we’re getting better. Fingers crossed and all!
As always I hope this gives everyone a little better insight into why we do what we do. Again this is focused on the active duty enlisted force, but it holds relatively true for officers as well. I’ll be around for the next few hours to answer questions, so have it!
~Leto
*****
Reminder: Leto & Avalune are standing by for real-time conversation about this post on 3/25. That’s this Wednesday around 8 pm.
The Imperial College Modeling Of The Coronavirus
CWZ
Hello from one old Ground Rat to another. Was a 304×4 in Electronic Security Command back in the ’80s.
JPL
You have a nice smile.
Leto
@CWZ: Hey! It’s always nice running into fellow Ground Rats. Small world and all that :)
@JPL: Haha, thank you. My parents poured a lot of money into my mouth to fix my teeth so I could have a good smile. I’ll let them know it paid off. :)
Ruckus
Leto
The navy has the same problem but has a slightly different bent to it because of actually operating a moving base. Just to make it work people have to stay long enough to learn while operating and running a military unit that has to work as one and the mass of bodies that requires, in a closed and small space means that reasonable leadership is vital and often lacking. Especially during a war, what with a lot of people not actually wanting to be there. (My guess was about 80% of the lower enlisted absolutely didn’t want to be there, maybe more.) On top of that your point about equipment is huge, because those moving bases varied in age, therefore often the technology changed with the time of build. The type I spent 2 yrs on was a series of 29 ships built over 10 yrs and they varied a lot. In our home port we had ships that were 25 yrs old and basically worn out. So transferring was necessary if you wanted to stay in, just to keep the place working at all. And then, living and working in such tight spaces meant that leadership was extremely critical. It wasn’t that people didn’t/wouldn’t do their jobs, that part worked well, it meant that without good leadership the system didn’t work. We had 5 captains in that 2 yrs I was on board. One very good, 2 OK, one not good, and one useless. That’s not good leadership at the upper level.
WaterGirl
@JPL: I thought it looked kind of goofy, myself! :-)
Omnes Omnibus
To build on what Leto was saying, a team that works together for too long can get so that it relies on SGT Bob being good at X, so no one else practices doing X – they wouldn’t be as good as SGT Bob, so what’s the point. If SGT Bob gets hurt or sick or worse, they are fucked. If they know SGT Bob won’t be there forever, a good team will learn as much from SGT Bob as they can while he is there. Good leaders (officers and NCOs) should ensure that people are always training those under them and making sure they are ready to move up to the next level of responsibility.
Also, if someone is hard to work with, you know that you won’t be stuck with them forever.
Leto
@Ruckus:
Commanders can make such a difference in how units are run. At my last assignment in England, we had a change of command after I’d been there for about 8 months. I knew from the incoming commander’s speech that it wasn’t going to be good. And it wasn’t. He was fired about 6 months later. Digging a bit more into his career, he had been working at the Pentagon for the previous six years and this was his first command assignment. He didn’t have the necessary skills to do it and that manifested itself in a ton of different ways, which ultimately led to a Climate Survey of the unit being done. The results came back and it was… how shall I say… extremely poor.
He was fired, the base commander was fired… but the resulting commanders we received were excellent. It shouldn’t have taken two people being fired to get excellent leadership but I’m just a Tech Sgt, wtf do I know? :P (ducks incoming shoe one of my previous bosses would throw any time I said that)
Yutsano
OH BOY! MOVING!!!!
I now have a better understanding about why I hopped so many states as a kid when my dad was in. It’s exactly that: he wanted an actual career rather than just to putz it. It’s how I ended up being born in Hawai’i and ended up with Washington as my sixth state by the time I was 10. He took the offers and off we went. It also explains why we never left the States: as far as I know there are no international bases for boomers.
Although I have a story about being cheated out of a move my junior year of high school,, but I’ll hold that for now.
Omnes Omnibus
@JPL: @WaterGirl: He needs to get his hand out of his goddamned pocket.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: C’mon OO it’s the Chair Force. He probably had an amazing golf game.
