In the past decade, much has been made about the retention of quality military personnel. In 2011, Tim Kane penned “Why Our Best Officers are Leaving” in The Atlantic, which served as a wakeup call for the military in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His study, which documented the challenges faced by the Army in retaining its company command-level leaders, set off a firestorm of debate. His recommendations were even more controversial, but to many they resonated.
The “people question” remains relevant as our nation struggles with defining a dynamic 21st century security environment. Rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific, engaging non-state actors, and meeting unpredictable regional challenges will not be possible without the right type of people to execute the missions set forth by policymakers. Boots on the ground and sailors manning forward stationed ships still matter, as they are the true face of strategic frameworks.
This is the context our military services face in a fiscal environment that demands hard choices. While it applies to all the services, we are seeing the people problem up close and personal in the Navy. Many of our peers wonder whether our best officers and enlisted personnel are leaving for the civilian world, and what the long-term implications of such a flight might be.
This concept was recently explored in “Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon”, a paper released in March that garnered a widespread audience within the U.S. Navy. Key to the argument is that the exodus of quality manpower is cyclical, and predictable, based on knowable factors. However, as a service we tend to respond belatedly because we rely so heavily on post-facto metrics to tell us that people are leaving in increasing numbers – and we now appear to be on the precipice of a new downturn in retention. Compounding the problem is that the armed forces, unlike our civilian counterparts, cannot directly hire into positions of leadership – we must develop our talent from within.
Among the four Department of Defense services, the Navy is unique in that it faces no significant pressure to dramatically cut its force structure. The Air Force is looking to cut 25,000 personnel in the next few years. By 2015, Army will be reduced from 520,000 to 490,000 active personnel. The Marine Corps will fall to 174,000 from their current end strength of 195,000. The Navy, by contrast, will likely remain at or near its current active duty force level of 323,600.
However, raw force structure numbers only tell part of the story. The missing element is the quality of personnel each service is retaining. Ask most flag officers, and they will tell you that each and every service has met its recruitment and retention goals for years on end. While this is largely true, what they fail to disclose is whether these numbers reflect the retention of transformative leaders that will be required for the dynamic nature of 21st century national security challenges.
The qualitative nature of retention within any military organization is subjective, and discussions related to it are emotionally charged. Claims that talent is departing leave those who remain in active service insulted. Those who leave, especially those with stellar performance reviews, scoff at those who claim that we are retaining the right quality of people. We need to remove the emotion from this highly charged conversation, and we need a way to really understand what is happening.
Without formal data, the best we can do is to infer trends by examining military selection boards. The following example is specific to the Navy, but all military organizations have similar processes to select their future leaders.
In the U.S. Navy, there are usually two major boards for upwardly mobile junior and mid-level officers: the department head screen board, and the commanding officer screen board. Both are used to select the next generation of Navy leadership. Department head screen boards are focused on senior Navy Lieutenants and junior Lieutenant Commanders (at about 8-10 years of service). Commanding Officer screen boards are for Commanders (about 14-15 years of service) competing for command of a ship, squadron, submarine, or shore based facility.
Implicit in these screen boards is their competitive nature, meaning that not everyone who is up for that particular board will be selected. This also ensures that performance matters, which provides an incentive for those hoping to compete for these milestones to do well.
Recent trends within naval aviation are telling, and exemplify this concern surrounding falling retention rates. For years, naval aviators about to have their department head screen board could either choose to compete for a department head slot in an upwardly mobile, deployable squadron, or choose not to compete for this mid-level leadership role. In the latter case, the officer could still stay in the Navy, but would likely have to transfer to a non-flying billet in communities like Intelligence or Engineering Duty Officer.
Having the option to choose one path or the other indicates a healthy force. There are enough people willing to face competition and fill the required roles in front-line Navy squadrons. Those who choose something else are usually passionate about a different community within the service, so everybody wins. Passionate people positively impact organizations wherever they are, which makes retaining them in uniform all the more important. In essence, this leads to better outcomes at both the individual and organizational level.
However, this year is different. If a naval officer wants to stay in the Navy, and he or she is an eligible aviator, then they must compete in the department head screen board regardless of intentions. Another important element to understand is that this screen process happens when most aviators hit their minimum service requirement – namely, they have just completed the initial obligation incurred by being an aviator. This means that while they must go before the selection board, they still have a choice – they can leave active duty. And many seem poised to do so.
