News for Marines today
Well, Leathernecks, today I have good news and bad news.
As of last week, a talked about change took effect.
Marines who plan on departing the Corps must now notify the service of their intent to exit no later than six months ahead of their planned departure date.
Previously, Marines could resign or retire with as little as four months of advanced notification. The update, released last Friday, went into immediate effect for the service
The previous timeline of resignation notification within 4-14 months didn’t give Marines adequate time to prepare for their transitions, Marine Corps spokeswoman Capt. Sarah Eason said in an email to Military.com on Thursday.
Additionally, Marines’ requests for resignation or retirement now may not be submitted before 18 months from the requested departure date; that’s up from a previous limit of 14 months. Military.com
So you have to tell them no earlier than 18 months from retirement – I guess the additional four months is to help them not prepare for your leaving? Would seem to me that additional scheduling time would help, but what do I know…
They also mention that there is a mandatory training seminar everyone leaving must complete 12 months before exiting the Corps (I won’t speculate on the topics in this seminar…y’all can do that.) But especially for first-termers, not sure they wouldn’t be better off amending that “12 months before” to “one month before”. I seem to remember first term folks knowing damn good and well if they were getting out a long time before their ETS, but re-enlisters sometimes waiting to make up their minds till very late in the game.
Regardless, all of you can be dressing in style. I remember doing a blurb on uniform shortages ‘way back when – partly due to Covid and partly due to other causes, the Marines have been short on basic issue camouflage uniforms for years.
The Marine Corps said it initially started noticing shortages in 2022 of the combat utility uniforms that left exchange stocks empty and Marines having to improvise, including issuing recruits fewer pairs of the Marine pattern, or MARPAT, woodland-camouflage sets.
Leadership in the Corps also gave commanders at the battalion level authorization to let troops wear desert pattern uniforms or flame-resistant sets, also known as FROGs, amid the shortage, a necessary departure from the Corps’ typical uniformity standards. Until the shortage is expected to fully end this summer, that authorization stands, according to officials.
The CEO of American Apparel Inc. says that due to (presumably the post Afghanistan)?) drawdown many of their subcontractors went out of business, and often workers made more from Covid subsidies from working.
“We did in fact increase our wages some 20%-25% to retain as many as we could and did to some degree. But it was costly, and we lost several million dollars but hung in there.” Military.com II
Might be wise to get to take care of any personal shortages as soon as possible, the CEO sounds optimistic on current supplies but seems to think a significant uptick in demand (like for a big deployment) could cause problems again.
Category: Marines
Just tell them you are getting out when in the window. They will always let you stay longer if you change your mind later.
Buddy of mine said when leaving the Navy in 2011 he had to take a training seminar basically teaching him how to be a civilian again. Everything from how to conduct yourself to opening bank accounts and managing life without the structure the military provided. He said it was borderline humiliating.
I dunno — my grandfathers and uncle seemed to merge back into civilian life just fine back in the day without all that but… what do I know?
In ’87, we had a similar “training” to attend, but as I recall it was about benefits: the VA, VA loans, ect. A female PN3 was giving the training and she could NOT understand why anyone was not staying Navy. A guy that was part of our helo det on 2 deployments told her:
“You and us and in 2 different Navies.”
“We are?”
“Who much at sea time/deployments do you have?”
“Oh, zero. I’ve been in Norfolk for 3 years…”
“Ummm…like I said. 2 different Navies”
Note: back then females did shore duty and a few served on auxiliaries like Destroyer/Submarine Tenders with very minimal at sea time.
HT3,
That’s exactly what happened
with MarineDad61’s high school best friend,
who I will call USNPiedmontButte81-85.
(We remain in good contact to this day,
and he receives links to VG articles,
but will not comment here, on anything.)
BTW, he has AD-17 Piedmont relics from the decom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Piedmont
When I became a short timer, I was asked if I wanted to ship over and I said that I was looking to do stationary engineer work when I was separated in 1966 and I started in the local supermarket for a few weeks then got a job in Air Conditioning for 4 years then in 1970 I got a job with Brink’s Inc and retired after 37 years on the Armoured trucks. Like myself and every Vet before me, they didn’t try and tell you how to adopt to civy life after seperation….I just thought that maybe the adopt to civy life was just meant for the carreer Men and Women..
When I was DEROS from Viet of the Nam I got some
paperwork and a plane ticket home.
No hearty handshake. Not even a heart felt goodbye.
The long career with the military industrial complex
that followed did pay off though so no hard feelings here.
Your best bet hire a vet.
A lot of it might be due to an overall generational softness, but I imagine the lion’s share of the difference is in the current cultural and bureaucratic gap between the military and civilian world – one that has exponentially widened over the last few generations.
Colleges and universities generally don’t teach anything close to the same level of technical proficiency and workman’s ethics as does the military. Trade schools and apprenticeships do, but, like military training, those credentials are no longer given the same respect by the civilian world – still, even those programs don’t always (and less often every day) accept equivalent military experience.
A four-year degree, to the white-collar world and increasingly even to the blue-collar one, has taken on more cultural and bureaucratic importance than other credentials, even as the caliber of a college degree has plummeted.
Assuming one is going to ETS after their first term and actually wants to continue working in some civilian capacity related to their MOS (if a civilian correlation even exists), the transition is more convoluted than it was for our grandfathers.
