Retiring from the Navy Corps - Essay Example

Swarnambika S Dr. Brown Article on Navy September 14, 2007 Why to get out of the Navy after 10 years of service? Service members retiring from the Navy/Marine Corps for reasons other than a disability, whose careers have not been interrupted by a physical or mental disability, are usually not eligible for medical retirement. Except for service members previously determined Unfit and continued in a permanent limited duty status, service members who are pending retirement at the time they are referred for physical disability evaluation enter the disability evaluation system under a rebuttable presumption that they are physically fit; i.e. Presumed Fit (PFit). Continued performance of duty until a service member is approved for length of service retirement creates a rebuttable presumption that a service member’s medical conditions have not caused premature career termination. In that situation, the PEB finds these members to be PFit. A finding of PFit means that the evidence presented to achieving retirement eligibility. Members found to be PFit have the same rights within the DES as those found Fit. While members found PFit are not eligible for disability retirement, they are still eligible for retirement under other provisions of law, as well as for evaluation by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs for disability compensation. In this paper we would be discussing on the ground taken by U.S on the separation of naval officers in the past and the reasons for the same. A service member is unfit to continue naval service when one or more physical and/or mental disabilities prevent him or her from reasonably performing the duties of his or her office, grade, rank, or rating. The PEB makes the decision on Fitness by balancing the extent of a member’s disability, as shown through objective medical and performance evidence, against the requirements and duties that the member may reasonably be expected to perform in his or her office, grade, rank, or rating. Typical medical evidence used by the PEB includes a narrative summary written by the Medical Evaluation Board (MEB), history and treatment of the injury or illness, referrals to doctors and sick call, and type and frequency of medication. Performance evidence includes non-medical assessments from the member’s command, personnel records, promotions, awards, and adverse personnel actions. In the period between the Spanish-American War and the U.S. entry into the war in Europe in 1917, new sources of Army officers were experimented with and expanded, federal authority over the militia was extended, and an Army reserve officer corps was established. The Navy formally embraced a system for promoting officers that was both centralized and selective, and Congress for the first time explicitly linked retirement provisions to the selection/promotion system. Throughout this period, the Navy continued to rely on its Naval Academy as the source of nearly all of its regular officers (Beach, 1986). The shortcomings of this approach became evident shortly after the Spanish war. The postwar Navy drawdown was short-lived. By 1905, Congress had approved construction of 28 battleships, 12 armored cruisers, and a variety of auxiliaries. The gap in the scheme was an acute shortage of officers to keep the ships manned. Proposals to promote enlisted men to the officer ranks ran into Navy opposition on the twin grounds of inadequate numbers of “qualified” enlisted personnel and “social problems” attendant to their elevation (Benjamin, 1901). The fallback was to expand the size of the incoming classes at Annapolis. In March 1903, Congress authorized a doubling of the incoming classes at the Academy for the years 1903–1913. The solution, however, served only to parent a later problem: a new “hump” in the middle and upper ranks 15 to 20 years later, not unlike that following the Civil War. Officer procurement in the Army was entangled in the larger, longer issue of regular versus militia. Congress, however, continued to favor a citizen-army led by citizen-officers. Some in the Army were sympathetic to this view. In Palmer’s assessment, an expansible regular Army was both impractical (it would be either too large to be politically acceptable in peacetime or too small to be militarily effective in mobilization) and “incongenial” to the American political system (Palmer, 1941). To ensure the place of the amateur in any future war, Congress, with mixed enthusiasm from within the Army, took a series of steps. 1. In the Dick Act of 1903, Congress formally established the state National Guard as an organized militia, specified its drilling requirements, provided it with federal arms and equipment, and prescribed that Regular Army officers were to be detailed to Guard units. 2. In the Volunteer Act of 1914, to get around the Attorney General’s 1912 opinion on the constitutionality of militia service overseas, it allowed individual guardsmen to volunteer for federal service outside the United States and required the War Department to preserve intact organized Guard units, three-fourths of whose members volunteered. 3. In the National Defense Act of 1916, it provided that the Guard receive federal pay for drills, gave the President authority to prescribe the kinds of units to be maintained by the states, and required guardsmen to take a dual oath to their state and to the United States (Gates, 1979). The prewar Army continued to embrace the seniority-within-branch promotion system established in 1890 (Huntington, 1959). The Navy took a different track. The system of “plucking boards” was unpopular with Navy officers in the middle ranks. But it was also ineffective, in that promotions piled up in the lower ranks as well. Either the Navy would need to “pluck” at every rank or it would have to restructure the promotion system directly. The latter was embodied in legislation enacted in August 1916. By its terms: Hereafter all promotions to the grades of commander, captain, and rear admiral of the line of the Navy, including the promotion of those captains, commanders, and lieutenant commanders who are, or may be, carried on the Navy list as additional to the number of such grades, shall be by selection