Stop Making Senior Reserve Officers Pay to Serve

Navy Reserve leaders—commanding officers (COs), officers-in-charge, and all those of the rank of commander and above—are being cheated out of pay. A loophole allows the Navy to force Reserve leaders to pay for their travel to drilling locations they had only a remote and indirect say in selecting. This loophole limits the Navy’s pool of available officers to the detriment of force readiness through gapped billets and the loss of talented leaders, and it punishes those who are dedicated enough to stick around. It must be closed.

Imagine working for a Fortune 500 company in a mid- or senior-level management position. The company offers you a position of increased responsibility that is likely to improve your chances of promotion and help advance your career. The job will be challenging, with a heavy workload. However, every month that company will require you to travel across the country to work on a weekend—and the company will not pay for your plane ticket, rental car, or other expenses, and you will get no bonus. And you likely will be expected to work the whole week afterward. If you decline the offer, your chances of further advancement in the company will be greatly reduced. Would you take this position, or would you find another employer?

Few companies in the world would be able to hang on to their managers with such negative compensation. But this is exactly the dilemma faced by all Navy Reserve officers at the rank of commander (O-5) and above, and by any senior Navy Reserve officer who wishes to take a command position.

Nonlocal Assignment

“The mission of the Navy Reserve is to provide strategic depth and deliver operational capabilities to the Navy and Marine Corps team and Joint forces, in times of peace or war.”¹ That means the Reserve is there to maintain a pool of trained sailors who can be rapidly mobilized to augment the active-duty force during war or national emergencies and to train for that mission and provide operational support in the meantime. To have access to the talented people who are, in between drill weekends, essentially civilians free to live wherever they like, the Navy has more than 100 Navy reserve centers (NRCs) spread across the 50 states and U.S. territories.² Ideally, all sailors should be assigned to a unit located at an NRC or base near their residence.

Unfortunately, the Navy Reserve is a maritime service and there simply is not enough for Reserve sailors to do at some NRCs located far from the ocean and any other Navy property. Even where there are local billets available, there may be none for which a particular sailor is qualified. There is little for an engineering rating to do in an intelligence unit, for example.

The practice of nonlocal assignment is intended to address this problem. Every Navy Reserve sailor can be assigned to up to two units at a time. One is their training unit. This is a unit at the sailor’s local NRC where they drill two weekends per quarter to maintain their mobilization readiness—taking care of necessary admin, medical requirements, physical fitness assessments, and general military training.

The second unit is their mobilization unit. This is the command the sailor would be attached to in the event of a force-wide mobilization. It owns the billet the sailor trains to fill in time of war or national emergency. For locally assigned sailors, their training unit and mobilization unit are the same, but where a local assignment is not possible, the sailor will be nonlocally assigned out from a training unit to a mobilization unit. The Navy Reserve is budgeted to send nonlocally assigned sailors, with all travel, lodging, and per diem paid for, to train with their mobilization unit one weekend per quarter, and during a sailor’s two weeks of annual training.³

The nonlocal assignment system is a compromise and an administrative burden, but it ensures units have the sailors they need in the event of a general mobilization with at least periodic job-specific training. What it boils down to is that all enlisted personnel and all officers O-4 and below can serve in the Reserve relatively near where they live, and their travel to their mobilization unit will be fully funded to ensure the right people are in the right billets.

Sailors can volunteer to be assigned to a unit at an NRC different from the one closest to their residence; sometimes this makes sense for a variety of reasons, usually related to their career intentions, civilian job situation, or desire not to have to deal with the complications of a mobilization unit/training unit relationship. However, presumably to prevent the Navy Reserve from being used as a tool for getting free vacations to places such as Hawaii every month, the Navy (per the Joint Travel Regulations) will not compensate sailors for travel to a drill site to which they are locally assigned.⁴ It will provide lodging for those with a residence more than 50 miles away as a concession to those living in relatively remote areas far from any NRC, but there will be no reimbursement for plane tickets, rental cars, fuel, and other incidental expenses.

This is unfortunate, but no O-4 and below is forced to take this option. All billets available to enlisted personnel using My Navy Assignment and officers using Junior Officer APPLY (JOAPPLY) are eligible for nonlocal assignment. However, all command billets and O-5 and above billets, which are available only through the APPLY process, are not eligible for nonlocal assignment.⁵ All APPLY billets, regardless of location, are considered local billets. And individual duty training performed locally is not eligible for travel reimbursement.⁶

The Cost of Command

The reasons all APPLY billets are local is not clearly stated anywhere; some hypothesize it is to reduce conflicts of interest in which commanding officers may feel torn between the priorities of their active-duty supported commander and those of their training unit, to prevent confusion about who reports to whom in the chain of command, or to prevent conflicts between supported commanders. Regardless of the rationale, anyone who receives an APPLY assignment is on the hook for their own travel every drill weekend.

