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: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday June 15 2018, @05:14PM (7 children)
[...] a quicker path to management positions.
Why would they want that? I thought one of the main points behind the Warrant Officer ranks was to avoid wasting a skilled, experienced hand. A skilled technician should be recognized as such and rewarded with higher pay, more interesting technical work, and more advanced technical responsibilities, not punished by kicking them to the curb and into management where the rest of the dead wood sits sharpening their pencils, rearranging their paperclips, and chewing sunflower seed shells.
The US Army used to have a specialist track within the enlisted ranks where one could advance in rank and pay and not get pushed into management. Instead those with specialist ranks could still continue doing useful, interesting things that they were good at and more or less enjoyed. The earlier article about the Peter Principle pointed to dual track career paths as a solution.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 15 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
If you get in the right management position, you don't even need to be stuck at the desk sharpening pencils. You can be traveling around the country every week, with occasional "telework" conference calls.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:34PM
I recently visited Singapore. And it was so interesting, so beautiful. Chairman Kim, amazing guy. But I wish I hadn't done the stopover in Quebec. Dull people, dull place!!!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 15 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)
Yes and no. Despite what any soldier or sailor might want, he enters junior management at some point around E-4 or E-5. People who can't manage at all generally aren't recommended for promotion above E-3. Many technical types stay at those three paygrades forever. Those who can manage more than just a little are recommended for E-6, and the better managers among them are promoted to E-7 thought E-9.
Warrants? I've only met a few. They tend to bypass E-7 through E-9, because they are the best-damned-technicians-money-can-hire. Uncle wants to keep them around because they solve problems, quickly, and efficiently. But, Uncle really wants them to be managers too. They need not be upper-management material, but they better be able to manage a division - or, in Army terms, they better be able to manage a platoon sized group. Basically - they need to run a shop.
IMO, the tech who can't manage a modestly sized shop isn't really much of a tech. If he needs a management minded assistant, that's fine, but he needs to be able to take responsibility. Johnny Junior Tech has no responsibilities, after all. He does what he is told, basically.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:37AM
" People who can't manage at all generally aren't recommended for promotion above E-3 "
Now that's one of the biggest loads of horseshit I've heard about the military in years. They give away E-5 to anybody because that's right about the time when a person's first enlistment is up, so they get "selected" for JNCO as a carrot dangled in front of their faces. I've seen total shitbags get "selected" for it over and over again. I've seen shitbags who did absolutely nothing approach 10 years of service as E-4's get offered E-5 because the government didn't want to pay them the ten-grand separation pay for reaching high-year tenure* (and boy, was that guy pissed, because he hated being in the military and was looking forward to that 10-grand and involuntary honorable discharge).
The only W.O.'s I've seen were army guys who were too stupid to go to college but hungry-enough to be great soldiers.
Being a W.O. would be a cushy job for pure shore-duty, but not much people want to spend their lives on a boat not being able to (legally) fuck, needing an intrusive security clearance (often all the way up to TOP SECRET) to do fleet security, with only South-American and East-Asian prostitutes to fuck and get diseases from. Also, surface-navy are some of the most backstabbing passive-aggressive rat-bastards known to the military. Surface Navy have to lose sleep doing stupid-ass drills and watch all the time. As far as being sniveling punks they're even worse than Air Force, and that's pretty bad. They get even worse when they reach E-7 and above, when the competition for slots is intense and the backstabbing intensifies.
* High-year tenure is when the military (Air Force, at least) politely forces you out with full-benefits because you're too much of a shitbag to advance in rank in a timely manner
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @08:32PM (2 children)
One of those "its complicated" situations.
In the Reserves a quarter century ago, we had a warrant in our platoon technically outranking our platoon sgt.
First of all, there's a difference between the legal minimum to promote vs the supply and demand of your field and your personal skill. So google experts who see the legal minima to become a SSG is 6 years without a waiver or whatever are missing the point that even Rambo couldn't make SSG in 6 years. Now you can do that as a SF soldier, which is a long side track story. But G I Joe isn't gonna be a SSG in 6 years and it would be very unusual to meet a 6 year SSG in practice (unless you're in SF, etc)
Realistically a soldier doing the NCO thing could expect to make Sgt in charge of a squad around their first re-enlistment figure 6 years in, make SSG in charge of a section around a decade in, make SFC and become a platoon sgt around 15 years in, and first sgt in charge of a company is very hand wavy right around retirement age around 20 years. CSM type working at battalion or brigade are dinosaurs older than me, like 30 years in.
Realistically a solder dropping a warrant packet, to get accepted would have to be high quality and probably sgt before five years in, so figure a warrant can be second in command to a LT in charge of a platoon technically legally outranking the platoon sgt but mostly being a technical resource like fourth or fifth tier tech support, in just a little over five years.
So if you want to be an "alpha support tech" with maybe 25 to 50 lower skilled minions serving you, if you go the NCO route you have a lot of NCO middle management leadership bullshit in addition to being an "Alpha Techie" and its gonna take you at least 15 years to get there, or you can drop a warrant packet and be slightly more of an "Alpha Techie" in about 5 years. Thats what they mean by "its faster"
I was in a log unit on TDY (long story) that had a genuine operations NCO staff sgt, took him at least a decade to get there, but a warrant could "out tech" him and legally out rank him with about 5 years time in service.
