As someone who just finished 22 years in the Navy:
It’s getting harder and harder to get young people in with the capability to adapt to the demands. I don’t know that this is good or bad (it’s a pretty unreasonable lifestyle); it just is.
Couple this with the cutting of recruitment incentives that are motivating, and retention incentives being gutted (retirement was cut almost 20%), and we’ve known that there was going to be a failure to meet manpower needs for a while now.
That’s even leaving aside the points brought up in the article, which are all relevant. I, personally, recommend against anyone joining unless they really don’t have an alternative.
I'll disagree that it's hard to get people "capable of adapting." And I also resent the implications.
The Service however is increasingly ossified. It increasingly wants to ossify. And Cyber is of course the perfect example.
The Navy was charged with building something like ten Cyber Mission Teams and instead of doing that they just battle-rostered the key individuals to whatever team was being externally inspected. For years; and Navy leadership is totally unrepentant.
The Army? Not much different. The Army cannot keep talent in the ranks. So Congress mandates incentive pay for key workroles. If enlistedmen demand their Congressionally mandated pay the 22-year veterans get pissed off at the 'mercenary' young people who don't adapt to the all-consuming Mission.
Despite the fact that the DoD Civilians earn twice as much for the Exact Same Role.
I thought I was fairly open that I don’t necessarily consider the failure of many of our recruits to adapt to be their problem; the military isn’t a very good way to live.
Specifically, I was very nearly a fatal failure to adapt (suicidal attempt), and am speaking from that perspective.
There is much they could do to address this from the services side.
The Army tried to recruit me to the cyber warfare side towards the end of my career, and after taking one look I ran. I wanted nothing to do with that structure.
Mandatory national service-whether it is military or civilian-could be a great way for a majority of high school graduates to identify vocational opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise investigated. And, it could be very motivating for some:
1. “do well enough in school and you will get a better position in your national service placement.”
2. “do well in your national service placement, and maybe you’ll get acceptance or even a scholarship to a great college.”
Change is difficult. If I were a teen and someone told me I had to do 2 years of national service, I would freak out. But with the demographics being what they are, something profound has to be done.
We actively chose to have a volunteer army instead of conscripts because professional soldiers perform better than throwing people who don’t want to be there in the first place into a fight. We should look at how to convince more people to enter the military by doing things like increasing the pay or not leaving veterans at the mercy of a complicated bureaucracy to get healthcare for their combat related illnesses before we throw our hands up and decide to just start throwing unwilling kids into the meat chipper again
>We should look at how to convince more people to enter the military by doing things like increasing the pay
'More money' really hits diminishing returns when you can't balance it against other factors. I walked away from raise to about 200k/yr (and favorable tax situation if my wife works) and 10 more years to a valuable retirement, including very good insurance, and that particular role is still substantially undermanned.
You walked away from a role in the military paying that much or you walked away from the military to a 200k/yr position?
My understanding is that the military is looking for people to fulfill jobs that the private sector is paying multiple times more in salary on top of not having to deal with all the loss of rights and strict lifestyle that comes with military positions
I have to be honest I am a bit skeptical at that. That is more than a 2 star general with 20 years of experience gets. I know there are special pay bonuses but I have never heard of any that high. How did they manage to get a 200k salary for a role given the military/government's pay schedule?
Base pay O-4 plus San Diego BAH for O-4 with dependent (adjust this for tax advantage), plus BAS, plus sub pay, plus sea pay, plus annual 40k COBO (and maybe add 1500 to that because it's 50k, then 40k repeats for the next 5 years.)
I'll have to do the math later, but it's pretty close to 200k, before any consideration of other benefits.
Edit: for the San Diego case, it's 209,000 before counting any tax advantages; 230,000 if you do some basic back calculations on BAH for federal income tax and payroll taxes; and it's actually even more tax-efficient than that, when you consider that you can be a resident of a state with 0% income tax. All this to say that monetary compensation has diminishing returns from a retention perspective.
Ah, I had assumed that was base pay + role adjustment and not with all the other normal allowances, my comparison to an O-8 was on base pay alone.
I think with that information my point still holds. I am taking and easy role and living at the edge of a major metro area(so lower cost of living) and pulling in 200k. With “sea pay” I assume you are on boats for a time? Also all the strict regimentation that comes with the military jobs(the UCMJ is a lot stricter than regular law). The military can’t pay as well as civilian jobs they need to pay significantly higher because they are asking for significantly more.
For instance would you have been as willing to walk away from the role if it was paying 500k? If you were then maybe you just hated the life but given how many people I knew in ROTC who admitted they joined solely out of financial considerations, I doubt a pay difference like that wouldn’t significantly affect retention rates and recruitment
>With “sea pay” I assume you are on boats for a time?
Generally, yes. One could expect to spend somewhere between 0 and 65% of his entire 3 year tour out to sea.
>Also all the strict regimentation that comes with the military jobs(the UCMJ is a lot stricter than regular law).
This is basically not a problem, though with notable 2020 exceptions.
>For instance would you have been as willing to walk away from the role if it was paying 500k?
All other things being held constant, I'd have stuck around for that, yeah. But I think the military could fill those jobs much more cheaply if they got other stuff right. Some of it results from byzantine regulation that will never be corrected, but there are lots of changes that could yield huge improvements to quality of life for cheaper than doubling salaries. I'll also say that it's a cool job with a sense of meaning that I perceive to be generally missing from workplaces, based on discussions here and elsewhere. In the end, though, the time away from my kids is too high a cost for all that.
It’s getting harder and harder to get young people in with the capability to adapt to the demands. I don’t know that this is good or bad (it’s a pretty unreasonable lifestyle); it just is.
Couple this with the cutting of recruitment incentives that are motivating, and retention incentives being gutted (retirement was cut almost 20%), and we’ve known that there was going to be a failure to meet manpower needs for a while now.
That’s even leaving aside the points brought up in the article, which are all relevant. I, personally, recommend against anyone joining unless they really don’t have an alternative.