How to know you’re in a recruitment crisis

The news media has finally jumped on the military recruitment crisis. The smart, intelligent, witty and dashingly handsome readers of this blog that look just like you already knew it was coming because of all the previous reporting here. But let’s say you weren’t so smart, intelligent, witty and perhaps only average in your looks. Let’s say that this not-nearly-as-good version of you wanted to know the truth, because the media likes to blow up a small story into something big to make money. Would there be a way to figure out if the military was really struggling to recruit new members?

Well, stand-in dumber-version-of-you reader, there is, because you can use the military’s readily available instructions to figure out just that! But first, we need a primer on military recruitment and promotion.

Military manpower is a big pyramid scheme, with lots of young blood on at the base of the pyramid, and fewer crusty old folks at the top ranks. Most military members only serve for 3-5 years, getting out for the much greener pastures in the civilian world. The one’s that stay in have some pretty good incentives: guaranteed pay, a pretty cool mission, a chance to get skills and experience on fancy, taxpayer funded weapon systems, and that sweet, sexy uniform that entices all the ladies.

Well, and the guys too, I mean, its 2022 and we have to be all inclusive.

Anyway, this pyramid scheme of manpower relies on a big influx every year of new recruits. We’ve already talked at length about why normal recruiting isn’t working. If recruitment sags, the military has other tricks to keep its numbers up, namely by making it more difficult for people to leave. They can do this by not letting people leave early, or even go so far as to force people to stay.

Let’s say that hypothetically we recruit a lot more people then we really need. Instead of showing them the door, the military can allow other members a chance to leave early. OR the military can tighten down on physical fitness standards, which they can use to boot people out. OR they can create some new stupid rule that will piss people off, which will cause more existing members to leave. These rules are like the handle on a water faucet that you can adjust so the water flow is just right.

Knowing this, guess which way the handle is moving?

Let’s look at the Navy, which releases NAVADMIN messages. These are bland, dull administrative things that nobody except slightly-inebriated Sailors actually read. At the end of June, the Navy released NAVADMIN 142/22 titled FISCAL YEAR 2022 ACTIVE COMPONENT ENLISTED FORCE MANAGEMENT ACTIONS (CORRECTED COPY), because I guess the admin person made a mistake and had to correct it.

Doesn’t inspire much confidence in our administrative people!

Anyway, let’s read the message.

1.  The purpose of this NAVADMIN is to implement key force 
management personnel policy actions in the enlisted active component 
to ensure the Navy remains fully manned and operationally ready. 
References (a) and (b) are hereby updated for enlisted personnel. 
For those who have decided to separate, please review reference (c) 
for additional career progression opportunities in the Navys 
Selected Reserves.  Navy encourages all qualified Sailors to stay 
Navy.  See your career counselor for more information.  While we 
strive to retain all qualified Sailors, commanding officers should 
continue to exercise their obligation to document performance and 
adjust their recommendation for retention, accordingly. 
 
2.  Sailors are encouraged to look for selective reenlistment bonus 
(SRB) updates frequently to take advantage of the opportunities 
published on the Navy’s SRB website at: 
https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/References/Pay-Benefits/N130D/. 
Please keep in mind SRB levels may be adjusted up or down depending 
on rating health.

OK, not much here. Maybe this section was put in to put the inebriated Sailors to sleep?

3.  Early Separation Cancellation.  Effective immediately, all 
enlisted early out programs and new time in grade requirement 
waivers are hereby cancelled.  Service commitments such as 
enlistment contracts, service obligations for accepting permanent 
change of station orders, advancements, bonuses, training, etc., 
will be fulfilled.  Service members experiencing difficulty in 
fulfilling obligated service requirements are encouraged to work 
with their chain of command and respective detailers to examine 
available alternatives to complete their obligation. 
    a.  Commanding officers still retain the 90-day early out 
authority for policy outlined in references (d) and (e). 
    b.  Service members previously granted approval will not be 
affected by this policy change. 
    c.  Service members interested in pursuing commissions in the 
Navy are still encouraged to submit requests.  As always, these 
requests will be considered on a case by case basis. 
    d.  United States Space Force applicants are not affected by 
this policy change.

Well, that’s a change! No early-out options. Definitely closing the faucet handle.

4.  Delaying separation or retirement.  The Navy is accepting 
applications from enlisted personnel who desire to delay their 
separation or retirement.  The deadline for application submission 
is 31 August 2022.