I think that's what they mean with respect to getting into management faster. Management as in at least part of your job is being tier five tech support, not management as in shouting at grunts to dig ditches faster or WTF.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:51AM (1 child)
A staff-sergeant in the Army and Marines is an E-6. A staff-sergeant in the Air Force is an E-5, and in the Air Force that is coincidentally the rank they offer to all shitbags (and not shitbags) of 4-6 years of service approaching the end of their first enlistment term.
Who woulda thunk that people like being in charge of their own lives and would like to not get killed fighting bullshit wars (okay, so Air Force and Navy other than PJ's, TAC-P, and SEALS are never going to be at risk of any danger) and smoke a joint every now and then without being thrown in the brig and given a bad-conduct discharge?
Kind of a tangent, but post 9/11 was the last chance America had to use patriotism to rally troops to its cause. Ain't nobody falling for bullshit anymore, and any attempt at a draft would face violent domestic resistance. That's why we can have Mexicans do it for us. We might as well start a full-blown foreign legion to fight our bullshit wars because Blackwater (Xe, Academi, whatever) is really expensive
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:06AM
> post 9/11 was the last chance America had to use patriotism to rally troops to its cause. Ain't nobody falling for bullshit anymore...
I sorely wish that were true. Have you met any Fox News viewers? People are falling for bullshit like never before. In fact it's the Golden Age of delicious, golden bullshit. When the flag starts flying and the news starts showing $1B military jets flying off $10B aircraft carriers 24/7 (rather than the usual 12/7), then America will get its woodie re-energized and LIBERAL TRAITORS will get pepper sprayed in the face.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday June 15 2018, @06:05PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAbkh4TMRqg [youtube.com]
Over and out.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Friday June 15 2018, @08:00PM (4 children)
Heres how the US Army works, or worked a quarter century ago.
E1 thru E4 are time in service / time in grade pretty much don't F up and you get promoted. There are slot issues such that a "Full" unit, especially during the Clinton era implosion of the military, might not have a E4 slot for a promotable E3; as with all things Army everything has a footnote and each footnote leads to entire chapters of regulations to hand it, recursively. To get E5 you need to pass the "welcome back to basic training" intro to leadership class that changes its name every five years and is about two weeks long, and every MOS (job title, essentially) has its own points and everyone eligible submits a packet containing points and the army simply marches downward in point order issuing promotions to the top soldiers. The army awards (awarded?) one point per percent on the PT test, one point per college credit, a bunch of points per year in service and so forth. For all intents and purposes the entire time I was in the Army in my MOS to make E5 you needed either something ridiculous like a Congressional Medal of Honor or enough credits to get a bachelors degree. Its possible to make Sgt without a degree, at least in theory, especially if you have more than a decade of years in, but at some point your career will stagnate.
At E5 Sgt rank you're at a crossroad. You can drop a packet and become a warrant officer W1 as per the article, drop a packet for OCS school and become an officer (remember with points reqs to make E5 you pretty much had to have a bachelors degree) or go up the NCO middle management ranks. In all fields EXCEPT warrant its up or out... you get a limited time to get promoted or you get kicked out. At some rank, the time it took to get there plus the time you got till you're kicked out is enough for retirement, but yeah you only get that sweet retirement package if you're at least halfway decent at your job.
Warrant is interesting in that my section had a W3 from the Vietnam War, literally. The up or out doesn't really apply to warrants. In our unit the warrant was something like Tier 5 technical support, if even the platoon sgt couldn't figure something out, the warrant knew what to do. They are pretty creepy-good diagnosticians and general troubleshooters. Sort of like the "special forces" of support jobs, in that the best gunslingers get into the special forces units, but in support-land, the best mechanics or sysadmins or accountants morph into warrants. The most elite warrants lik W-5 rank have a reputation something like Neo from the matrix like he can just think real hard and the computer will boot or the generator will start, crazy.
In practice Warrants don't take unit command. Think of them like permanent staff officers, but assigned to lower levels than the usual staff. A mere platoon or section won't have officer grade staff, mostly handwavy, but they'll have warrants to take on that kind of role. So a general would have a major on staff as an S-1 or something, but some rando logistics platoon leader would have a warrant advise him as to complicated technical whatevers.
Another interesting side note is virtually all Army helo pilots are warrants. All the other services are commissioned officers. The Army pilots mostly fly because they're not also spending 16 hours per day being the logistics officer and whatever other crap extra duty flyboys get stuck with. The Air Force pilots mostly do extra duty and staff duty and other BS, shockingly this has resulted in staggering low retention rates for air force pilots. It would be interesting to see naval pilots as W1 or whatever.
Anyway thats how warrants roll in the Army for a couple decades. Be interesting seeing how the Navy does it.
(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.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 16 2018, @12:56AM (1 child)
Erm...I believe that this is your "Reality Winner" moment. E5's in any branch are, always were, and always will be glorified knuckle-draggers. No bachelor's degree necessary.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @06:32PM
At that time, in the MOS I was in, you'd need like 15 years in service worth of points to equal one lousy bachelors degree, not to mention in the Reserves in a college-town unit, essentially everyone in their first enlistment WAS a college student earning that degree, so ...
Yeah its not necessary, theoretically on paper, but ... points competition for higher ranks is fierce and I don't think in practice you can make 1st sgt without a degree simply because the supply of degreed competition is so high.