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The Army’s “Captain Gap”
By Charlie
Most of the officers who commissioned from 2001-2005 will be getting promoted to captain soon if they haven’t already, and many from my year group plan on leaving the service as soon as possible.
Guys that I thought would stay in 20+ years and become the CJCS are cashing it in for the civilian world. Lacking empirical evidence on this, I’ll stick to the anecdotal. When I deployed, I noted that captains seemed to be in short supply, leaving lieutenants to step up and work above heir paygrade, unsupervised, or majors to take on additional duties. This phenomenon is apparently still going on, a contact deploying at Fort Bragg gave me similar info: a plethora of LTs and no one to train/mentor/guide them, and a command group that was experienced (majors and the colonel) but given a inherently flawed organization to lead.
The Army recognized this problem, and realized how important retention was for the mid-level officers and NCOs (I put it on par with recruiting fresh troops –keeping the experienced ones is just, if not more, necessary) and implemented a bonus for captains that signed on for additional time. $25,000 for regular Army captains who re-upped, but none for the Reserve or the Guard.
Another issue that ties into this is expanding the active military, which despite it being talked about quite a bit, has yet to materialize on the ground. No new divisions have been flagged, however, there are some recruiting efforts for RC to AC (Reserve Component to Active Component) and operation Warrior Trainer, BUT they both require release from the Guard which requires permissions from the Guard chain of command.
Many of the reasons for young officers getting out of the active Army are not related to deployments: frustration with command environments, wanting to do something “different,” wanting to go to graduate school, etc. On the Reserve side, deployments are the primary reason people seem to be bailing: two year+ deployments in 4 years cause citizen-soldiers to loose focus on the “citizen” part. Frustration with command climate is simply a new Army versus old Army clash, young leaders focused on teaching their men phrases in the local language, and sergeant majors focused on whether reflector belts are being worn properly on-base.
Is this a problem and can it be stopped: Until there are numbers to back up this widely- observed phenomenon, it can be dismissed as idle talk and speculation. However, whether mid-level officer retention is prioritized and dealt with seriously is a good test that will tell us what the Army will look like in 10-15 years. If it is ignored, quality officers will leave, leaving the not-so-quality guys behind to pin on general.
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Comments
The Army won't start retaining it's captains until it devotes itself to treating captains as captains,...
Ditto to DaveO.
The way we currenlty organize and run things, and often micromanage the staffing process, it is like we have one to many levels of rank in the current system. I'm not really sure we need Captains anymore. Well, yeah, we do need Captains.
Or, is it maybe that we don't really need Majors or Lt. Colonels anymore?
During my time at higher level staff, combining the 3 field grade ranks into 2 would have made little difference in quality, and would have actually leveled the career field for many. We had one-stars doing the work of Colonels, and LTCs doing the work of Majors, etc. And with Majors scrambling for elusive LTC positions it left senior Captains in a big bottle neck.
It was/is common for Captains, still young enough to embark on a second civilian career, to do just that. Not so easy for senior Majors and junior LTCs to do that.
as i remember they were having the same problem right after nam and during slick willies second administration.
perhaps it comes in about 10 year waves.
C
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The Army has been bleeding out its captains since I was commissioned. The Army has lowered the the Time in Grade and Time in Service requirements, and made a number of schizophrenic moves (bring on officers via Call to Active Duty while conducting wholesale cashiering of officers who soldiered through the bad years). So I will say the experience level of today's majors and lieutenant colonels is suspect.
The Army won't start retaining it's captains until it devotes itself to treating captains as captains, not as wannabes on a street corner. My two cents...