How about that! Did you want to rethink getting out? Well, now you can, just delay that separation or retirement for another year! Unless you didn’t take the COVID vaccine, in which case you better be part of the class-action lawsuit or else you’re out on the street!

The rest of the NAVADMIN is the dirty details of who can or can’t apply. Another NAVADMIN to look at is 172/22, titled: ACTIVE DUTY ENLISTED ADVANCE-TO-POSITION PROGRAM UPDATE. No corrected copy, looks like they got this one right the first time. I’ll summarize it: enlisted members can apply for billets one paygrade above their current one.

That sounds good right? Let people take on more challenges early? You might think that, until you realize the reason this is happening is because there isn’t enough people at that paygrade to fill all the slots…meaning the Navy is desperate to fill them, even if it means sticking otherwise not-as-qualified individuals in there to meet their numbers.

By the Navy’s own admission, it is hitting a personnel wall that it can’t seem to scale. One contributing reason might be all the “smart people” in the room telling us we could use part-time people, cut back on pay and benefits, and magically we’d have a better, cheaper Navy. I’m not making this up, see every single report that Beth Asch authored at RAND. She’s one of many “smart people” that writes up nice looking reports about policy that influences many people in Washington DC, but don’t seem to understand the nuances associated with a job where you actively kill people while they try to kill you. Since the military services did put into place many of RAND’s recommendations, how’s that working out?

The next steps I expect to see is the military suspending physical fitness separations. After that, expect waivers galore for things like tattoos and prior non-violent felonies. After that…expect stop-loss and calls to bring back the draft.

2023 is going to be even worse. So buckle up and hope we don’t go to war with China.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency, because those people will simply point you to some RAND report to justify their actions.

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Why we’re not solving the veteran suicide problem

Spoiler alert: its because we’re solving the wrong problem.

You can’t walk around on a military base without being innundated with suicide prevention materials. Walk down any hallway and there’s a poster with the hotline number. Navigate to any DoD website and there is a 24/7 military suicide chat line linked at the bottom. Heck, even if you sit down to do your business in the bathroom, you’ll see a suicide prevention poster on the inside of the door.

Granted, the suicide rate in the military is rising. The military is composed mainly of 18-25 year old men, who traditionally have the highest rate of suicide. Combined with the stress of working in a job field where people actively try to kill you while you kill them, and you’d think that would spike the suicide rate. But for the longest time, despite the many years spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, military suicide was statistically lower than average.

From **Suicide Rates Among Active Duty Service Members Compared with Civilian Counterparts, 2005–2014**

Look at 2005-2008 here. The rate is far below what you would expect. You can look at the crude numbers here as well.

It’s obvious though that the rate was rising. If you look at combat deaths and the news, the United States had a nasty surge in combat deaths from 2009-2011. This was when we were trying to drawdown in Iraq and surging in Afghanistan. It would be easy to blame the added stress for the rise in suicide. But I’m not so sure. After the surge, the number of combat deaths plummeted, yet the military suicide rate continued to rise. The additional stresses of combat, once removed, don’t support the hypothesis that it caused the increase in suicide.

In order to have enough troops to surge, the military, particularly the Army, waived a lot of requirements, including physical standards and prior drug use. This means that instead of selecting from the best of the crop, you get a swath of people that look more like most Americans, which means you get the suicide rate of most Americans. Notice that the suicide rate plateaus and matches the average civilian rate.

This is further confirmed by looking at the most recent suicide rates. The rate slowly began rising again from 2018 until today, despite a continued decline in combat deaths. Now its rising again. What are we doing that might cause it to rise?

If you look at my previous posts here, I’ve been complaining about the drop in standards and loss in direction for the military for a while now. The Army finally admitted it will simply be short 10,000 troops, but that it “wanted to maintain high standards” instead of recruiting more soldiers. To that I call BS, because they already lowered standards a lot in order to get to where they are at now.

Worse still, we’re cutting back on training. The Army softened its boot camp, which caused retention to go up, but likely didn’t help build soldier’s confidence. Most of the services have cut back on specialized training (the Navy in particular), so its harder for service members to feel like an expert in their field. Combine that with a refocus on things like “extremism training,” and military members can’t be faulted for feeling a bit adrift.

So we’re lowering entrance standards, which we have proof raises our sucide rate, AND we’re shortening and softening our training, making less capable military members (who, by the way, KNOW that they aren’t as capable). That’s a bad combination, and its the real reason behind the continued rise in suicide. It’s not that we lack the funding for suicide prevention programs. It’s that we’re solving the wrong problem.