When mine came home from WWII, he had no interest in being a paratrooper, even if such a role had been available without donning another uniform. He’d been MIA and then a POW, so his return was met with a bit more attention than the average returning joe – some WWI vet he’d never met took off his hat to him and literally gifted my papa with the first hat he’d ever own (a rabbit-felt trilby with a pheasant tail feather attached to the band). He fell in love with style and learned to tailor while working at the local JC Penny until he had enough tailoring experience to open his own shop. What bank, today, is going to give you a loan on a high-end clothing store just because you hemmed a few pants at Penny’s?
The Marines (and the other branches) are focusing on a real issue, even if they’re approach is misguided.
Stop loss will solve the problem of notification of leaving and a lack of recruits will solve the uniform shortage. Easy peasy. Can I get my consultant fee in form of a direct deposit?
Only after you partner up with a rando lesbian Native American in a wheelchair and set up your LLC so that Accenture can funnel the contracted work to you.
As usual though:
Here’s what the army does with all that extra time alerting them of intent to retire. I submitted my packet in May of 23 to Fort Xx Retirement Service Office for a May of 24 retirement.
NOV 23
RSO: “hey, we just found your retirement packet. It never left Retirement Services. And we need x and y documents.”
me: “Here’s the email I submitted to you in May, with those documents; just get them from there.”
DEC 23
RSO: “hey, I know we handle thousands of retirements yearly but we just realized you need z doc too.”
Me: “okay,” works arcane system and produces document.”
DEC-FEB
me: despite 35 years of knowing better, trusts Army to deliver orders.
FEB 24
me: no longer trusts personnel system. fires off email and face to face visits with no response. Writes my branch rep.
branch rep: “your retirement packet is still at Fort XX with no action taken. But I’ve energized them.”
RSO: “hey, we’re gonna need x and y documents.”
me: “here’s the email from May 23 I forwarded you in November with those docs.”
Branch: “hey, we got your packet. We’re going to need docs a and z.
me: “here’s my my packet, still with doc a in it and here’s the email I sent in DEC 23 with z in it.”
MAR:
RSO: “hey, here are your orders. I realize we took 10 months from you, but thank you for your service!”
I must’ve led a charmed life. Retired in July 2017. Came off convo leave in June of 2016 and dropped my appendix J. Went to the seminar twice. Had my ceremony/went on terminal in May of 2017. Got hired by the county a week later, took a month off/went on a cruise. Started work in June, still drawing a military paycheck. Retired July 31st, last active paycheck 1 Aug, first retired 1 Sept, first VA 1 Oct. Now I’m 7 years into a second pension working for the county and will be fully retired before I’m 59. Life is good.
I retired on a Friday started the new job on a Monday. A few more months I will be done for good. Beat you by a couple of years.
Trying to decide if I want to work teacher days and hours now just to stay busy…
Noice. I write on the side (have 2 books published already). That’ll probably be my “stay busy” work in retirement. That and being “professional pop-pop”.
Enjoy the retirement, you earned it.
Good news for MarineDad61.
Good news for the USA.
MarineDad61 will remain a Marine Dad for additional years.
Upcoming end of deployment.
Upcoming transfer to new unit.
Upcoming new advanced duties.
Upcoming cross country drive for MarineDad61 to visit son and family.
Upcoming promotion.
All good.
All should occur in 2024, except the possibility of USMC promotion delay.
It’s good to be a Marine Dad….
of a Marine in the cockpit,
on the “right” side of history.
Congrats!🇺🇸
This is a stealth stop-loss move. Back in the non-computerized, Remington raider days running the paperwork, the Army only needed two or three months to process the paperwork for an RA officer to resign and be released from active duty. In my case, it only took three months from submission of paperwork to Group HQ to outprocessing.
In the Air Force we had at one time a series of briefings called TAP, Transition Assistant Program. Not that kind of Transition.
Taught you how to write a resume’, talk during an interview, had job recruiters, and computers to apply for local jobs.
Had to do the brief when I left AD in 96, when I was medically retired from the Reseves in 2008, there was a new program that they did, which included VA Reps on hand etc. Don’t recall what they called the new program. I didn’t go through it, I knew I was wasnt going to be working ever again.
Mike
USAF Retired
Army (Active duty and mobilized reserve components) has the same thing. I actually had to sit through all of those briefings during de-mob in 2014 since I quit my job prior to mobilizing. I was technically unemployed, but had lined up a couple of interviews for civilian jobs while I was deployed. Started working the day after my orders ended, so the program didn’t do much for me. However, I did serve as an example to my Soldiers since they saw “The LT” in those briefings with them.
Yeah, moblized as a reservist, I’ve had do it a bunch… in 2016, they’d started to differentiate by how far along in service we were– SP4s/1LTs are different from SGMs/LTCs. (RAND broke down skills by pay grade, apart from MOS, too:
https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrO.b2aiiRmBMwguvhx.9w4;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzMEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1713699610/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.rand.org%2fcontent%2fdam%2frand%2fpubs%2ftools%2fTL100%2fTL160z3-1%2fRAND_TL160z3-1.pdf/RK=2/RS=KsRQ87mO3W.0Jx6QQmDZWyQJJzE- .)
Might want to test them a year out to see if they maintained their DEI and SHARP proficiency.
You know, the important stuff.
My theory is that the problem is all those rear-echelon senior officers buying (?) all the cammo uniforms so they look like ruff and tuff Rambos at their press conferences and photo ops.
I thought CAC cards and digital everything was a cure-all!
I’ve got a feeling sickcall and SAP are gonna get busy…