Leto
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh man, so many good points there. I’ve worked in shops where we have that one person who’s the master of this certain piece of equipment, and like Omnes said, if they get sick/hurt/deploy/move… it can be a fucking shit show. And that’s putting it mildly. In the Air Force we call those people “knowledge hoarders”. They do it for a variety of reasons but the basic one is they’re scared of being replaced. So the ensure that they can’t, but that in turn hurts the team overall.
One of the best pieces of advice I received when I became an NCO was: train yourself out of a job. You want to train your people to the point that if you get sick/hurt/deploy/move, that they can step into your shoes and keep the mission going without missing a beat. I never had a problem with that mainly because I absorbed that kindergarten lesson early on, but also from a semi-selfish reason: I wanted to left the hell alone. If you’re the single point of knowledge for anything, you’re always on call. They’ll call you at home, they’ll call you while you’re on vacation, they’ll call you while you’re trying to enjoy your anniversary… so while I always enjoyed teaching people knew things, sharing knowledge… I also wanted them to leave me alone!
One of the eternal benefits of the military: either I’m going to move soon or he will. The people who have to be stuck with an asshole for years and years on end… no thank you!
Omnes Omnibus
@Leto: When I arrived at my battalion after training, we had a fairly new battalion commander who had been put into the job after a soldier had been killed in an accident on a firing point. The old CO had been back home for a birthday party when the accident happened, so he was toast in so many different ways. The new commander was very strict about procedure and safety in the field. As a result, I was in a unit that did things by the book which came as a bit of a shock to more experienced people coming in from other units.
Baud
Kind of like Balloon Juice.
Leto
@Omnes Omnibus: If they didn’t want us to put our hands there, they wouldn’t have included them in the design in the first place! My tactical hand camouflage is doing it’s job. :)
Omnes is just jelly that we’re allowed to use umbrellas while it’s raining instead of being completely soaked to the bone.
Leto
@Yutsano: You know, I actually hate golf. We had plenty of functions where it was a booster club event (fundraiser for something), and I’d participate because 1) it was expected but also 2) it was a day out of the office. Most of the time it was really good weather so that was fun, but seriously, golf courses are a perfect waste of parking lot space. :P
Also most golf courses are closing down. At least on AF bases. Because they have to be almost 100% self sufficient, they simply don’t bring in the same revenue because the youngs don’t golf and there’s not enough retirees to keep them open. Most MWR functions are suffering the same fate unfortunately.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Why? He was off duty.
Omnes Omnibus
The best NCOs I knew were always teaching. That included teaching their officers. They became somewhat invested in “their LT” and didn’t want him to look like a dumbass in public; it reflected on them. I did my best to listen. My grandfather had been an E-6 in WWII and talked to me a lot before I went to my first unit. The best advice he gave me was to always listen carefully to your NCOs; you don’t have to do what they say, but you should always listen.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: He was in uniform (sort of). Inter-service stuff; Army and Marines do not walk around with their hands in their pockets – it’s known as “Air Force gloves,” which is spat out by NCOs with great disdain.
Avalune
@Yutsano: The Boy kind of got screwed in some aspects due to the moving – which I’ll be talking about a bit as part of next weeks post, so you can have at it then!
civilian side they call knowledge hoarding “maintaining job security” and it’s bad there too but when we get to third week (working) I have an example of where that works well but still has some big ole pit falls.
Litlebritdifrnt
My last move was from Hong Kong to Scotland in 1988! By the time I got to my home town train station I decided that at 28 it was time to start bloody driving. I had two months leave until I joined FOSNI (Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland) at MHQ Pitreavie so it seemed to be the perfect time. I had no desire to drag my suitcases on and off trains again. I bought a car and started taking lessons. I am happy to say that I drove myself to Scotland to report, suitcases safely in the trunk!
