The expansion of educational and economic opportunities for women in the United States has fueled the Navy's officer retention problem. There just aren't as many women today willing to make the sacrifices that come with being a Navy wife.
Officer retention has received a great deal of attention over the past few years. Enlightened thinking from Navy leadership has led to significant reductions in the interdeployment training cycle, targeted financial bonuses, a healthy pay increase, and the death of the onerous Redux retirement plan. We appear to be on a path toward incremental retention increases.
Critical as these enhancements were, however, they do not address what could be the most important contributor to retention problems in the late 20th century— American society now offers many more opportunities to young women, too many for the Navy to compete with under the old paradigm of service. Simply put, the life of a Navy wife does not hold the appeal it once did, and the desire for a stable family life is bleeding the Navy of the young, educated men on which it relies to fill its wardrooms and ready rooms.1 Tectonic shifts have occurred in the dynamics that govern the personal lives of these young officers, and the Navy must recognize these shifts or risk falling even further behind.
The explosion of opportunities for women in the United States has had a host of effects. The majority of university undergraduates in this country are women. The immense generation of wealth in the past 25 years has been contributed to greatly by the influx of educated women into high-paying careers. Women are putting off marriage and families, and many are choosing to pursue careers with all the vigor America once associated with the "company man."
These strides pose a challenge to Navy officer retention. These young, educated, career-oriented women are also the women our young, educated, ambitious junior officers hope to marry. In days past, the life of a Navy wife had certain attractive benefits—the travel, the tight-knit Navy community, and the status afforded the spouse of a naval officer, for example—and although some women still find Navy life fulfilling, many desire the security and satisfaction of careers of their own. More often than not, those careers will not blend easily with the careers of modern naval officers. In addition, the widely held perception among young adults that two incomes are needed to achieve a desirable standard of living forces young officers to weigh heavily the financial contributions of their wives.
Many times throughout my career I have sat down with peers and subordinates and talked about these issues. One officer (now an executive with a telecommunications firm in Denver) put it bluntly, saying that he enjoyed his work but that his prospects of marriage and fatherhood were bleak because "no woman I would want to marry would want to be married to a naval officer." Another pointed out that a $10,000-a-year surface warfare officer bonus was "chump change" compared to the six-figure income his successful wife was bringing home. Others married during their early tours after having reached an agreement—implicit or explicit—with their spouses that they would leave the Navy when their obligated service ended. These are patriotic, hard-working, and dedicated young men who simply want the kind of family stability that they believe once existed within the Navy.
What can the Navy do to address this aspect of the retention problem? Earning trends and attitudinal shifts are unlikely to reverse themselves, so we must recognize that the retention of a junior officer includes his social circumstances both today and in his future. We must explore new initiatives that will make being a Navy wife less detrimental to a spouse's career. Here are four suggestions to move the Navy in this direction:
- Home basing. The Navy must get serious about providing officer career paths that include the prospect of significant service in one home port without jeopardizing a officer's chance for due-course promotion and command selection. This would enable both spouses to pursue their careers with a modicum of geographic stability.
- Headhunting. The Navy Family Service Centers attempt to help relocated spouses find work, but they generally are ill-suited to place spouses with executive-level abilities. The Navy should outsource this effort to reputable executive placement firms skilled in obtaining niche positions for highly qualified candidates. The old chestnut about officers' wives not staying around long enough to benefit a business does not hold water in these days of a highly mobile workforce and a tight labor market.
- Education benefits. The Navy should look at providing education benefits to Navy spouses, along the lines of today's Tuition Assistance Program. We need to be able to say to a spouse who relocates with her husband, "We recognize the value of your decision; we realize it has a cost to your career; and we are going to show our appreciation by partially funding your bachelor's, master's, or other advanced degree." The service member would not accrue additional obligated service because of his spouse's realization of this benefit.
- Health and welfare agreements with the airlines. Because the Navy will never be able to home base everyone where they would like to be, we should pursue contracted, discounted air-fare schedules with the major carriers serving fleet concentration areas. This would alleviate some of the strain of "geographic bachelor" tours by making it easier for service members to get home to be with their loved ones who remained behind in the pursuit of career or family stability.
Of course, each of these suggestions will cost money, and personnel accounts already are the largest component of military spending. But the costs of officer discontent could be crippling. We have taken great strides in addressing the financial issues facing all officers, and with the reductions in the interdeployment training cycle, we've gone a long way toward giving officers additional time at home. But much is yet to be done, and we must adapt organizationally to the challenges presented us by a shifting sociological scene.
Commander McGrath is executive officer of the USS Princeton (CG-59).
1. Not all young officers are male, of course, but more than 85% are, and that number is unlikely to change significantly. In addition, many of the suggestions here apply equally to young female officers. To some extent, what today's young male officer faces is what female officers always have faced--a limited pool of potential spouses willing to blend into a naval career. back to article