only from the next lower respective grade upon the recommendation of a board of naval officers (Crossland & Currie, 1984). The statute set minimum time-in-grade criteria and maximum age limits, all designed to promote the “best fitted” officers and ease out the others. The first clear break with earlier promotion philosophy, the 1916 provisions were nevertheless watered-down to a degree in actual operation. The Navy allowed some officers to be judged merely “fitted” and promoted rather than eliminated (Gates, 1979). The 1916 Navy act was also the major retirement policy reform during the prewar period. By its terms, captains, commanders, and lieutenant commanders, upon reaching age 56, 50, and 45, respectively, and not selected for promotion according to the new procedure, could retire with 2.5 times their shore-duty pay for each year of service, the total of retired pay not to exceed 75 percent of shore-duty pay. The mandatory retirement age of all Navy officers, not otherwise affected, was increased from 62 to 64 (Gates, 1979). Demobilization following the war was not only rapid, it was also steep. The Army officer corps dropped from 130,485 in 1918 to 19,000 in 1919 and the Navy from 23,681 officers to 10,642 in the same period. In January 1919, the War Department asked Congress to fund an interim army of 509,000 officers and enlisted men “until such time as the United States could determine the shape of the postwar world and formulate new policies accordingly” (Dickinson, 1920). Congress responded, in the National Defense Act of 1920, by authorizing a maximum Regular Army strength of 280,000, plus another 435,000 in the National Guard (the act restored and organized into divisions the National Guard and the Organized Reserve, which had been absorbed into the Army of the United States during the war). As a means to select out inefficient officers, the act further required that henceforth all Regular Army officers were to be categorized in class “A” or class “B.” Class A officers were those considered to be “satisfactory” and would be kept on active duty. Class B officers were to be separated with severance pay or mandatorily retired if they had more than 10 years of commissioned service (Dickinson, 1920). The new authorized strength, it became quickly evident, was a chimera. In an economy move in 1921, Congress cut the Army to 133,240 officers and enlisted men (the Navy was cut from 133,000 to 94,000). One thousand Army officer billets were explicitly eliminated, promotions were stopped, and 800 officers were demoted to their next lower grade. In June 1922, Congress reduced the Army’s commissioned strength further. To ease the removal of class B officers, it prescribed a scale of departure benefits: those with less than 10 years of service were to be discharged with one year’s severance pay; officers with over 10 and under 20 years of commissioned service could be mandatorily placed on the “unlimited retired list” (with retirement set at 2.5 times active pay multiplied by the number of complete years of service); those with over 20 years could be mandatorily retired at 3 percent of active pay multiplied by the number of complete years of service (with retirement pay not to exceed 75 percent of active pay in all cases) (Crossland & Currie, 1984). In 1960, the Department of Defense impaneled an “Ad Hoc Committee to Study and Revise the Officer Personnel Act” (the Bolte committee). The intention was to achieve uniformity whenever practicable in officer career management systems (Bolte Report, 1960). Among other things, the committee recommended a uniform percentage to be applied to the total numbers of regular officers in each service to determine the numbers who may serve under permanent appointment in each grade and urged a requirement for a minimum period of service in each grade before eligibility for promotion to the next. A uniform (modified) up-or-out promotion system should be established. By its terms: 1. First lieutenants/lieutenants junior grade twice failed of promotion would be discharged with severance pay; 2. Captains/lieutenants twice passed over would be discharged with severance pay but could be continued on active duty by a selection board for not less than two or more than four years, with eligibility for additional periods through completion of 20 years; 3. Majors/lieutenant commanders passed over twice but having completed 20 years would be retired; 4. Twice-passed lieutenant colonels/commanders would be retired at 20 years but could be selectively continued to a maximum of 26; and 5. Twice-failed colonels/captains would be involuntarily retired but could be selectively continued to a maximum of 30 years (Bolte Report, 1960). The principal issue throughout this period centered on familiar questions of promotion and separation, specifically, up-or-out. In 1976, the Defense Manpower Commission concluded that the up-or-out policy was “one of the most controversial subjects in the personnel management arena . . . [and] has created morale problems . . . has caused personnel turbulence and general hardship” and is “failure oriented” (DMC, 1976). References Beach, Edward L. 1986. The United States Navy: A 200-Year History, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, p. 492. Benjamin, Park. 1901. “Naval Promotion from the Ranks,” Independent, in Hayes, 1978, p. 103. Bolte Report, 1960. Report of the Department of Defense Ad Hoc Committee to Study and Revise the Officer Personnel Act of 1947, p.1. Crossland, Richard B. & Currie, James T. 1984. Twice the Citizen: A History of the United States Army Reserve, 1908–1983, Office of the Chief, Army Reserve, Washington, D.C., p. 23. Dickinson, John. 1920. The Building of an Army, Century Co., New York, p. 324. Defense Manpower Commission (DMC). 1976. Defense Manpower: The Keystone of National Security: Report to the President and the Congress, Washington, D.C., p. 261. Gates, Ed. 1979. “Putting Up-or-Out in Perspective,” Air Force Magazine, p. 64. Huntington, Samuel. 1959. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 166. Palmer, John McCauley. 1941. America in Arms: The Experience of the United States with Military Organization, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 135. Read More