Until we solve the standards problem, we can’t begin to prevent military suicide.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

And if you’re thinking about suicide, put it off for a day, watch this Jordan Peterson video, and then call a friend or a hotline. We’d rather have you around.

The Navy’s “punishments” for the BONHOMME RICHARD fire, explained

USS BONHOMME RICHARD on fire on 12 July 2020, from Wikipedia

Do you remember the USS BONHOMME RICHARD fire from 2020? Today marks two years since the fire was finally extinguished, having raged for four days while the ship was moored in Naval Station San Diego. Thankfully, nobody was killed in the fire, although 63 people suffered minor injuries, but the ship was ultimately scrapped, being sold for just over 3 million dollars and towed to a scrapyard in Texas.

A multi-billion dollar warship being scrapped due to a fire that should have been put out relatively quickly? Perhaps the Navy will hold someone accountable? I mean, when LtCol Stu Scheller said ~~mean~~ true things on social media, he was placed in jail for nine days and ultimately fined $5,000. Surely the incompetence that leads to the preventable loss of a warship in a US port would be punished more severely?

Well, the Navy unveiled its punishments on Friday:

“The disposition decisions included six Nonjudicial Punishments (NJP) with guilty findings, two NJPs with Matter of Interest Filings (MIF) and a Letter of Instruction (LOI), two NJP dismissals with a warning, one additional MIF, five other LOIs, three Non-Punitive Letters of Caution (NPLOC), two letters to former sailors documenting substandard performance, and six no-action determinations,” according to a statement from the service.”
From navy.mil

The Navy also issued a letter of censure to retired VADM Brown and two LOIs for other admirals.

For most non-Navy people, the language used for the above punishments listed is confusing, so I’ll translate what it says into what it actually means.

First, the letter of censure. In this case, it was issued to VADM (ret) Brown, who is already retired. The letter can be viewed here. A letter of censure is a “strongly” worded letter from the Secretary of the Navy expressing their disgust for someone’s actions. It sits in a service member’s record, so if you were hoping to promote, its unlikely to happen. That…doesn’t matter much to someone who is already retired. Worse still, it appears that nobody interviewed VADM (ret) Brown, and he is contesting the results, so the letter may ultimately be rescinded.

In other words, letter of censure = no punishment if you’re retired.

Let’s look at the non-judicial punishment (NJP) results:

6 NJP with guilty findings
2 NJP with MIF and LOI
2 NJP dismissals
1 MIF
5 LOIs
3 NPLOCs
2 letters to former Sailors
6 no-actions

NJP is a legal proceeding where the Navy doesn’t have to prove something “beyond a reasonable doubt,” instead they can punish someone if there is a “preponderance of the evidence.” If that sounds a bit sketchy to you, it should. The “preponderance” level essentially means you can find someone guilty of a crime even when there is substantial evidence placing doubt as to whether the person was really responsible.

The Navy is supposed to use NJP to punish small offenses quickly so as to maintain good order and discipline. NJP punishments are limited in nature and aren’t considered an actual conviction, so they don’t translate to felonies or misdemeanors on a service member’s record when they leave service.

The fire on the BONHOMME RICHARD was not a small offense. Reading through the description of the poor response to the fire should make you angry as to how the Navy, charged with maintaining the premier maritime fighting force for the most important nation in the world, could let a critical warship burn in a major city when it has plenty of firefighting equipment nearby. This SHOULD have gone to court martial. The one Sailor accused of starting the fire, a Seaman Apprentice, is facing criminal charges at a court martial, and we don’t know yet those results. Yet for some reason the Navy elected to not pursue court martial charges for any other person involved in this case.

So NJP it is. Six members were found guilty at NJP. We don’t have the full results, but the SECNAV said that two members, the Commanding Officer and Executive Officer of the BONHOMME RICHARD, were assigned letters of reprimand and forfeiture of pay. NJP limits pay forfeitures for officers to 1/2 months pay for up to two months. With this in mind, we can calculate the lower limit for how much pay was taken by assuming they each lost 1/2 months pay for one month, and the upper limit as 1/2 months pay for two months.

CAPT Thoroman enlisted in the Navy in 1988 and thus has 34 years of service. His base pay is $12,980 a month, so he could have been fined $6,490 or $12,980. CAPT Ray joined via NROTC in 1996, and his base pay is $12,725, so he’s being fined either $6,362.50 or $12,725.

Adding these up, the lower limit of total fines is: $12,852.50
The upper limit of total fines is: $25,705
The estimated cost to fix the BONHOMME RICHARD was around $3 billion, so these fines represent 0.000857% of the repair cost for the ship.

