Not the least of the problems of this Age of Affluence—for the Navy and the other services—is how to keep the junior officers and enlisted men in uniform, now that they have seen the Great Society.
The present administration seems determined to honor its campaign commitment to abolish the draft and depend exclusively on volunteers. Professor Milton Friedman, of the University of Chicago, is simply the most eminent and persuasive of a number of professional economists who say it can be achieved by paying service personnel in accordance with prevailing wage rates in civilian jobs.
Most economists who take this line betray either their own lack of military experience or their inability to profit from the experience of the military. For, in fact, most officers and men who “opt out” after minimum tours of duty or periods of enlistment do not do so exclusively for money reasons—some not even primarily because of superior income prospects outside.
Every experienced officer knows well the other reasons, not only as a matter of observation, but often as not because he has at one time or another rehearsed them in his own mind in considering his own personal decision. Apart from hazards of service, there is the tedium of barracks (or shipboard) life, physical discomfort and grubbiness, protracted separation from family, unexpected change-of-duty orders that disrupt children’s schooling, and frequent unsatisfactory housing. For the enlisted man, even the high-rated, highly skilled, technician there is the further fact that too much of civilian society views him as a second class citizen, supinely accepting an essentially demeaning role.
At the present time it is nearly certain that “pay equivalency” would not be enough to sustain a volunteer force of the size evidently required. Furthermore, even if circumstances were in the future to justify much smaller services, the volunteers would tend overwhelmingly to be drawn from the poor and underprivileged, rather than constituting a healthy cross section of the population.
Hence, if we are to approach the problem of all-volunteer forces at all realistically, we must admit the proposition that military and naval service must possess certain features which are actually more attractive than corresponding civilian occupations. Even if every officer and man in service were paid double his earning capacity in civilian occupations—entailing an astronomic budget increase—it still by itself might very well not be sufficient.
In an hedonistic society with built-in “full employment,” an all-volunteer armed service has got to be an elite and generally recognized as such. Internal esprit de corps, pride of uniform, more and better commissaries, and USOs are not alone enough. Society has to recognize it as being in significant respects a privileged status—right down to the apprentice seaman and buck private level.
No doubt a lot might be done on a simple creature comfort level, where circumstances of service make it feasible. Just for example, every Navy man who has ever served in small ships knows how damnably irksome lack of privacy can become over a period of time. Barracks and enlisted quarters with individual rooms and the amenities of the average college dormitory might be worth far more in morale than the cost in dollars. Rigorous maintenance of messhall standards at least the equivalent of a well-run civilian cafeteria is a goal worth high priority attention. (If it can be done in submarines, it can be done anywhere except in field exercises.)
By far the most promising area of reform is in the field of liberty and leave. For all of us the single most effective trade-off for more income is an increase in leisure, and/or a greater flexibility in ordering one’s own time. So, for example, in the past 100 years, the workweek in industry has dropped from 60-plus to under 40 hours. Beyond this the unions demand and get “time-and-a-half” and “double time”. Furthermore, even at premium wages, few workers care for more than four or five overtime hours a week, and very few would care for or stand for more than a 48-hour week. Longer paid vacations continue to be perhaps the most determinedly sought fringe benefit.
Now the idea of a shorter work day is not very relevant to the experience of a sailor at sea or a Marine in the field. But a 32-hour work week, with (say) Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off would mean a lot to a G.I. or a bluejacket assigned in Washington in the baseball season. (And his average weekly productivity might not suffer a great deal, either.) A liberty policy which by regulation counted watch service on Christmas and other holidays as rating a double time- compensation would help. (In civilian occupations, you seldom are required to work on holidays.) It is not merely that extra free time seems a good thing in itself. It can be a status badge to flaunt before one’s civilian acquaintances.
A serious reassessment of leave policy could quite conceivably result in the doubling of the present retention rate of junior officers and petty officers. Such are the variables that to develop a radically revised policy consonant with the present needs of the services would require a protracted team study beyond the limitations of this article or this writer. But it is worth noting that the present leave system was first developed in a totally different social and economic context. A priori, it would be astonishing if it continues to be the best possible leave policy for the present.
With a certain humility, the following tentative proposals are made—not as a blueprint of action, but rather as a means of helping to promote intraservice discussion which may lead to worthwhile reform.
Accumulated leave should not “expire”—certainly not on an annual basis. Officers in responsible billets and certain key ratings sometimes simply cannot be spared in a particular year, and neither justice nor common sense would punish them for their indispensability. Recommended reform: Allow accumulation of unused annual leave up to a maximum of 180 days.
For reasons analagous [sic] to those cited above re the standard work week, appreciably more annual leave with pay than that received by civilian employees or civil servants would not only be directly attractive, but also could be a means of enhancing the status of service life. Recommended reform: a basic annual leave-period of 45 days.
