In the December 2014 issue of Proceedings Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Admiral Bill Moran wrote, “It costs a lot to train people from the ground up,” meaning that maintaining a sailor’s connection to the Navy makes fiscal sense, and asserted that off- and on-ramps between military and civilian experience can provide insights that will add value to the Navy upon a return to service. While overhaul is almost certainly needed in our decades-old personnel-management system, I would argue that naval aviation would produce more cost-efficient benefits by adopting an opposing policy—keeping people in specialized roles longer. Although a human-resources or information-technology officer can gain invaluable experience in the civilian sector, a better choice for officers with specific perishable skills would be the option of building individualized career paths, allowing those individuals to attain their goals while the Navy maximizes its investment in its people.
The Navy should harness that outlay and create separate tracks for those who may not desire command. While it is anathema not to seek command at sea as a naval officer, only 27 percent of the O-1–O-3 respondents to the online 2014 Naval Retention Study Survey—those junior officers making the “stay or go” decision—felt that command was a coveted position. More than half of survey respondents at and below O-5 do not want their boss’ job, yet 80 percent would like more flight time, and 55 percent of JOs would join the reserve. This illustrates that there is a market for aviators who want to fly but don’t necessarily want command. A great deal of money and time has already been spent to train an aviator; should the Navy really sacrifice that cost if an aviator doesn’t seek command?
I propose an alternate career path for non-command-driven aviators who can provide invaluable skill to fleet squadrons while on sea tours, and weapons schools and staffs on shore tours. The mentoring possibilities are incalculable, and from a detailing perspective, professional military education and high-visibility staff jobs can be more efficiently focused on career-track personnel rather than trying to broaden uninterested officers. For those aviators who do seek command, advanced education, professional internships, and higher-headquarters staff jobs will prove extremely valuable following an O-4 department-head tour and as their career progresses.
As an aviator, I see the training-to-utilization cost epitomized by naval aviation. With a training track from accession to fleet of more than three years, another fleet-based multiyear qualification program, and the fact that aviators are not surrounded by a sizable crew while operating, naval aviators’ experience is not easily replaced should they decide to leave service at the end of their initial commitment. And they are leaving. Commander Guy Snodgrass’ white paper “Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon: A Navy Retention Study,” published in March 2014, highlighted issues leading to lower-than-normal naval-aviation retention rates. The survey found that among aviators only 32 percent of the O-1–O-3 respondents planned to stay until 20 years of service.
While that number is disappointing as a return on initial investment, equally troubling is that the vast majority of those who do stay 20 years spend less than half of their careers in fleet cockpits. The exception is an aviator who screens for operational command at sea; of those COs who stay 20 years, the Navy generally receives 11 years of fleet and instructor flying from initial fleet tour through outgoing change of command. For those who don’t screen for department head or command, the fleet flight time is vastly shorter—often as little as six years. That’s a costly loss of knowledge and experience.
Given a choice as a CO at the tactical level, I would prefer a few 1,000-hour pilots and Navy flight officers who do not want command but want to excel in the cockpit and in the unit rather than mid-career, civilian-experienced, off- then on-ramped aviators who cannot operate the aircraft at the optimum level. When it comes to operating skill-intensive tactical aircraft, there is no substitute for repetition and experience. Any future personnel system should seek to maximize the experience of our best operators by keeping them in the cockpit. Let’s not send good aviators overboard simply because they don’t want command, when the expertise to optimize program investments demands experience and competence.