In your view, how is the Navy's stance different today than, say, 30 years ago?
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Naval Aviations "One" Problem...
- Thread starter Empire16
- Start date
...and there's nothing unique about Lemoore in the challenges that professional spouses face in finding good jobs.
That means your T/M/S community isn't having trouble getting people to take orders to those locations. It's an incentive pay.
I know several mostly NLC wives that have made something for themselves, but it had to be a long hustle, and it couldn't have been easy. That said, Oceana isn't that much better. Maybe if your spouse is a health care person, as so many are, since there are several major hospitals in VA Beach (one that my youngest was born in, like my oldest was in Reno......and we now joke how he is an outlaw by birth)
Was on an LHD in the Persian Gulf during the OIF kick-off, when the ship calls emergency flight quarters. Later found out that a Marine sergeant went into labor, and delivered in that little medical facility onboard. The H-60 det transported the baby and mom to higher level med care in Kuwait.
Can't imagine what the conversations were like with that kid's friends about where they were born. Also, I'm assuming their birth certificate says USS XYZ on it? Apparently it's happened a few times over the past 2-3 decades...
I think the key factor is being in a small town/rural environment. Setting aside the professions that we normally think of as transportable, like teachers, nurses, etc., If you're a lawyer, or doctor, academic, engineer, scientist, businessperson in any of the traditional fleet concentration areas like JAX, Norfolk, San Diego, PAX, DC, even Oahu and Point Mugu, you're going to have a pretty good shot at finding employment. On the other hand, Whidbey, Bremerton, Lemoore, all the southern tier TRACOMs, Kauai, Fallon, China Lake, Key West, etc... that's going to be a challenge.
There's no way the service can offset that in any meaningful way. It's just going to have to be the cost of doing business, which includes locality pay.
That lifestyle still exists and it is not as uncommon as you think…
BattlingTrain
SNA
I'm 27 with 8 years enlisted time, currently waiting to start flight school and I've just committed to not even thinking about starting a family until I'm preparing to drop my retirement package. On the enlisted side I never turned down an opportunity to deploy and plan on keeping my career as my priority for the next decade. I'm not willing to get married until I'm ready to prioritize a relationship and family over my career and I'm just not there yet.
That’s fine, you do you. I was just telling Chuck that there are plenty of us out there that are married with kids and our wives are at home with them.
Like key parties? Or helping out Jody?
HA. No I mean like around helping out with sick kids, activities. health crises, wives club stuff. The old standard of young women showing up at your house to fill your fridge with casseroles was a bedrock of support.
And to be fair to you, yes I think that culture is pretty dead in the Navy writ large. We get it through our church. Many of them are also Navy families, but it isn’t through the squadron or anything.
Depends on the squadron- my findings are very different from yours. On the whole, my wife and I had some pretty good experiences with squadron officer spouse groups / FRG, and that part of the culture still seemed fairly intact when I left AD around 4 years ago.
Well, of course my community isn't having trouble getting people to take orders there: there aren't any orders to take.
Last I checked, the ADHRB isn't a location incentive pay. Even the relatively nice locations of Jax and Whidbey aren't keeping pilots and NFOs in. JO retention is a nightmare right now and there's even folks getting out after screening for DH.
Well, since you last checked, location incentive pay has apparently become a part of it. Just like designator and platform-specific bonus differences in years past, this seems to be designed to address where the problem is worst while still acknowledging retention issues across the board.
Will it move the needle? I don't know. But I will say it's good to see the USN finally acknowledging that Lemoore and Iwakuni are less desirable than, say, San Diego or Oceana.