Di Rita may have been joint, but I am one of a new generation of officers who are bona fide Goldwater-Nichols Act double-jointed. I have been told that I should consider it a privilege to be serving in my second joint duty tour, but I can’t help but feel that I’m playing right field again. I played a lot of right field when I was a kid because my teammates never trusted me around a baseball.
Most of you have by now seen the joint duty service ribbon pinned to the chest of one of your ship- or squadron-mates. It is a distinctive white ribbon with vertical red and blue stripes, and it stands out like a mast on the horizon atop the sea of otherwise typically green and blue Navy ribbons. This is the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, which, if you thumb through your uniform regulations, you will find just below the Purple Heart Medal and just above the Meritorious Service Medal. Pretty impressive. In the Navy, we award the Meritorious Service Medal “for outstanding meritorious service” and usually only to senior officers and enlisted personnel who have served in command or other positions of great responsibility. In the Marine Corps I think you have to defeat an entire enemy division single-handedly to even warrant consideration. In the joint duty world, however, every E-7 and above who survives a two- or three-year hitch without getting thrown in a rubber room or the brig gets one of these as an end-of-tour award. Now you know the truth.
Of course, joint duty isn’t all bad. By the end of your first joint tour, you will find yourself quite comfortable working around heretofore alien Army and Air Force types, and you will have learned to speak their language so that during your second joint tour, you’ll be able to use their own lingo against them. Just about the time you’ve heard every black-shoe, airedale, and bubble-head joke several times over, your sense of humor gets a boost from going joint. Those step-siblings of yours from the other naval warfare specialties will become your new-found allies in a much broader and higher-stakes competition of wits.
Good News, Bad News
If you are one of those skeptics, let me assure you that jointness is making a difference in our military. Take, for instance, that fancy new navy blue (read “black”) jacket and V-neck pullover you bought last winter. They are exact replicas of the Army black jacket and sweater that soldiers have been wearing for years. This means that somebody in our Navy actually thought the Army had a good idea going and copied it outright. Or it could just mean that one of our admirals lost a bet to one of their generals.
If that doesn’t convince you, then hear this. The Navy is frocking again and the other services are following suit. The catch is that Goldwater-Nichols says we can only frock those officers who fill joint duty billets of the next higher grade, so to take advantage of this great new deal you need to make sure that your detailer sends you to a joint billet that calls for somebody one rank senior to you. Before you heave a belaying pin at this latest joint breakthrough, you need to know that for the past nine years the only reason the Navy hasn’t been frocking is because the Army and Air Force wouldn’t go along. Now they’re playing by our rules.
Another good deal from the land of jointness is the Critical Operational Specialist (COS) take-out. It works like this: If you’re a line officer and a warfare specialist who will be rolling out of a joint tour into a commanding officer or executive officer billet, your detailer can pull you at the two-year point! Your not-so-fortunate compatriots will be Army green with envy as you sail out the door headed back to the real Navy after only 24 months. For the first time in your Navy career, your detailer can be your hero. It won’t matter that you’re going off to the armpit of the world to be executive officer of a waste oil barge, you’ll be too busy worshipping the Bureau for getting you back to sea. Unfortunately, you can expend this silver bullet only once.
To Pentagon or not to Pentagon
I did my first joint duty tour far afield from the Pentagon—in a cornfield, actually—and I pity my comrades who are doing their first joint duty tour and their first “significant Washington duty” all at once. The first Pentagon job always is overwhelming, and when coupled with an inauguration into jointness, it can be too much for a simple ship, submarine, or airplane driver. Not a single one of the paperwork, correspondence, publications, or filing systems even remotely resembles what we’ve been raised on. Administrative nuances alone can take six months to figure out.
Then there’s the Pentagon itself. Initiates weave down the hallowed halls with thousand-meter stares, stopping abruptly every now and then to squint at an office door and compare the room number with something scribbled in their wheel book. Pentagon lifers, always late for their next meeting, blow right by these lost souls, but eventually some good shipmate will see the distress signals and stop to help because they remember those first several months and recognize the symptoms.
One of the beauties of joint duty is that you’re not limited to the Pentagon or other traditional Navy shore duty sites. If, for example, your detailer notices that your home of record is Macedonia, Iowa, you could land a job just across the Missouri River in Omaha, Nebraska—home to Offutt Air Force Base and the U.S. Strategic Command. This is a favorite tour for Big Ten fans. Joint duty also can take you to such exotic overseas ports of call as Quarry Heights, Panama, the present location of U.S. Southern Command. For those who decry adventure, we have joint duty for homesteaders just down the street in Norfolk and Honolulu.
Not Playing with a Full Duck
There is more to joint duty than getting used to the bus driver and boy scout uniforms and the paperwork-from-another-planet. There is stuff so different that most line officers are not just ducks out of water; they’re ducks a l’orange. In joint jargon, Navy line officers are commonly known as “operators.” An operator is the “tooth” in the tooth-to-tail-ratio. Being an operator puts you at a distinct disadvantage in joint duty because the Army and the Air Force have an overwhelming superiority in their burgeoning staff corps. They have full-blown, badge-totin’ lifer staff corps specialties for stuff you’ve never heard of. In addition to the medical, dental, lawyer, engineer, logistics, and chaplain type folks, they have adjutant generals, operations analysts, signal corps, and a bunch of others that even a double-jointed sailor couldn’t identify without a manual.
