No worries, and nothing personal taken. You make some good points. I'll try to address some of your points (with caveat that my info may be dated)…both you and I know that Marine aviation constantly over-inflates the values of quals and undervalues resumes or experience when it comes to assignments. I’ll caveat these next couple of paragraphs that I don’t envy the monitors job at all, and it is a very difficult position to execute well. It’s not personal - They get put in some tough spots.
-HMX doesn’t need to be staffed with 95% WTIs to fly what is essentially Day VFR patterns to the south lawn. No matter how much those guys ramble on about “national missions.”
-Would you rather have a quality division lead with a graduate level STEM degree background at VMX or a NSI/WTI?
-How come WTIs don’t do Air Officer or Staff tours proportional the rest of the population? (Its embarrassingly apparent +0-5)
-Would you rather have a guy who has graduate degree in program management and DAO certifications at the class desk or some rando with no acquisitions experience?
-Do our PEPs all need to be WTIs? If so, why?
-How come we will send any mouth-breather to MATSG who gets selectively scheduled as a HAC, but sending talented sticks to production is frowned upon?
There are plenty more examples. A lot of the decisions made by Manpower are bullshit and not codified anywhere. They’ll always harp on the regulations they use, but when it comes to managing needs vs desires, The Marine Corps is an intellectually lazy organization when it comes to staffing. In the civilian world, you interview and have a panel for selection on jobs that require certain skill sets. In the Marines, the monitor can make stuff up that fits their requirements and have no sanity check. We don’t use our talent appropriately. It’s probably better than the Navy’s system and more “free play” but the grass isn’t always greener.
Obviously some monitors are better than others, and I’ve been fairly lucky. I only had to pull the networking card once or twice.
-HMX selection process happens after resident PME boards (very early in stating process) They are owned by HQMC Aviation. Manpower's only real input is screening their applicants for eligibility to PCS. But I agree with you about the qual hoarding.
-VMX (you've got me on that one..looks like that org has changed a lot. I can't remember if the guys we sent to China Lake needed to be NSIs...
-PEPs (no req for WTI). Kind of like HMX these tours get selected by a board process that MMOA doesn't own
-WRT production tours, I think this happens bc the monitors feed those PMOS B billets first (FRSs, VMX, etc).
MMOA did put an internal hr/qual req agreed upon with the MATSGs. That was to prevent the 520 hr HAC getting orfers there and not making it through the HITU/FITUs, which happened some.
So, yeah it's not perfect, and never will (like a lot things in the military, the IT systems could be a lot better too)