I might be off a bit, check my math and let me know in the comments.

So that’s the financial cost, and as far as I can tell, the ONLY financial cost. Granted, its not likely the Navy could get $3 billion from all the people involved, but only punishing the CO and XO financially seems a bit light. The other guilty NJPs probably issued letters of reprimand, which like the letter of censure is a black mark on your record that otherwise has no bearing in the civilian world.

What about the Matter of Interest Findings, or MIF? A MIF is a negative letter that also sits on a service member’s record that essentially says this person wasn’t necessarily guilty, buuuuut we think we should be concerned about this individual. Translating that to reality, it means that person will likely never get promoted, but the MIF doesn’t become a felony or misdemeanor in the civilian world.

Letters of Instruction (LOIs) are letters that say “You did something wrong, and I’m instructing you on how to do better.” Then, once you complete all those items, the LOI is considered complete. I have an LOI from my first command where I screwed up a tagout and my CO made me provide tagout training to my division. LOIs don’t go on your record and don’t affect promotion. They correct bad behavior and are one step above yelling at someone for doing something stupid. Again, not much of a lasting punishment.

A NPLOC is a non-punitive letter of caution. It has even less teeth than a punitive letter, because it doesn’t sit on your record at all. A NPLOCs whole purpose is to give you more evidence on someone that is likely committing crimes but staying just below the threshold to get caught. Do you remember the “I’m not touching you game,” where you irritated your sibling by putting your finger just bareeely in front of their nose or cheek and said “I’m not touching you,” like somehow not touching you meant you couldn’t be punished? Remember when your ~~birthing person~~ mom or dad said “That’s strike one, do it again and you’ll get a whooping.” That’s a NPLOC. Not a punishment at the time, but could be used later.

Did any Admirals besides VADM (ret) Brown get punished? Well, Rear Admiral Scott Brown (not related to the VADM (ret) Brown) and Rear Admiral Eric Ver Hage both got LOIs.

And that’s it. So, just to review:

USS BONHOMME RICHARD catches fire on 12 July 2020, burns for four days and is a total loss of somewhere around 3 billion dollars.
Two years later, the Navy issues approximately 30 pieces of administrative paper that say they are really, really mad with how a Sailor acted.
The Navy also issues somewhere between $12K and $25K in fines.
The Navy has an ongoing criminal trial into one Sailor they think started the fire that we don’t have resolution on yet two years after the initial event.
No other Court Martials were convened.
No Sailor above the paygrade of O-6 was held responsible in any meaningful way.
No person was sent to jail (at least not yet).

And that’s it. That’s the extent of how the Navy holds people responsible for losing a warship inside our own port.

We often talk about the “Deep State” and how it protects bureaucrats from punishment while holding all the “little people” responsible. While its been obvious for some time now, the failure of the investigation into the fires on the BONHOMME RICHARD confirm that the military should be included into this “Deep State” calculus. It goes far beyond COVID vaccines and extremist “training.” The people wearing stars in our military will gleefuly destroy the lives of the hard working men and women in our service while continuing to provide poor leadership, poor guidance and force an ever increasing focus on non-warfighting skills. They are responsible for the poorly structured command and control diagrams, the shortened damage control training pipelines, and the increasing focus on non-warfighting skills, yet they demand all the pomp and circumstance for their office from every service member below them, and demand that we ASSUME (always a dangerous word) that they are really ready to conduct warfighting on behalf of this great nation.

Contrast the response to the BONHOMME RICHARD fire to that of the USS COLE, which had a massive hole blown in the side at the waterline from a suicide bomber, yet stayed afloat long enough to be brought home in one piece on the MV Blue Marlin, and eventually returned to service. Think about that when you read the descriptions in the BONHOMME RICHARD report on how Sailors didn’t know basics about their fire fighting gear:

On the morning of the fire 87% of the ship’s fire stations “remained in inactive equipment maintenance status,” according to the investigation. None of the crew members tried to use the ship’s foam sprinkling system because it had not been properly maintained and “in part because the crew lacked familiarity with capability and availability.” The crew made several other mistakes that day, including waiting far too long to report the fire, the investigation found. Several sailors decided not to put their firefighting gear on because they thought they were not wearing the proper uniform to take part in firefighting efforts. Sailors were also not properly trained on how to use emergency breathing devices, leading to cases of smoke inhalation.
Task and Purpose Article

What happened in the 20 years since the COLE bombing? How did we get worse at damage control as a Navy? Most importantly, who should be held responsible for that?