Leto
@Omnes Omnibus: I have a similar story about the second time I was stationed at Shaw AFB. The unit I was assigned to, the 682 Air Support Operations Squadron, had gone through a major inspection and failed it, badly. The inspectors told the commander, “We’re going to be back in 60 days, make sure every item is fixed.”
Inspectors came back in 60 days and… not a single thing had been touched. The commander was fired on the spot. All of the TACPs (Tactical Air Control Party members: they’re Air Force members who are directly embedded with Army units to direct close air support: they direct how the air planes will deploy bombs/guns near the Army guys) were instantly decertified. The certification process is a roughly two year process. All of the NCOs above E6 on their side were reassigned or retired.
The guy who was brought in to clean all of this up did exactly that. By the time I got there it was a very tight run organization, but they were also tired of being under that type of system. The incoming commander made it clear what he expected. Understood what they had been through, how far they had come, and told them that if we returned to that that we’d go back to hell. Nobody wanted a return to that so we made sure it didn’t go back to that.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Where does the Navy put its hands?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: You don’t want to know.
Avalune
@Litlebritdifrnt: Having lived in the U.K., I understand why it takes so long for someone to get their license but in general that is a baffling concept to most Americans. ?
Making it when bags in place is always a major goal of a move lol.
Omnes Omnibus
@Leto: I was artillery. I’ve done some calling in close air support. It’s fun.
Leto
@WaterGirl: @Omnes Omnibus: Indoors you’ll see it more because of a more relaxed atmosphere, but honestly we yell at our people to get their hands out of their pockets. It’s unprofessional looking (even though if you look at pics from WW2- Vietnam, our supposed most “professional time”, the amount of hands in pockets from O-10 to E-1 is quite a bit. I mean, they managed to defeat the Nazis with their hands in the pockets… :P )
I started teaching my people that if you feel the need to put your hands in your pockets, what they should do instead is hook their thumbs around their front belt loops. It was always an acceptable compromise.
Jager
@Omnes Omnibus:
When I was in basic training a million years ago, we had a Corporal who was knee walking dumb, so dumb he got lost marching us for haircuts. About 6 weeks in, I was CQ one night, we were going to get a new company commander in the morning. Our outgoing Company Commander was first-rate, he’d just come off his year in Vietnam. He left this note on his desk. “To my successor, Corporal A will beg you for a transfer to a combat unit. Don’t do it, he’ll get people killed. He signed it, Patrick S. H. 1st Lt, Infantry.
Lt. H was a good leader, the new guy, not so much. We had a hell of a good 1st Sgt and that helped.
Leto
@Litlebritdifrnt: Our son is in the same situation. His teenage years were spent in Europe where he didn’t need a car. He was able to walk and bike everywhere he needed. If he wanted a license, we would have needed to take him back to the States to get his license and that was an expense we weren’t going to incur. Plus he simply wasn’t interested.
But that did hinder him when he joined the military. Turns out about 50% of Air Force jobs require a drivers license. You can’t go into those career fields without having a civilian drivers license. So that cut off a good number of jobs he could select. Also it’s put a burden on his unit because he needs to rely on other members to get places. He does bike around base but he really needs a car. In his defense, his current job doesn’t keep him on regular hours. He’s constantly switching shifts every couple of months so trying to go to a driving school to get lessons is basically impossible. I don’t have a solution for him, but I’m also 1) not his boss and 2) I’ve had accept that he’s an adult and needs to figure some of this shit out on his own.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s kind of a sexy look – are you sure you guys weren’t jealous?
Avalune
@WaterGirl: /snigger
Ruckus
@Leto:
The leadership skills of any group of people will of course vary. The issue of military leadership is that people are rarely advanced because of leadership skills, those are extremely hard to define and some will surprise you and rise to the occasion, while others will surprise you and suck with the force of a hurricane. I’ve seen leadership in many situations and a run in the military and in professional sports showed that it can be an elusive and yet powerful thing to see. One thing I noticed in the military, it isn’t rank that determines leadership, having bars or stars is no indicator that one has any ability whatsoever. The same holds for enlisted. Time doing things wrong is still wrong. The fact that it works at all is, IMO a tribute to humanity in that the good do rise in an emergency and at the same time the bad shows exactly how bad they are. Good example, trump and his sycophants.
