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Is maturity taking back seat in NCO ranks?

Lower cutting scores are generally regarded as a good thing. Drop the numbers and prepare to see smiles all around, as promotions mean more money, more freedom, more authority — all morale boosters.

Let them drop too low, however, and you run the risk of flooding the fleet with immature and inexperienced leaders who must bear the burden of greater leadership. It’s a numbers game the Corps now faces as promotion opportunities for enlisted Marines soar, thanks mostly to the Corps’ push to add 22,000 additional Marines to the force by fiscal 2012.

In many circles, the move is being met with criticism.

“The score for corporal dropped down to a 1419 this month for us [field radio operators], allowing plenty of [losers] to pick up, making many of the Marines who got it with a 1650 just a little sour,” wrote one corporal, nicknamed Cardeezy, in a posting to a Marine Corps Times online forum.

But concerns aren’t limited to the junior Marines. Even some of the Corps’ senior leaders are wondering what effects massive promotions now will have on the Corps later.

“As the Marine Corps increases its enlisted end strength, some general officers have expressed concern that the time to promotion has shortened,” reads an October memo from the Center for Naval Analyses, sent to Lt. Gen. Ronald Coleman, deputy commandant for Manpower and Reserve Affairs in Quantico, Va. “If Marines are being promoted faster than normal, it would mean that the typical Marine in a particular grade (a sergeant, for example) now has less experience, than a typical sergeant in the past.”

In response to the question, CNA reviewed promotion flow-point data for corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants going back more than a decade.

“There are no trends there,” said retired Sgt. Maj. Lewis “Gary” Lee, an analyst with the Arlington, Va.-based unit, a federally funded think tank serving the Navy Department and other defense agencies. Promotion flow points — the years of service at which a Marine is promoted into the next rank — “are no faster and no slower” for most military occupational specialties, with a few exceptions, he said.

“We heard some concerns about promotion flows being too fast,” said Lee, a former sergeant major of the Marine Corps. “It’s been amazing to me that there haven’t been any significant changes in the timing.”

But the report only included data through June 2007, not final numbers for the year or projected numbers for 2008, predicted to be the best promotion year in recent memory. Updated fiscal 2007 numbers and projected fiscal 2008 numbers were requested by Marine Corps Times, but have not been provided by manpower officials.

So whether those historical promotion trends will stay on track as the Corps expands its force remains to be seen. That new force structure will dictate the billets, skills and ranks of Marines who would be needed to fill out those units and commands.

“All of those things are being talked about and being thought about,” said Lee, noting that the Corps’ focus “is hitting the end-strength glide path to get to 202,000,” determining the shape of that force and managing that through enlisted career force controls. These include selective re-enlistment bonuses, first-term boatspaces for re-enlistments, lateral moves and other measures to fill billets by rank and skill.

The story so far

Up until now, the promotion flow was consistent, according to the CNA memo.

“We find no general evidence that time to promotion to corporals, sergeants or staff sergeants has decreased” since fiscal 2000, according to the memo. “Rather, it appears that time to promotion either stayed the same or lengthened for these enlisted Marines in most MOSs.”

The data found that a little more than half of the primary MOSs have promoted to corporal at the same or slower rate each year since fiscal 2001, when looking at the total months of service completed before pinning on the new rank. About 60 percent of the primary MOSs have promoted to sergeant at the same or slower rate since 2001.

Promotions to corporal for riflemen, for example, fluctuated by several months over that seven-year period, from Oct. 1, 2000, to June 2007. In fiscal 2007, riflemen became NCOs at 34 months of service — four months longer than it took in 2003, according to the partial data.

Making sergeant came at 47 months, four months faster than it took in fiscal 2006, but four months later than in 2001.

“Although the majority of promotions for corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants are either taking longer or are the same as in the past, there are grade and MOS combinations that are experiencing shorter promotion times” since 2001, according to CNA.

These include:

* Infantry unit leaders, MOS 0369, were promoted from sergeant to staff sergeant faster in fiscal 2007 — at 101 months, almost a year earlier — than in fiscal 2000, when they were promoted in their 112th month of service.

* Field artillery cannoneers, MOS 0811, made corporal two months sooner (at 29 months in 2007, versus 31 months in 2000), and tacked on their sergeant stripe a half-year earlier (43 months, versus 50 months). But artillerymen had to wait longer to add a staff sergeant rocker: Promotions came at 101 months in fiscal 2007 — more than a year longer than the 88 months in 2000.