If you have a subspecialty, you may be one of the lucky few to land a joint job that correlates loosely to your training or experience, but don’t count on it. The Army and Air Force wrote most of the staff job descriptions long before the Navy decided to take jointness seriously, and, not coincidentally, hardly any of the staff job descriptions match anything you might have in your service record. BUPERS is still trying to find matches for the transportation and operations analysis billets that the Army and Air Force slipped in when we weren’t looking.
Even if you find a match, chances are you’ll end up in a directorate and a division that does whatever least resembles your current professional background and qualifications. And that’s only half the game. You’ll be surrounded by Army and Air Force career staff officers who have spent their entire careers doing this highly specialized and obscure job that you’ve never heard of.
Who’s Who in the Zoo
A double-jointed officer doesn’t need uniforms to tell the services apart. Now, with this handy guide, you can develop that eagle eye without having to go to all the trouble of an actual joint-duty assignment.
Army. The closest thing to soul mates Navy and Marine Corps line officers will have are the Army combat arms officers (infantry, armor, artillery, etc.). They abhor paperwork for the same reason Navy line officers do: they lack training in producing the eloquent prose characteristic of their staff corps and Air Force counterparts, and they view paperwork as an impediment to progress instead of the means to every end. They also operate with a similar sense of purpose; when faced with a challenge, they follow Admiral Horatio Nelson’s maxim, “Never mind maneuvers, always go at them.” They often cross staff lines-of-battle without a thought, bruising toes and egos in the process.
Army staff corps officers, like their Air Force counterparts, will make a career out of staffing a single issue. They will amass briefing slides, references, and staff papers for even the most straightforward decision. They can cite regulations on demand and are always prepared to tell you why something can’t be done.
Air Force. There are those who fly and those who don’t. Those who don’t populate an enormous staff structure that ostensibly supports those who do but actually has evolved into its own raison d’etre. The Air Force staff corps folks are the ultimate staffers. These highly trained tree-killers build elaborate “staff action” packages and have spearheaded a revolution in briefing technology. While the standard sailor’s briefing usually consists of a few pieces of smudged acetate covered with some scribbling in grease pencil, the typical Air Force briefer employs a multimedia extravaganza complete with color slides, digital imagery, embedded high-resolution photography and graphics, surround sound, and full-motion enhanced video.
Then there are those who fly. They’re . . . well, pilots.
Marine Corps. The average Marine can accomplish the most difficult combat mission against overwhelming odds with determination, skill, and esprit de corps; but in the maelstrom of a joint duty staff, that same Marine is outnumbered, overwhelmed, and utterly defeated. The environment is so alien that even Marine “improvise and overcome” instincts are rendered ineffective. Most Marines on a major joint staff have the same why-me look that your dog gets when you give it a bath. They just don’t understand what it was they did to be punished so severely.
Navy. You already know your shipmates; they’re the ones on the phone to their detailers begging for that job as executive officer of a waste oil barge. And the aviators are the ones standing next to the coffee pot shooting their watches with the Air Force jocks.
Myths and Legends
As we get older and more senior, we like to bore others with stories about things we learned the hard way, mistakenly assuming that everyone is as naive and ignorant as we were. In that vein, I offer my experiences with some of the myths surrounding joint duty.
Myth #1: Joint duty officers develop policy for and perform other critical tasks in support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Unified Combatant Commanders. What joint duty officers do is make coffee, do touch-and-goes through endless meetings and briefings, operate fax machines and copiers, answer telephones, and serve in the same career-enhancing collateral duties they did as ensigns (Combined Federal Campaign Coordinator, Classified Material Control Officer, Coffee Mess Fund Custodian, etc.).
Myth #2: You’re lucky to get these orders. Joint duty may be good for you, but it’s a lot like brussel sprouts: few people actually queue up to get it.
Myth #3: A joint duty tour will make your record more competitive. Three years of fitness reports signed by some Army guy about what great briefing slides you made and how well you took care of Air Force generals on their junkets won’t impress too many crusty old senior officers on your selection board.
Myth #4: It doesn’t matter which joint job you get, they all count the same. Imagine you’re sitting on a selection board trying to sort out the “crunch zone” wherein one officer was Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other was Assistant Deputy Protocol Officer in Panama. Any questions?
Bore Report
I’ve worked for Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force bosses. I’ve worked in four-by-four cubbyholes and in command centers that would make an Aegis cruiser command information center look like a V.F.W. television lounge. I’ve traveled to Maine, Spain and Spokane. In short. I’ve weathered four years of joint duty. When I complete my second joint tour, I will have spent more than one-third of my Navy career in purple purgatory. After all of this, I can report: ‘Two rounds expended; bore clear; crew overcome by smoke inhalation.”
Commander Prisley did his first hitch in “the joint” at U.S. Transportation Command, Scott Air Force Base. He is doing his second joint duty tour on the Joint Staff in the bowels of the Pentagon and may write more after his last Joint Staff fitness report is signed.