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Carrier deployments
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No doubt. Especially since it's the same cat, from my understanding.
I must admit that this has never made sense to me - maybe the fact that we have said that it is career enhancing enough times, ergo it is.
Have we ever thought about this in terms of $ spent and tactical quality of our more senior pilots. We seem to be married to a plan that costs the Navy millions (gas and mx for an H-60 alone is - $5k/ flt hour x ~60 hours x # of DHs per year) just to get someone refresher training. And then there is the qualitative measure - we take a guy out of the cockpit at his/her prime and send them to a job - and have them play catch up on tactical quals when they get to their DH squadron. Doesn't make sense to me - seems that it would be better to preserve the quality and keep senior aviators flying and leading - especially as flight hours seem to be dwindling.
And I still don't know why OOD/CDO underway matters as second sea tour - this is a qual to say you are interested in being CO of a deep draft (e.g. a qual you shouldn't worry about until you think you have the paper as a sqdn cdr to support).
MasterBates
Well-Known Member
Stop making sense. BUPERS hates that.
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Sent from my PH44100 using Tapatalk 2
Historically (well the last 15 years at least) Helos have pushed for the CAG helo officer vice the Super JO. The reasoning has been that as a Super JO you're still doing JO jobs vice growing as an Officer.
Since HS, HC and HSL all had Training Officer DH's putting the patch wearer into a staff position (who could still fly every day, if needed) was considered better than having a Super JO suck up one EP for the two years he or she would be in the squadron.
If you have a Super JO that person will have to suck one of the 3 or 4 EP's every cycle. If not, then you have a Super JO being ranked below a less expirienced pilot and Officer.
Having a highly trained pilot in the squadron is a good thing. Putting that individual on the CAG staff gets the Officer "in" the squadron but keeps that Officer progressing upwards and competing against Officers from other communities while not tying up a squadron EP so we can continue to grow future leaders.
Since HS, HC and HSL all had Training Officer DH's putting the patch wearer into a staff position (who could still fly every day, if needed) was considered better than having a Super JO suck up one EP for the two years he or she would be in the squadron.
If you have a Super JO that person will have to suck one of the 3 or 4 EP's every cycle. If not, then you have a Super JO being ranked below a less expirienced pilot and Officer.
Having a highly trained pilot in the squadron is a good thing. Putting that individual on the CAG staff gets the Officer "in" the squadron but keeps that Officer progressing upwards and competing against Officers from other communities while not tying up a squadron EP so we can continue to grow future leaders.
The '05 trough briefed in the latest NPC manpower brief (See Tailhook symposium if you haven't) may seriously benefit nontraditional career paths for those guys. They are (potentially) in a sweet spot where there isn't enough manpower anyway.
Making DH probably isn't the concern, as given the makeup of the DH screen board, the community has the biggest say in who gets moved up. So I see your nontraditional, P-8 guys having no issue at that milestone.
The bigger issue for year groups '05 and junior may be the command screen. While the bigger discriminator is DH performance, you could infer from past results that the disassociated sea tour was a tie breaker. Given that the ACSB has 50 voting members, the majority of whom aren't from the MPRA community, whether a P-8 super JO job with a 1 of 1 O-4 select FITREP is rated as highly as a boat job . . . well, the community will be responsible for making sure the right message gets across in the community brief. Having said all that, any LT motivated by the command screen board, well, is probably focused on the wrong thing, IMO.
Honestly, I think the "OOD/CDO underway matters" thing was developed as a way to sell the billets after the fact to people as being good for them, as opposed to the real reason for the billets which is that somebody needs to fill them and the helo and MPRA communities have the bodies to do it.
MasterBates
Well-Known Member
Why not just be honest about the jobs? We need boat guys, and the jet guys gave better reasons to not be it.. (yes, timing and sheer numbers are a lot of it)
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That worked historically (as you said), but the problem that's been facing the HSM community as it's transitioned is that it if they didn't do the multiple SJO billets, it would be a squadron full of PQMs and a couple of DHs plus a SWTI/TrainO. Obviously that doesn't work operationally or getting your PQMs up to speed. While a couple of squadrons are transitioning while still on the line, they're still not really airwing players until they can get up to speed (with the exception of -51, but that's actually an expeditionary setup and will continue to operate as they transition). The other squadrons are being stood up, so they have a desperate need for HACs.
With the change up to having multiple SJOs (be it post-RAG golden children or "other"), now you get more senior HACs that aren't DHs to train up the PQM/H2Ps...even if they don't have a ton of time in Series. Not a bad plan....except for the last bloody O-4/DH selection, which has now caused some SJOs to not select and muddy up the O-3 FITREP pool instead of being "SELECTED." Still, it's probably worth some of the pain just to get the juniors up to speed.
There's some honesty that's starting to come across regarding boat jobs. Not everywhere, not 100% of the time, but the word that "this is something that the Navy needs and doesn't want to get elsewhere. They value that you are sucking it up for them" is out there.
The veracity of such a statement is left as an exercise to the reader.
This... this is what "has the herd spooked," to use the parlance of PERS-43. The apple cart has been upended, and no one knows where everything is going to fall out.
HS seem to tranistion from the H-3 to the H-60 with very few Super JO's. To saw that you'll only have PQM's and O-4's sounds like a self-imposed problems.
What about the folks who are HACs (18 months into a squadron) when it transitions?
During the HS H-3 to 60F transition they went through a new board (concentrating on systems knowledge, not decision making) and became a HAC in the new aircraft (once FRS complete).
Yeah, I kind of lost focus on that post. Was pretty tired when I wrote that.
There's two different transitions going on. The first is the conventional one you describe. You have some HACs going through as CAT IIs and then come back, but they don't all go at once, not everyone transitions, and the squadron isn't fully off the line, it's just not on deployment/workups. As a result, you end up with a minimal number of HACs and with almost no one with Series experience. So there's guys around, but not as many as Ops would like to get their 2Ps up to speed. It can be overcome, but it isn't optimal.
The second transition is when they make up new squadrons, which is the bigger issue and the one I was referring to with SJOs. The first Romeo squadron was also the first one made from scratch, which is what I was referring to with the "all the golden children show up at the same place" comment. That hurt a lot of people. There's still currently several in the various stages of forming, and those have (or will have) a make up of a couple of DHs, a bunch of PQMs, and then some SJOs. There really isn't anyone else to fill the experience gap because the squadron is only so many months old and for quite some time, only can operate on minimal hours per pilot (until they're commissioned...or whatever they call it).
And then there's Firescout, but that just confuses things even more...
Although, I am willing to argue that a super JO will only end up with one of those FITREPS - assuming that he promotes to O-4. As soon as the promotion list comes out - he is now in a different reporting group than the rest of the JOs. And then, he eventually promotes to O-4
So you have a pilot who doesn't have experience other than being a squadron pilot. First as a LT which he/she has already done then as a DH which he/she is going to next.
In the meantime, in addition to the FitReps you have a JO who will be getting some of the flights you want your non-super JO's to get before they become Department Heads in a few years.