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In a short article, the US Naval Institute reports that the Navy will bring back the Warrant Officer-1 rank for certain specialists:
After a 44-year absence, the rank of warrant officer-1 will return to the Navy in 2019 for cyber specialists, a move signifying the great lengths the service must take to retain talent and fill leadership roles in an increasingly tight labor market.
The return of warrant officer-1 (W-1) — discontinued by the Navy in 1975 — is both a Navy bid to keep highly sought-after computer technicians and is indicative of the greater challenge facing the service as it seeks to meet growing recruiting and retention targets.
[...] Only a small number of enlisted personnel will qualify for W-1, the pay still will not match what the private sector offers, and the Navy will still face tough recruiting and retention challenges. However, those sailors who do qualify for W-1 will be the ones the Navy hopes will consider remaining in the service longer because [the] rank offers something the private sector can't as easily match — a quicker path to management positions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @08:11PM (1 child)
Another note I forgot is its a common meme across the entire Army that the "E-4 Mafia" basically runs the lower enlisted ranks of the entire Army while the NCOs merely think they're in charge as sort of an elaborate hoax. There is a lot of truth to this statement that by E-4 time the average soldier is on top of their game and knows everyone else in the E-4 mafia and a lot of weird shit can happen when the mafia wills it.
Anyway the point is some people incorrectly think leveling up from the E-4 mafia means becoming a E-5 Sgt, but the real level up from the E-4 mafia is whatever the Warrants call their .. tribe or whatever. So the E-4 mafia can do hollywood supply sgt semi-legal things like make off the books generators or NODs or even rifle components magically appear (or disappear, for that matter) whereas the leveled up Warrant can do the same on a much more wizardly scale, they just make a phone call or a hand gesture or some form of magic and they can make entire helicopters appear or disappear, they can do hard to believe paperwork manipulations that are reportedly impossible... very much a wizard's wizard.
So in my case the E-4 mafia got us some interesting software debugging tools on a floppy disk, but our warrant obtained development hardware systems and buckets of ozone depleting freon solvents I didn't even need but were part of some elaborate deal, and a complete development suite, back in the old days when compiler licenses cost $15K and stuff like that. Warrants are pretty interesting people to know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @01:06AM
E-4, E-5, E-6, and E-7 are all pay grades, not ranks. The idea would be to decouple pay grade from managerial roles. Yes, a skilled technician will normally be part of running a shop but does not need to be burdened with the full administrative load. Part of the senior technician's role will always entail bringing up the junior and journeyman level technicians, but only from a technical perspective as it relates to accomplishing the mission. They need to stick to completing the task at hand not dorking around unproductively in 38 hours per week of SAP or PeopleSoft.