Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
After thinking about your defense of automatic dismissal of all single parents, Army Sgt, the most important question is this: what is the mission statement for your policy? What are we trying to accomplish? The obvious answer is that you want to improve the quality of the force, and you seem to believe that a blanket policy of dismissal is going to achieve that end with the greatest efficacy and the least cost to the force. Let’s go beyond that and restate the problems you want to address as specifically as possible.
By the way, I did read that you agree that a board of review is a good idea. I note as well that you want meeting the minimums to count against the SPS in terms of retention. From a management standpoint, this idea doesn’t stand. The minimum is the minimum because that’s a passing grade for the force. If you don’t like the minimums where they are, advocate moving them. I certainly don’t believe that 60/100, which was the minimum in 2005, is acceptable as a fitness standard. I don’t believe that 24/40 is an acceptable standard for marksmanship when only 3 of the targets are 300 meters from the firing position. Regardless of my beliefs, though, the Big Army says those standards are sufficient for retention. We can’t set up separate standards for soldiers who happen to be single parents by saying that the minimum is good enough to retain a married soldier or a soldier with no children but not good enough to retain a soldier who is a single parent. Either the soldier meets the established standards or she doesn’t.
What you can do is prevent favorable actions being taken on behalf of the soldier who hits the minimum consistently. No PLDC, no other schools, etc. until the soldier meets some other standard that applies to everyone in the force or at least everyone in the specific command. We also can advocate for raising the minimum. We can and should raise establish minimums by MOS, such that the combat arms have to get 80/100 or some such. Of course, this action is likely to affect a lot of people beyond the single parents. But then, we’re not conducting a witch hunt here, are we? We’re not attempting to create policies that target a whole group we don’t like; we’re looking at specific and measurable performance criteria that improve the ability of the force to take to the battlefield.
I respect your service. I respect your obvious commitment to the good of the Army and the sacrifices you have made for the good of the nation. Your ideas are worth taking seriously, if only because you’ve paid the price. Within that context, this is a terrible idea. Worse, you seem to know it but advocate it anyway. This is why I use the term “witch hunt”: you want these young ladies gone so badly that you defend a policy you know has a seriously negative outcome for the force.
Let’s think this one through for a moment. The Army invests real money in getting a recruit through her IET (or whatever Initial Entry Training is called these days). Let’s look at a linguist or an electronics specialist who has a lengthy IET and therefore costs more than the average new soldier. If the Army establishes a policy of getting rid of SPS automatically, then we’re setting ourselves up to be taken to the cleaners financially and in terms of readiness. Sally Jones, who has reasoned this all through, joins the force and gets the good training, plus a paycheck besides. She stays in long enough to qualify for the GI Bill, then gets herself pregnant. Once she gives birth, the Army gives her a severance and puts her out. She gets the GI Bill to attend the college of her choice, she goes home without serving, she gets to have that good Army training in a technical field, and the Army is now back to square one in terms of filling the need for a junior enlisted specialist in whatever field Jones was trained in. The Army is now out the cost of training Jones, the GI Bill, Jones’ severance, and Jones’ monthly pay up to the point she was put out for having a child out of wedlock. Worse, Jones tells all her friends how she did it. How long does it take before the recruiters are deluged with young women willing to put up with 12-18 months of BS to get the GI Bill, the pay, the marketable skills etc.? How much money does the Army throw down that hole before the bean counters demand a change of policy?
Again, I agree that the SPS presents a problem. Just as we need a more sophisticated philosophy for dealing with hajji than “shoot ‘em all”, we need a more nuanced philosophy than “kick ‘em all out” or even “set ‘em up to do the wrong thing, punish ‘em, and then kick ‘em out”.
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I consider this with one short term and one long term goal.
The short term goal is to break the "Single Mom is ok in the Army" Culture of acceptance. Leadership has been running away from the issue. Otherwise hard ass Sergeant Majors haul ass at the sight of a Private with a pregnant belly. We know from experience that the hint of impropriety is as good as conviction when it comes to Boards and Awards. An accusation of Misogyny is a career killer in Combat Service Support (CSS) units.
I want to break that cultural shift. This is called the Service. Programs to aid Single Moms are called Welfare. This is not a third world army with 500,000 on the payroll to keep the unemployment numbers down.
The second is the long term. That female terp or tech is costly. No doubt. What is 80,000 to the US Army that bulldozed the four year old Bob Hope Chow hall? This cost 8 million to build?
That 80,000 is going to balloon way up over time. Look at all the facilities, the incentive pays, the housing, the education. The Army could lose 80 to 100k discharging the single mom, and retain many, many, many times that amount in not having to build and staff day care centers, salaries for pediatricians, child development workers, child psychiatrists, and all the other support structures and facilities.
I think a consistent record for hitting the minimum should be a bar to service. That prior to the E5 board you have to have maxed the correspondence course points. There is no excuse it is free, and only requires time. That PT tests and Marksmanship are an average of qualifications on the primary weapon system (or the M16A2 if the primary is something like the M1A2 Abrams)not a one time score.
The Army just announced today (2/6/2012) there are plans in the works to further reduce the Army to pre-9/11 strengths of 480,000.
If .01% of that force is an undeployable single parent; that is 4,800 Soldiers re-assigned to Stateside desk jobs and programs. A Brigade equivalent.
Can we really afford that?