Officer Retention

[jcustis]

I had a chance this past week to talk with someone from RAND about this problem.

The first thing out of his mouth:
"We insult our Captains when we give new recruits up to $15,000 more than the Captains. We expect the Captains to carry more responsibility and more accountability, then we go and offer them less money than someone who had been in high school a week before signing up for his first enlistment. It's no surprise to me why the Captains are leaving with policies like this..."

That's a keeper. Altough I don't have the slightest concern for money for myself, I can personally tell you that it is indeed infuriating when a Marine transfers in, is a total soup samich, but cleared $40K as a reenlistment bonus. The calamity of it all...because you've become the guy who has to clean him up.

[sandbag]

Has anyone else looked at the other options that HRC is pimping for Captain retention? You've got DLI, grad school, Ranger (I need to find out who is taking this one) and branch transfer. Most of these have expired, but I asked HRC to get a rough idea about the most popular ones.

Branch transfer rated pretty high. From what I can tell, since the FAD/CFD process was stuck in artificial emergency mode, most officers weren't getting selected for career field designation outside their basic branch. That meant that a lot of Captains used the transfer option to get into a "non-insignia" branch. Why? I don't know, outside of my own branch. The ones I've talked to that used the option to transfer into mine cited a desire to break the cycle of deployments, only to learn that there's not much difference.

Has anyone talked to some of the Captains that took any of these options? Outside of just love of the lifestyle, what motivates them? What's Big Army doing for outreach? All I got back then was a survey that I maxed out the "Additional Comments" block on, and never heard anything back.

[RTK]

Has anyone talked to some of the Captains that took any of these options? Outside of just love of the lifestyle, what motivates them? What's Big Army doing for outreach? All I got back then was a survey that I maxed out the "Additional Comments" block on, and never heard anything back.

Everyone in my circle who took the incentive package took the money, including your's truely. Most of these guys were at the point where they were staying in anyway (8 of 10) and figured it was free money. The other two were on the fence. The money enticed them to stay.