In university teaching (including, to a limited extent, the Naval Academy), there is a valuable fringe benefit called the sabbatical leave—an extended, partially-paid leave-of-absence without loss of seniority, available to careerists presumably every seven years. Regardless of the activity undertaken on his sabbatical, the professor finds that getting rid of the grind of the classroom for a little while enables him to come back with "all batteries recharged” and do a better job than ever before. There is no good reason to doubt that the same principle would apply to other occupations—probably to naval and military leaders more than most. Recommended reform: a policy of granting an additional three months of leave (in addition to leave normally accrued) at full pay, or an additional six months at half pay, approximately every seven years to every career officer, and every enlisted man in the pay status of E-4 or higher. In the latter case, there might be a two-year extension of enlistment ex post facto, but if so there should be no sacrifice of “shipping over” bonus that would otherwise be due. An officer receiving a sabbatical leave ought not to expect to resign or retire for at least two years after returning to full duty.
Back in the days of sail, as everyone knows, governments gave out commissions freely enough in time of war, but in times of peace put most of the officers on a half pay status (essentially “on retainer”) and let them make the rest of their living however they could. They remained on the Navy list, and come another war could count on active duty again. There were very few shore billets, in war or in peace.
Such a system would hardly make for an attractive career today. It did, however have a couple of advantages which it is a pity we have lost. For one thing, the wider and more varied experience it provided militated against the development of a narrow “service mentality.” Perhaps more important, it gave a career officer an opportunity to make a meaningful comparison of the service and civilian pursuits.
At present a holder of a regular commission who wishes to get out of the Navy must resign. With some minor exceptions, this finishes his naval career. Unfortunately, many junior officers truly “don’t know what they are getting into” when they quit.
There are many obvious advantages to a naval career—the satisfaction of command, the camaraderie of a good ship’s company, medical service and hospitalization, the annuity value of retired pay, for example. Nearly every fledgling ensign and second lieutenant has at least a dim perception of most of these points. What he very seldom realizes, however, is that most civilian jobs that he could immediately aspire to are, comparatively speaking, just damn’ dull! One may make more money selling soap for Procter and Gamble than one would as a division officer on the USS Katahdin. But as most men are constituted, there is much more challenge, variety, interest, and satisfaction in the latter occupation than in the former. As a Naval Academy professor now a little long-in-the-tooth, this writer on occasion is party to dialogue with midshipmen and junior officers considering resignation. “What’s so great about a Navy career?” is—explicitly or implicitly—their basic query. Standard reply: “In civilian life you’ll probably have two or three jobs. You’ll get good at something or other, most likely, and the simple facts of economic life will effectively prevent you from doing anything else. For only that one thing will pay you so well . . . In the Navy you’ll have ten or 15 different jobs, mostly challenging. And after you hang up the blue suit for good, you still have some life left over for more variety. The big thing about the Navy is that it is not boring!” And this I believe to be a great and important truth.
Does this pitch in practice do much good? Probably not. It is, alas, very difficult to pass on experience from one generation to another.
Yet, a flexible leave policy might enable us to salvage some valuable officers we now lose. Without undue penalty, why not let them find out that job-satisfaction is a great value in life, and that the services have a comparatively large helping of it? Recommended reform: Allow any officer up to four years of leave-without pay at any time in his career after his first term of required service, with loss of seniority on the promotion list equal to half the term of his unpaid leave. A corresponding reform for enlisted men would extend the period in which re-enlistment would be possible without full loss of re-enlistment bonus (perhaps with a time-phased scaledown.) The effect of this would be to allow a young man to change his mind, and resume an interrupted service career. He might well be a better officer (or petty officer, as the case may be) for knowing from experience the alternatives.
After all, in most professions a temporary change of occupation is possible. An academic economist may work for a while in the Budget Bureau or for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A lawyer may take a turn at elective office. A librarian may work as an editor, all without prejudice to the possibility of their returning to their original lines of work. For a significant number of people (many of them among the abler ones too), it would make a service career a great deal more attractive if there were a similar flexibility.
Clearly any such innovation would remain subject to the ancient catch, “consistent-with-the-needs-of-the- service.” In Utopia, as here and now, leave of any kind would remain a postponable privilege, rather than an absolute and immediate right. Very probably also it would become tacitly understood that anyone who insisted on every possible leave privilege at all stages of his career would be compromising his chances for promotion to the highest ranks.
But if we are really serious about aiming at a volunteer Army, Navy and Air Force, this is probably the most promising avenue to explore. It is quite possible that the out-of-pocket costs of these proposals would be more than compensated by a markedly-increased retention rate and a consequent increase in the percentage of fully-trained and battleworthy—as compared with the untrained and the learners who form such a large fraction of men in uniform today.
Why, we may ask, should this nation—which through most of its history relied on volunteers—be driven to such special incentives to maintain such a force? In part, because we feel we require a much larger force today—relatively, as well as absolutely. But, more particularly, because in the last 25 years we have lived in a period of seller’s markets for labor, when nearly anyone competent enough for the armed services has had the potential of a decent, well-paid job outside. Furthermore, the increasing technical complexity of weaponry and fire control requires a more intelligent, better educated man—both officer and enlisted groups.
If we want the right kind of man in the right quantity, we have got to coerce him (via the draft or something like it), or persuade him. And persuasion is not simply a matter of adequate wage-incentive. It is as simple as that.