* Military police, MOS 5811, moved into the NCO ranks earlier in fiscal 2007, with corporals pinning on at 28 months, six months earlier than their peers did in 2001. Sergeants picked up at 47 months, seven months earlier than in 2001. Promotions to staff sergeant were steady at 96 months, just one month later than in 2000.

The good and the bad

The Corps’ push to 202,000 undoubtedly will continue to require some short-term adjustments, often to put more junior Marines into those higher-rank billets.

“The battalion commander ends up with lance corporals as squad leaders when he’s supposed to have sergeants there,” noted Lee, citing a common situation at many units. “There’s a lot of things causing that,” not just promotion timing.

“In this case, you just don’t have enough sergeants to promote and get in front of a squad,” he said, referring to the shortage of infantry sergeants, a problem the Corps is hoping to remedy with re-enlistment bonuses and more meritorious promotions.

During war time, such shortages aren’t uncommon. “I was a lance corporal squad leader in Vietnam 35 years ago,” Lee said.

Promotion flow points, cutting scores and experience don’t identify one quality of a Marine that many say is critical to becoming a leader — maturity.

Retired Sgt. Maj. Greg Leal became an NCO after just less than two years in the Corps, and pinned on his sergeant stripe at two-and-a-half. He did well enough to go to Drill Instructor School in his third year as a leatherneck.

“Promotions have nothing to do with speed but the maturity of the person,” said Leal, former 1st Marines regimental sergeant major, now retired in Texas. “I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I was promoted on my potential. Some Marines are promoted on their looks and how they carry themselves in front of their leadership.”

Granted, cutting scores open the door for junior Marines to move into those NCO ranks. But it’s not always guaranteed, and Leal and many other senior staff NCOs have advocated advancements that consider the so-called “whole Marine” — not just their entire enlistment, but who they are.

“You may look good in front of me, but how are you when you are not being watched?” Leal said. “Once I received nominees from my [sergeants major], I would find them and see what they were like. I wouldn’t be looking for perfect, but I would look for potential and see how he/she treated their Marines.”

Master Sgt. Michael Earwood, an assistant operations chief with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C., said things have changed since the time he was an NCO. Earwood has been in 21 years, excluding a two-year break he took during the late 1980s.

“They have to grow up a lot faster than what we had to do,” he said of junior Marines today. “Is that hurting the Marine Corps? I think it’s a different leadership challenge. The Marine Corps has to face that challenge. The supervision definitely is a concern.”

Gone are the days of open squad bays and barracks where junior Marines were around their NCOs and staff NCOs much longer when the work day ended, which afforded closer supervision, he said.

“When I came in, the tools were more of a hands-on approach,” he said. “It’s like, if you didn’t do what you were supposed to do, you were out there doing the push-ups. Nowadays, you have to be smarter on it. You have to be more creative with the tools of your leadership styles nowadays. For example, you make them read more.”

Earwood said he tries to teach his junior Marines who’ve met trouble by having them write essays on why what they did was a bad idea, and he has them develop it into a class on the subject.

“To me, that’s not humiliating; you’re teaching them,” he said. “Sometimes when it comes from the peers, kids take that a little more to heart.”

Education is another way to prompt young Marines to mature and plan for their future, Earwood said.

“You’ve got to force the Marines to go to school to get the education. With the tempo of the deployment cycles and stuff, I would say it is more challenging. There’s going to be times when you have to force them to,” he said.

“I always tell my Marines, the Marine Corps is what you put into it,” he said. “The Marine Corps is a profession, so if you want to get ahead of your profession, you have to be good at your job.”

The waiting game

Lance Cpl. Amanda Willaman said she hopes she’s been good enough at her job to get meritorious corporal, a goal she had before promotions began to rise.

Willaman, a 20-year-old field operator with the 24th MEU, said she hopes to be a corporal by the time she returns from deployment sometime next fall.

She’s not sure whether some of her peers are ready to handle that next step.

“I believe it depends a lot on your work ethic and your goals and how seriously you take your job,” she said.

But Lance Cpl. Randy Little, who works at Camp Lejeune’s newspaper, The Globe, said he’s had to put in his time as a lance corporal and is ready to become an NCO. He said if he wasn’t already eligible to make corporal, he’d be angry at the thought of Marines in other jobs — who’ve spent less time in the Corps than him — making the same rank.

“It kind of irritates me that some people will get promoted who may not deserve to be,” he said. “A lot of the new guys — when they’re new and they haven’t been in the fleet that long, they don’t have enough knowledge to be a corporal.”

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