The inactive duty training–reimbursable (IDT-R) program is a potential but limited solution to this issue. This new program funds up to $500 per weekend in travel expenses (lodging is provided) for an officer in an IDT-R billet. However, depending on the distance and location, travel costs can easily exceed that amount. Moreover, most Navy Reserve billets have not been designated as eligible. At time of writing, less than 50 percent of all APPLY billets were IDT-R eligible.

IDT-R billets aside, this can become prohibitively expensive quickly. I know one officer who lives in Washington, D.C., who was assigned a two-year command tour in Portland, Oregon, followed immediately by a two-year executive officer tour in San Diego, California. He frequently lost money on drill weekends because his pay was exceeded by the cost of flights and rental cars necessary for reporting to his appointed place of duty. Serving as a senior officer in the Reserve basically turned him into a volunteer and philanthropist. Luckily for the Navy, he could to afford the additional expenses, and he was dedicated enough to put up with it. 

The effects of this policy go beyond shorting some officers’ pay. The policy can shut officers out of some jobs entirely. Perhaps the ideal candidate for a particular CO job in Virginia lives in California, but the officer cannot justify paying out of pocket to fly to Virginia every drill weekend. With competition for billets in every location, that officer might be unable to get a billet at all. Essentially, this could force them out of the Selected Reserve.

Such cases are not uncommon—it is one of those well-known things that officers are quietly aware of but put up with as the price of continuing their careers. Some, of course, decide the price is too high and separate from the Reserve, concluding that a future Reserve retirement pension is not worth the near-term financial pain. And so, the Navy loses good officers who otherwise could contribute to the mission, as evidenced by how every year competitive billets go unfilled because there are not enough qualified applicants. Perhaps that would not be the case if the Navy paid its officers for their travel costs.

Countering the Counterarguments

There are several common counterarguments to reimbursing command leaders for travel, but they are all flawed and usually result from a misunderstanding of the situation these officers face:

“You get paid the big bucks,” or “You make officer pay, you can afford it.”

This is an oversimplification and unfair. Yes, officers get paid more than enlisted members, as is true in every branch of the military. Navy Reserve personnel in a drilling status are paid 1/30th of their base pay per drill period, of which there are four in a typical drill weekend. However, they do not receive basic allowance for housing or basic allowance for subsistence during drill periods. And, unlike active-duty command billets, there is no command bonus for most Reserve command billets. In other words, they are not paid enough extra to compensate for the monetary losses incurred while traveling. And, of course, this argument does not consider that Reserve officers also have civilian jobs, and the amount each officer is paid will vary based on their field and position.

“You volunteered for this assignment.”

While this is accurate, it does not tell the whole story. Most communities acknowledge that successful command in a challenging billet, and the fitness reports to back it up, are a significant factor in succeeding on promotion boards, particularly for unrestricted line officers.⁷ So an officer can continue to accept noncommand, nonlocally assigned orders for a time, but this will hurt their chances of promotion. And going before the board but rejecting a command job offer essentially ends an officer’s career and sends the officer into a nonpaid status. The threat is subtle, but no less real: If you value your career, you will take what jobs you are offered and simply pay the price.

“You can just telework.”⁸

This is technically true, but the ability to telework solves one problem at the expense of another: How effective would you consider a commanding officer who had never met his or her subordinates in person? APPLY jobs are all leadership positions whose holders are expected to motivate their sailors to achieve the command’s mission, and doing so over the phone or virtually is difficult at best. Moreover, some command jobs simply must be done in person. You cannot effectively command, for example, a maritime expeditionary security company that operates a half-dozen patrol boats and dozens of vehicles, weapons, and communication suites without being on the ground and in the harbor.

You Get What You Pay For

Requiring officers to pay their own travel as a condition of continuing in their jobs is wage theft, and it takes advantage of an officer’s dedication, patriotism, and desire to advance his or her career. It is an exploitative practice enabled by a bureaucratic loophole and would be unacceptable in any other part of the government and any civilian company. The Navy does not do this to Reserve enlisted sailors or junior officers, and it does not do this to any active-duty personnel. So why is it acceptable to do it to Reserve senior and commanding officers? 

This practice must end. Whether that means carving out an exception in the policy, expanding IDT-R to fully cover travel, or revising the Joint Travel Regulations or Reserve Personnel Manual, the Navy must take action to ensure its Reserve leaders are compensated for their work and that the best and fully qualified are retained and put into the jobs in which they can do the most good.