This concern isn’t limited to naval aviation. If, as predicted in “Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon”, an increased flight of mid-level military officers across many U.S. Navy communities is true, the downstream effects of a retention crisis can have long-term consequences. Take the department head example: If there is not a competitive screen process, where a percentage of candidates is culled because they don’t measure up to their peers, then career timing trumps merit and everybody becomes a leader by default. In that cadre, you will have exceptional leaders mixed with bad leaders who were only selected because of manning shortages.
Leadership matters, and junior personnel exposed to bad leaders are more likely to choose to leave, thus exacerbating the retention crisis. In short, it is critical to have a pool of people to choose from in order to select those who will inspire future generations. If you don’t have enough people to create a competitive pool, leadership stagnation could be a consequence.
This is the case in any organization, civilian or military. Even if you have the right number of people filling leadership roles, the quality of those remaining leaders will directly impact whether a subordinate will want to remain with the organization.
Recent exoduses in the naval aviation and Navy SEAL communities indicates that the retention challenge has already started, with at least two aviation communities unable to meet the required numbers of officers needed to fill department head jobs. But why are they leaving? To address these questions and give a new perspective on the retention landscape, a self-assembled group of Navy service members, of their own volition and in their own personal capacity, have created an unofficial, Navy-wide survey to find out. The Navy survey recently went live and will be available for the next month. Though focused on the naval service, the concept of a grassroots, crowdsourced survey is replicable across any Department of Defense entity.
The popular response to “Keep A Weather Eye on the Horizon” makes it clear that these issues are on the minds of U.S. Navy sailors – and on the minds of those across the military. We want to understand what keeps service members in uniform … and what is driving them out. An independent survey allows us to better understand their perceptions about uniformed service in a constructive, comprehensive way, and making the results available to senior leaders will provide a new and previously untapped source of information to aid their decision-making.
We truly believe that our military’s most important asset is its people. The unpredictable nature of 21st century national security challenges require that our forward operators – those manning the watch on ships and on the ground overseas – be the best they can be. We need to know what motivates them, what our military can do to improve their experience, and how to retain them for when their skills are most demanded. We understand this survey is but one small step, yet we hope it informs a way forward so that our foremost warfighters remain in uniform.
Guy Snodgrass and Ben Kohlmann are United States Navy officers. The opinions and views expressed are those of the authors alone. They do not represent the views of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or any other agency.
Photo credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery
ntenghtim 
18driver 
Anonymous 
Observer 
Ian 
JEC 
The view from the cheap seats is that you’ve got a pretty wide ranging campaign going. My read is that you are long on anecdote, short on data. Yes, I am aware that you are conducting a survey and I fully expect it will confirm your worst fears. (This will probably have a lot to do with response-bias; a particularly challenging component of self-reporting surveys like the one you set up.)
It is time for you to apply some real context to this alarming narrative that you are creating. What is new? What has changed? Leadership is concerned, but there is no solid data suggesting that we have a retention problem…let alone a crisis. Furthermore, while there is not a lot of data suggesting a stampede out the door, there is even less data that suggests that we have an impending quality problem. Before you point your finger at the behavioral/leadership challenges we are seeing on the front of Navy Times, you need to go all the way back to the origins of the all-volunteer force and conduct some analytic comparisons and prove that there is an increasing trend of bad behavior – and probably a concomitant negative impact on mission. After you have done the work to prove there is a real issue, you will need to look at the future of the force (which will get smaller as the budget declines) and attempt to demonstrate where the issues you have uncovered will create significant risk to mission accomplishment.
When it comes time to make recommendations based on your findings, I would hope that you conduct some research on the art of the possible and resist the temptation to reinvent the personnel system from the bottom up. Much of the personnel management system we use is tied to Title 10 (law) and a large collection of policies that are long-serving artifacts of the 20th century. In general, I think you’ll find that wholesale change is pretty tough – and isn’t really advisable or necessary.
BL: I don’t want you to waste the opportunity you’ve developed. The possibility of fostering positive change in a large organization is something that most folks won’t ever get to do. That said; please don’t confuse positive public feedback from the crowd with real concurrence. The psychology of populism and group behavior is tricky and has caught more than one or two doomsayers flat-footed in the past. Do more homework and start bringing data to the table along with an understanding that we have seen variants of these issues before and have a fair amount of experience with the possible solution sets.