Robert Sneddon
@Yutsano: The USN had a support facility for US boomers and hunter-killer subs based in the Holy Loch on the west coast of Scotland, with a submarine tender ship and a floating drydock as well as shore-based facilities. It closed in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Brachiator
Very interesting stuff. Never served in the military, but am enjoying learning about military life.
I can relate to this piece of advice here. I had a supervisor who said, “I am going to teach you everything I know about this department, to the point that I can sit back and almost do nothing. It’s not because I am lazy or want to pile everything on you. But I never want to be in a position where my boss says ‘I can’t promote you because you are too valuable where you are now.'”
He also encouraged me to hire subordinates who I could also train up to the max. And I did. And passed this advice along to others.
Conversely, there was one supervisor who decided that she wanted to stick comfortably in her job until she retired. She sabotaged anyone assigned to her who was too ambitious, and found an assistant who knew the score, was a suck up, and who caused a lot of trouble. But the supervisor always had her back because she knew that she could relax and never worry about being ousted.
Leto
@Omnes Omnibus: For my Iraq deployment training that I did with the Army, that was part of the training. How to call in close air support. I basically told them, “If you’re relying on us to do this, we’re all dead.” It was part of the, “We don’t know what you will be doing downrange, so we’re going to give you every conceivable training we can.” Always fun times :)
WaterGirl
@Avalune: Theoretically speaking, of course. For the record, I was not hitting on your beloved husband. I know you would cut me. :-)
Yutsano
@Robert Sneddon: I know those existed. But that’s not the same as an actual base that supports families. My dad was never going to get based in Japan unfortunately even during his stint on a surface ship. Which incidentally he hated and wanted back on boats as soon as he could.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Dear god.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Navy dress blues didn’t have pockets that hand could easily slip into. Whites did but of course those got dirty rather easily. Always made me wonder, on a ship that didn’t have enough water to wash clothes, the summer dress uniform was – white. Snow blinding white. I think logic was often a missing component in military thinking. And yes sometimes the logic was there but was not obvious.
Leto
@Ruckus: @Brachiator: These two comments here are basically military leadership in a nutshell.
Over the past ten years here the Air Force has been revamping their promotion system to try to better identify their potential leaders and promote them faster. There are some aspects to it that are good, but also a whole lot of just crap practices that are going to manifest themselves in about 5-10 years. The promotion process and enlisted evaluation reports are a whole separate topic of… fun!
Avalune
@WaterGirl: Lol! Clarification wasn’t needed and people hit on him all the time and I let them live.
Eunicecycle
Very interesting. Now I understand why my nephew is moving around so much in the Air Force.
Omnes Omnibus
@Leto: Some people in the military make things go boom. Everyone else makes things work. I had the privilege of making things go boom.
Yutsano
@Leto: @Avalune: Okay so…the real question is: is there an AF base where you just KNOW your career is probably going nowhere? I’m trying to compare this to a notorious Marine base in California.
Leto
@Robert Sneddon: Our last base, RAF Croughton, had a good number of local “myths” about it. One being: it was a nuclear submarine base. If you click the link and take a look at where it’s located… like I don’t know how that myth/rumor started? I don’t see how you could really believe that? But we’d always tell the locals, if we heard that, “Sir/Ma’am, I can neither confirm/nor deny…” :P
Avalune
@Leto: Well I mean this is a country that build a tunnel underwater to another country. No reason to think it’s the only tunnel.
Yutsano
@Leto: I mean the nuclear training facility for the Navy is in Idaho Falls so…why not?
WaterGirl
@Avalune: Troublemaker!
Avalune
@Yutsano: All of them!
