Army slashing senior NCO ranks
Chief Tango sends us a link from Federal News Radio which reports that the new Army Secretary, Eric Fanning, announced plans to cut 3000 senior NCOs loose in an attempt to reduce the force to 450,000 by 2018;
Starting in October the retention control points for sergeant first class will be reduced from 26 years to 24.
Master sergeant control points will go from 29 years to 26 and sergeant major control points will decrease from 32 years to 30.
Last year the Army reduced its retention control points for promotable sergeants first class from 29 years to 26 and lowered tenure of promotable master sergeants from 32 to 29 years.
The soldiers are forced to retire or go to the reserve or National Guard components.
No one is asking me, but here’s my 2 cents; If I was going to reduce senior NCO strength, I’d start with putting NCOs on the street who had declined an assignment to a leadership slot. If they had been a Master Sergeant or a Sergeant Major for their whole career and never wore green tabs, cut ’em loose. They don’t want to be in the Army anyway – they only want a steady pay check, give ’em the chance. But that’s not the way it’s going to be done – they’d rather use some random process about time in service than an actual measure of excellence and proven performance.
Category: Army News
If they got rid of every E-9 in the Army the only way people would notice is that there would be soldiers walking on the grass and cigarette butts in the parking lot.
There would also be a mass PT belt bonfire.
…and servicemen/women walking around with their hands in their pockets.
The horror of it all!
Don’t forget about all of the rocks that would remain unpainted.
Oh God, how many of the rocks I painted in Albany GA in 1987 that would end up looking like… I dunno, rocks??? No raked lines in the sand of Camp Johnson, NC early 1987? Foot prints everywhere. Cigarette butts everywhere. It’s over.
Get rid of all the NCO’s…WTF is going to run the Army? damned sure not the airheaded freaking brass at the top!!!
A real helpful cut would be to slash the number of Senior Officers. Just think of the money saved there.
They are doing a good job of thinning themselves out.
Even better, cut the number of GS and super grade slots in the Puzzle Palace and other government agencies..
Did you deploy?
No
Well you are now,
to civilian life.
Agree, Jonn – bring back the senior SP7-9 ranks from the hard stripes and QMP ’em out. No leadership position, no deployment – away you go.
Start cutting generals and their staffs. Endstate is when we are down to the number that existed at the high point of WWII mobilization. If that was enough for 2M+ Soldiers then, it’s more than enough for an Army 1/4 that size.
Um, high point of World War II Army strength was roughly 8.25M soldiers vice 2M. And if I recall correctly, only around 3M of them were Army Air Corps.
‘they’d rather use some random process about time in service than an actual measure of excellence and proven performance.’ – Absolutely.
Not LBGT-whatever? BYE!!
That will be the first step. After that, well — we’ll see.
Cut the senior ossifers first.
I think Fanning just doesn’t like those mean old nasty senior NCOs cuz they’re scary…..
he’s flying right in the face of the Bloomberg article which says the military needs to revise how it promotes and retains because, y’know, those folks who spend their entire careers getting PhDs in learning to write computer code or whatever are as valuable or more so than the knuckledraggers who just, well, fight and do other military stuff. I’m sure by disagreeing with such military authorities as Bloomberg’s, Heads Will Roll.
I’m working on my doctorate, but that is not at the expense of doing any of the military stuff.
Does this means more opportunities for me to get promoted to SFC?
Probably not.
More Cahtah Hollow Army . . . . until the next international crisis. . . .
Start with Generals, then every E9 above Battalion level.
No deployment; E5 is the ceiling.
Eliminate the EO career field altogether as it is wholly manned by over-entitled, malingerers
I have never understood how an EO complaint was anything other than a specific type of IG complaint. Or why such a complaint couldn’t be investigated through IG channels.
3000? They could probably cut 1/3 of that, easily, by taking a good hard look at FT Hauchuca. That place is overrun with senior NCOs that have ridden a desk for way too long and haven’t been in a leadership position in over 5 years. Half the combat patches on that post are 6 month augmentee assignments, then back to their cushy desk job.
I was a NTC/JRTC MI O/C for 3 years. Almost every BDE that came down during my time was shorthanded senior MI NCOs, but the Army was overstrength? Come on!
Maximum Years of Service (MYOS) for Army Reserve is suspended. Wonder how long it would take before MYOS is re-implemented.
That’s exactly why I got out of the Army as fast as possible. I joined in 1999. It seems like it was a series of being thrown under the bus my entire time. I doubt I would have been allowed to be able to make it 20 years. I’m a white male so I wasn’t allowed to progress since that’s not progressive. In my basic training the drill sergeants were one white male, one black male, one white female, one mexican. The senior drill sergeant was black. That’s how the politicians want the Army to look. They don’t care about efficiency.
You had a female drill sergeant?
Then you were a pog. Had you been an infantryman you would be at least an E8 by now.
I mean, you joined in 1999, which means your first 10 years, fron E1 to E7, would have been with a shitload of deployments and plenty of opportunities.
Don’t blame it on the Army, or on political correctness. Blame it on you for missing the opportunities.
My unpopular opinion:
The politicians (to include the Secretary of the Army) don’t know and don’t care about how the Army runs. They just want it to accomplish it’s mission at or under budget. These days, that basically means cutting people.
They depend on the uniformed leaders to tell them who to cut. That means Milley, and WRT NCOs this means Dailey.
As an officer, I always admired how well the NCOER system worked. I rated and senior rated dozens of officers and non commissioned officers; OERs are an exercise in creative writing while NCOERs required actual, measurable, quantifiable performance. I always felt confident that the NCOERs that I wrote were accurate reflections of potential- and every single one went through the 1SG and CSM.
NCOs have been their own worst enemy in the last several years. They have been eating their own.
NCOERs have become ridiculously inflated. The new system of limiting senior rater top-blocks will go a long way to force accountability, and will allow the army to identify and separate the right NCOs. They should have waited a year or two to use the new ones to help identify who to separate. It was time for the old system to go away. I got my first NCOER under that old system less than a year after they started it. Despite having 4 quantifiable bullet comments for my squad of “highest” or “best” I got a 2/2 by the senior rater, a lieutenant that was still trying to figure it out (as was everybody else). When I show that NCOER now, people can’t believe it.
Now as an O, I find the writing of OERs much more challenging than the old NCOERs because just limiting the senior rater to 49% or less top-blocks means that no matter how much fluff is in the narrative (the same as with the NCOER), you still have to make a cut separating the rated officer into the top half (realistically around 35-40% or the bottom half(+). Statistically, officers that have not gotten 3 or more top-block OERs out of the last 5 evaluations are at significant risk of not getting promoted again and it is the block check that is doing it, not the quantifiable bullets. The only good thing about drawing down right now is that a lot of weak leaders are getting culled. Unfortunately, when we invariably realize that we’ve gone too far, we will then revert back to promoting everyone with a pulse.
I still remember the old EERs. Talk about inflated – everyone got 125 or you were done.
Trying to purge the military of war on terror troops.