My guess is that you are not from a tip of the spear community. I also presume you have benefitted from the current system of retention and promotion. I suppose rank is O-5. Am I wrong?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
… Well done to you both.
This current generation of junior officers (and their civilian counterparts) are more different that their predecessors and superiors than any two generations have been in a long time.
The younger generation understands this generational gap, is frustrated by it, and is working to effect change faster than what has previously been possible.
I think part of that pressure from the younger generation comes from an understanding that we are living in a time in which things will only continue to move faster and evolve faster, and thus all institutions must adapt more rapidly than ever to keep pace.
The organizations (both civilian and military) that embrace this attitude and their younger leadership will quickly be the best positioned to enjoy future success and the ones that do not embrace this change will be the worst positioned in the future.
Chapeau to the authors.
Talent flight is a perennial issue in the military. Just like every new generation thinks it is unique and special and should be shown deference by the old guys, people who care about the nation’s officer corps question if we are retaining the right people.
As the authors noted, defining “quality” is exceedingly challenging. The attributes required for a quality Infantry lieutenant who leads his troops face-to-face through physical example are not necessarily the same for a four-star general leading an enterprise level organization spread across the globe. A quality surgeon is defined differently than a quality astronaut. Having been involved in efforts in the Army to define a quality officer and find ways to identify those with strong potential for service at the senior ranks, I know this is a very difficult proposition. I can also say that there are a lot of very good research institutions and smart military and civilian staff members working on this issue.
In the mid 2000’s, when the Army end-strength was increased, the Army needed to rapidly increase the size of the mid-grade officer corps. In spite of the dire state of the Iraq war at the time, officer retention was at about historic norms, but retention had to be increased to fill the expanded number of captain and major authorizations. The Army conducted surveys, which identified many of the same reasons for resignation as identified in the article, and developed a menu of incentives which captains could choose from in return for an extended service obligation. The incentives included training, graduate school and others. However, the single most popular incentive was a cash bonus. When it comes right down to it, money talks.
Today Congress professes to be alarmed at the cost of the all volunteer force and wants to reduce compensation. The result is easy to predict. Additionally, cuts to equipment, training and a smaller force significantly increase the individual risk of serving, while the population that is even qualified to enlist continues to shrink. America insists that its military be composed of those who have options outside the military, and the quality of the force has yielded a great strategic advantage. But we seem to think that we can do this on the cheap.
We wouldn’t have to pay so much in compensation, not to mention the billions that go to marketing and recruiting, if military service was recognized as a civic duty to be performed by all qualified adults. Look how many defense officials and pundits have never served a day in the military. Today’s military is very disproportionally middle class and increasingly composed of those who grew up in military families.
The drawdown could present an opportunity to economically retain top talent if we were serious about it and politically courageous. We could expand opportunities for service in the reserve components, creating a larger pool of trained service members and the ability to retain talented officers who also want to pursue other paths (Lindsey Graham, or Bo Biden for example). We could expand non-financial incentives for continues service, such as increased federal job hiring preference for veterans, or requiring military experience for defense and national security positions.
Most importantly, Congress must give the services budgetary predictability, so that the services can in turn assure service members that they will be well compensated, well equipped, and well trained. Service members must have faith that they will not be over deployed and that their families will be safe and comfortable in their absence.
Service members must have reason to believe that Congress will honor its promises to the one percent of Americans who volunteer to serve the nation.
Guy, Kudos to you for undertaking such a worthy effort. The challenge of figuring out why people stay and go is important, and work like this is overdue.
My concern is: where does this work go when you assume responsibilities as an XO? Do you have a well-conceived “succession plan” in place? You know from your time as a DH what time demands are placed on an XO. Once assuming the role, will your priority of effort align with the demands of the job, or will you co-opt your time?
This question is not intended as a jab, but one of genuine concern about the future of this important undertaking. Are the pieces in place to continue moving forward after you have a stack of evals and awards on your desk?
What you’ve started needs to be seen through to completion (whatever that ends up looking like) in order to provide the substantive feedback our leadership desperately needs.
Keep up the good fight, smartly.