Haha. I mean they do have unique stigma. But half the time it’s BS. Like once we got sent back to Shaw we bought a house because we assumed we’d be stuck there until retirement but within 2 years they sent us to Europe. Leto will have to speak to the career side though. For civilian side it was more like oh well this place is biting poisonous insects, this place is hot as fuck, this place is a run down piece of garbage and I will flat out refuse to move there if they try to move us there (not that that was actually an option), this place what do they have against books anyway…
Ruckus
@Leto:
The difference in how any station, unit, base, ship was run would probably stun outside people. The military is in many ways not at all like any other group of humans and in others exactly like all of them. The group dynamics run roughly along the lines of what is asked for up top but the fine points depend a whole lot on the bottom 2/3 and how they work. If the top sucks the bottom 2/3 can pull it together or fall completely apart.
It comes from the top that tells the bottom what needs/wants to be done and the bottom has the skill to do the work. The important part is the desire on both to actually get the job done, using the skills/tools that are available.
Avalune
@Yutsano: Don’t forget the aliens in Ohio. I mean we let everyone THINK they are in Nevada but everyone knows where they really are…
Avalune
@WaterGirl: Lil ole me? Oh I declare…
I just know that anyone who had to live with him for a week would stop flirting with him post haste.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
And I’m not telling…..
Avalune
@Ruckus: That’s the kind of thing I say all the time – that they are not like anyone else but at the same it’s exactly like everyone else.
Robert Sneddon
@Yutsano: There was shore-based housing for deployed sailors and their families. There were, of course a lot of single men deployed there too resulting in a healthy crop of Scottish children with a possible claim to American citizenship. Quite a few of them were somewhat darker-skinned, not the usual “peely-wally” fishbelly white of their contemporaries. Didn’t matter much though, more important was which team you supported.
Leto
@Yutsano: Honestly no. Enlisted side, no. We don’t have a base that we send all the bad apples to. Well, maybe the Pentagon… but honestly no.
One of the things about the military is that even though each service is relatively large, each career field is actually pretty damn small. Spend any significant length of time in and you’re bound to run into people you know, or meet other people who know your friends. This can be a dual edge sword because if you’ve gained a good reputation, well that carries forward. But if your reputation sucks… well that carries forward too. That’s one of the good things about the military moving process: if you’re in a bad place where you are, when you move you have a chance to reinvent yourself. It’s a fresh start. Yes, your new station is going to call your old station and inquire about you. So that might color the process. But your new station is also going to give you a shot to prove yourself. I’m going to give you just enough rope to hang yourself. It’s up to you if you choose to use it.
Mike in NC
@Ruckus: In the military, logic almost always takes a back seat to tradition.
Robert Sneddon
@Yutsano: There is an AF base in Ultima Thule on the northern coast of Greenland. An ex-USAF ex-captain of my acquaintance spent her last deployment there before being up-or-outed. Talk about being frozen out.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
In the navy enlisted ranks you advanced by taking a test, which was about the work you did but at the next level. Everyone could take a test, the only way to stop someone was that leadership had to write a disciplinary action up in your file. As I understand it in the army/marines you had to have approval to move up. The first requires a reason not to advance the second requires a reason to advance. In the navy you could take the test and if you passed, you advanced, it was your choice unless you were a fuck up. In the army/marines you often had to be a suck up to be advanced. At least that’s what it looked like to me.
Leto
@Avalune: @Yutsano: She can also speak to this, but there’s some locations that just simply suck for spouses that want to work. Shaw was one of them. When we were stationed there our second time, 2009-2011, the unemployment rate was 22%. Yes that time coincides with the Great Recession, but even now it has one of the highest unemployment rates for military bases. It’s because it’s a podunk town that has nothing else going for it. If the base were to leave, that town would disappear off the map. It’d be another relic. If you want to work you either go to Columbia (state captial) about 30-45 mins away, or over to Florence, yet another 45 mins away.
But also, each base is what you make it. If you choose to have a shit time there, you’re just going to have a shit time there. A lot of people won’t go out and engage with the communities. They don’t travel. They don’t explore. They’re perfectly happy to wallow in the mire. I can only guide you to water so many times… I’m sure it’s the same in the Navy.