One final piece of history. The original BOMHOMME RICHARD was a converted merchant ship used by Captain John Paul Jones to raid the coast of Britain. In the Battle of Flamborough Head, Jones fought the HMS Serapis, which heavily damaged and eventually sank the RICHARD, but not before Jones had lashed the ships together, stormed the Serapis and ultimately captured her in a massive win for the fledgling United States Navy.

One has to ask how Captain John Paul Jones, currently interred at the Naval Academy, would react to his old ship’s namesake suffering such a tragedy, and how he would have conducted the follow-on investigation.

This post represents the views of the author and does not represents views of the United States Navy, Department of Defense, or any other government agency. You’re welcome to read their views in their official posts on navy.mil. If you learned something from this article, please consider donating to Da Tech Guy, or purchasing one of the author’s books for you or someone you care about.

Building solid products

I still enjoy going to the theater for a movie. My last in-theater movie was Dune, and while I have a good sound system at home, nothing can compare to giant theater speakers making your chair shake as a sandworm travels across the screen. Theaters have had to up their game compared to when I was a kid. Back in my day, you were lucky to get hot popcorn with something resembling butter and a seat that was cleaned a few hours ago. Now your seat is cushy, was reserved in advance (no rushing to the theater), and at my local theater you can order alcohol and dinner from your seat!

Movies are finally starting to up their game as well. We went through a drought of movies after Avengers: Endgame that just seemed didn’t inspire spending the money to go to a theater. On top of that, the movies went both woke and China-censored at the same time (which ironically often conflicted with itself). But times are changing, and Hollywood seems to be waking up to the realization that it should make solid movies and worry less about pleasing the Chinese or the woke mobs.

Apparently, its big enough that even CNN is recognizing it.

Look at the Top Gun sequel. Rather then make a movie about a sad Tom Cruise now working as the top DEI enforcement officer at the Pentagon, or cut out the Taiwanese flag on his iconic jacket, Hollywood decided to just make a solid movie. And it sold, bigly, now well over 1 billion dollars. Or look at Spider-man: No Way Home, another solid movie that just focused on being a movie. Or Dune, which took complicated source material and pieced it into an action-packed film.

My point is, if you make a solid movie, more often than not you’ll make money. That holds true across many other disciplines: make a solid product, and you’ll make a solid profit.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you like this post, why not listen to the author narrate his epic tale of woe to you by purchasing his book on Audible?

When should you start a family?

I have five living kids at home, and would have an additonal six year old girl with Down Syndrome had she not died after a failed heart surgery. I also have a pretty odd mix of friends, most of whom don’t have a family anywhere near my size, so I get asked a lot of questions about raising a large family. The most common questions come from younger couples asking about when the right, perfect time is to start a family.

And well…there isn’t one.

Someone might tell you to at least wait till after high school, which sounds like pretty good advice. After all, you probably aren’t married in high school, need to finish your diploma, and let’s be honest, most high schoolers don’t think through such life altering choices as having a baby.

Yet I know a few families that were high school sweethearts that married in or pretty near to high school graduation. My mom was one of them. She was married at 18 to my dad (who was graduating college and 4 years her senior) and somehow managed to successfully raise three kids while traveling the world with a Marine Corps officer. Compare that with too many of today’s graduates that can barely write English papers and brag about doing their laundry only a few days late with hashtag adulting on social media. Perhaps that says more about the current state of education than family planning though.

We could pick more times: after you finish your degree, after to start your first job, after you “settle down” (whatever that means), or after you are “ready” (seriously, what the heck does that mean??). But every time you try to nail down a right time, you’ll find lots of counter examples of people starting families that don’t follow that logic that come out just fine.

Which is why there isn’t a perfect time to start a family. Sadly, I see too many good, family-oriented couples searching for the perfect time to start a family. Many of them pray over it, but their prayers revolve around asking God to tell them when to start a family, like they expect some booming voice to emanate from the clouds declaring “Have intercourse at 6:35 pm on July 12th!” or some other nonsense like that. This delay and worry is part of the reason people are waiting later and later to start families, which makes it harder to have children as your biological clock only runs at full tilt for so long.

The recent SCOTUS decision is likely making many couples revisit this question. Abortion and contraception make it appear to give us control of when we have children. Neither does, or certainly doesn’t without consequences. Accepting the challenges, and the joys, of having a family will mean accepting it on the timeline that it comes to you.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to this blog or purchasing one of the author’s books.