@Yutsano: Because they thought we had submarines stationed THERE… when there’s no bodies of water that would be able to accommodate that anywhere near us. They thought we had subs coming and going. We didn’t even have an airfield there. Croughton was a super unique base: it was a Communications base. Just Comm. No other function. There’s only, approximately, 3 other bases like that in the military.
Yutsano
@Leto:
…
Was there something in the water or something? You can’t exactly fit a nuclear submarine up a creek!
Leto
@Robert Sneddon: From the people I knew who were stationed there, a lot of them loved it. One of the secret jewels of the AF. Lots of outdoor activities to do, the mission was fun…
The one place I heard, consistently, that was a poop base was Shemya Air Force Base. I had a boss who was stationed there for two years and the stories he would tell… ugh.
Leto
@Yutsano: So if you click the link, take a look at the picture and tell me what those are. Tell me what you think those are, what they do. Now if you didn’t look at the wiki page, and you didn’t know what those were… what would you maybe think was happening there? All I’m going to say is that people still have very active imaginations. It also didn’t help that twice a year we had a nuclear protesting group camp outside the base gate for 2 days to protest nuclear war.
Ruckus
@Leto:
This.
What I said in #58 was one reason the navy was able to work at all. If you wanted to advance it was up to you. I had a buddy who didn’t want rank because it meant that he couldn’t sell off his weekend in port watches and go see his girlfriend. He worked hard, he was great at his job and he could have made rate and better money but as you moved up your watch duties often narrowed. And anyone to replace me on a general watch had to be the same or higher rate as me, E5. To replace him anyone E3 or above could. He calculated what his rate would cost him.
Leto
@Ruckus: Air Force is similar: we have two tests we take (one on job knowledge, the other Air Force knowledge) and that’s combined with our Enlisted Performance Reports. For advancing past E6, your records are sent to a board and that board grades them, gives them a score, and if you make the cutoff you advance. Now each year the board is looking for something different. What is the board looking for this year? What are they going to look for next year? Who knows! It’s a fun system.
Ruckus
@Avalune:
Sounds like every base/ship/workshop I was ever in during my enlistment. You can find the bad almost anywhere you look, of course there are places that you could see the bad while blindfolded…….
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
So you have been in the navy……..
Barry
@Avalune: “civilian side they call knowledge hoarding “maintaining job security” and it’s bad there too but when we get to third week (working) I have an example of where that works well but still has some big ole pit falls.”
The big thing is the expectation of the company. I got a phase of a project completed, documented and handed off to a group in India.
My next meeting with my manager involved somebody higher up + and HR person. Guess what!
Barry
@Brachiator: “But I never want to be in a position where my boss says ‘I can’t promote you because you are too valuable where you are now.’””
In the late 1990’s, my co-workers at one of the Big 3 said ‘if you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted’. That died in the ’01 recession, and I’ve never heard it since.
Barry
@Ruckus: “Always made me wonder, on a ship that didn’t have enough water to wash clothes, the summer dress uniform was – white.”
These are the officers. That makes them stand out, and marks them as people who don’t soil their hands.
Barry
@Leto: “Spend any significant length of time in and you’re bound to run into people you know, or meet other people who know your friends. ”
I spent four years in the Army, in the Infantry, so it was a big group, but by three years in I was running into people I’d known from a previous unit.
Ruckus
@Leto:
When I was in in the navy – 50 yrs ago, enlisted up to E6 took a rate test – knowledge of the work you were supposed to do and that was it. Do remember that we weren’t just repairing the stuff that broke, we had to operate all the equipment and at least try not to sink the ship. The tests were given navy wide every so often, if you had enough time in grade you could take it and advance.
E6 and above I believe had the same as you describe, they had to be recommended to advance and approved by the board. And you couldn’t stay in if you didn’t advance. I wasn’t desirous of staying in. At all. For any reason WSE.
Ruckus
@Barry:
Enlisted also wore white or blue dress uniforms when dress was required. Like manning the rail when pulling into port. Or if you stood a quarterdeck watch. Of course most often we wore dungarees because it’s living inside a machine and no matter what you do it’s dirty/oily/nasty. Sometimes worse.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I think I understand the value of such a system, but I have never worked in any industry where you had to take a test as one of the steps to get promoted. A different world.
Marcus
@Leto:
@Leto: When I was in, unless you had firewall nines, promotion was going to be iffy beyond E-5. My career field (Weather) is/was tiny, and so very few slots to move into each cycle. Since weather was a black hole AFSC (can’t cross train to another career field), it was only those who scored very well and had the reviews to make a career in the Air Force. It cut out some good Airmen, and made a few bitter, since they wanted to serve, were very good at the job, but couldn’t stay.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Well often when you advanced you also became the department head. That’s what happened to me. When I became an E5 I became in charge of all the section equipment and men. We were supposed to have an E6 and an E7 – actual leadership, but we never got either assigned to the ship. All the navigation gear, all ships internal communications – including ship electronic controls, the people to run, maintain, repair it, all of it was up to me. I was 21. That wasn’t all that unusual. The guy doing it before me was an E4 with more time in than me. The day I made E5, my boss became my subordinate. Others could tell you similar stories, you didn’t have to be ready for it, you just had to do it. It was assumed that if you had the rate, you had the ability. Most often, most people, that was true, sometimes it wasn’t at all
Also you have to remember that a job in the military has an end date. You can add to that date if you are competent enough, which sometimes means breathing, but every enlistment has an end. You can walk away if you desire. I did, so did most. It seems to be a bit different now, the pay is better, even if not great, the size of the force is smaller – the navy was trying to be 600 ships, now it’s just over half that.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I believe that some unions work, or at least used to work that way.
Yutsano
@Marcus: I have a friend who’s an officer in Weather. It’s expanded a lot it sounds like since you were in. I can’t think of how he got Hawai’i so soon after training otherwise.
J R in WV
@Yutsano:
I don’t know very much about today’s Navy, but I do know that the Nukes train at a decrepit base in Charleston SC. My nephew is a LT jg with a nuke specialty on a fast attack boat, spent a long time in Charleston SC and other east coast bases, was never in idaho.
Vast majority of nuke boat stuff is really secret, best non-secret thing I know is that this winter they were supporting research at or near the North Pole… I forget which boat he’s on now…
JaneE
I can see the value of moving to develop technical and interpersonal skills, especially for management. The fact that the military routinely takes steps to make that happen makes me feel a lot better about their leadership. I just wish more of corporate America felt the same. All but one of the companies I worked for worked under the theory that it was easier to buy new skills than upgrade old personnel, and that applied to technical skills and management skills alike.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
2 yrs in Charleston. There was a seafood restaurant that was amazing and somewhat affordable. Now I’ve covered all the highlights.
CWZ
@Leto: “But also, each base is what you make it. If you choose to have a shit time there, you’re just going to have a shit time there.” I was stationed at RAF Chicksands in the UK (closed in ’96). I could leave my barracks, walk 100 yards, catch a bus, and be in London in little over an hour. Or, catch the bus going the opposite way and be in a relatively big town in 20 minutes (Bedford) that had plenty of pubs. And there were STILL barracks rats hanging around complaining that England sucks and there’s nothing to do!
WaterGirl
Leto, are you guys standing by?
Leto
Hey everyone! I’ll be here for a bit so have at it :)
@CWZ:
I was stationed with people who served there. They were retired civilians but I’m pretty sure that base was in the “area”. Yeah we were roughly 45 from London, 30 from Oxford and the same dorm rats were saying the same thing. The smart ones were the ones taking Ryan Air and hopscotching around Europe, or they were taking the Chunnel over to the mainland to putz around.
@Ruckus: Haha, ass :P
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: I think Baud knows.