• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

Navy Retention Survey Results are LIVE!

Spot promotions? If there isn't a "good ole boy" club now, there sure as shit would be in that scenario.

Promotions would be solely based on who you know/work for vice how good of an officer you were. I would think for every Eisenhower we got out of that system, there could have been twice as many [insert your worst boss here].
 
wlawr005 said:
Spot promotions? If there isn't a "good ole boy" club now, there sure as shit would be in that scenario.

Promotions would be solely based on who you know/work for vice how good of an officer you were. I would think for every Eisenhower we got out of that system, there could have been twice as many [insert your worst boss here].
Click to expand...
I can't speak for azguy, but nowhere in my post am I arguing that spot promotions are a good idea. The only reason I brought them up was to observe that there are times below flag rank, even in the current system, where you already put on rank by the nature of the billet you're holding. The only thing I'm suggesting is that rank be tied to the billet you are currently detailed to, combining the functions of the the statutory and community screen boards.
 
wlawr005 said:
Spot promotions? If there isn't a "good ole boy" club now, there sure as shit would be in that scenario.

Promotions would be solely based on who you know/work for vice how good of an officer you were. I would think for every Eisenhower we got out of that system, there could have been twice as many [insert your worst boss here].
Click to expand...

It's not a spot promotion in the current sense - the "network" wouldn't have any more influence than they do at selection boards now. The community board would meet, pick the new aviation COs, DHs, etc, and those selected guys would promote based on their increased responsibilities. Not wildly different than how it works today, except a) each community gets to pick their future leaders; and b) less dead weight.
 
Sorry if I missed it somewhere, but are the qualitative (open ended) responses available somewhere? I'm sure there are more than a few gems hidden there.
 
PhrogLoop said:
"5,536 viable responses were submitted from an eligible pool of 323,681 Sailors (as of June 5, 2014), resulting in a ±1.3% margin of error."

I'm not sure if this statement is worded as strongly as it could have been to tell the story of how statistically significant the survey results were. To put this in perspective, when Gallup conducts polls leading up to a General Election, they sometimes poll as few as 1,000 respondents representing an eligible pool of 150 million people (voters) and end up with a +/- 3% margin of error. What I am trying to say is that if senior leaders try to downplay the results of this survey, they will do so at great peril because these 5,536 are speaking loud and clear.
Click to expand...
Maybe. But there is a significant difference between how the two are/were conducted. The Gallup type poll goes out and randomly selects participants, whereas the participants in the retention survey actively sought out and provided information for the study. To me, this is more analagous to customers of a product/service providing feedback on said products/services. Angry and pissed off customers are far more likely to volunteer their time and provide feedback than happy customers.

Playing devil's advocate, I could easily make the case that things really aren't that bad if only 5,536 viable responses were received from an eligible pool of 323,681 people. Seriously, if morale was as bad as "everyone" says it is, wouldn't you expect more responses? I could go on and break down the statistics one by one. I'm not saying that stats are a load of crap, but they can be an easy way to mathematically spin a predetermined outcome. Is that the case here? Probably not, but I sure wouldn't be relying on a margin of error to prop up the validity of the study. There's simply too many other factors to consider.
 
nittany03 said:
That's the point. Make rank commensurate with a level of responsibility, not a timeline. Different communities would have to use different metrics. I can't speak to what the SWO or Nuke equivalent would be, but I'm just using aviation as a starting point. Either let some smart people sit down and come up with an equivalency table that says ACTC Level III equals SWO/Sub DH equals SEAL Platoon Commander or whatever.
Click to expand...
Do not confuse tactical/professional competency with responsibility. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other (in the way you are connecting them).
 
Last edited:
Steve Wilkins said:
Maybe. But there is a significant difference between how the two are/were conducted. The Gallup type poll goes out and randomly selects participants, whereas the participants in the retention survey actively sought out and provided information for the study. To me, this is more analagous to customers of a product/service providing feedback on said products/services. Angry and pissed off customers are far more likely to volunteer their time and provide feedback than happy customers.

Playing devil's advocate, I could easily make the case that things really aren't that bad if only 5,536 viable responses were received from an eligible pool of 323,681 people. Seriously, if morale was as bad as "everyone" says it is, wouldn't you expect more responses? I could go on and break down the statistics one by one. I'm not saying that stats are a load of crap, but they can be an easy way to mathematically spin a predetermined outcome. Is that the case here? Probably not, but I sure wouldn't be relying on a margin of error to prop up the validity of the study. There's simply too many other factors to consider.
Click to expand...

That's a very astute analysis, and in our report's methodology section we used the term "at best a margin of error of 1.4%" to account for the nature of online surveys.

There has been a fair amount of criticism on this point, and it's important to note, yet all recent official Navy survey's have had a similar method (reference the SWO and Aviation surveys in the past year). There were email and social media blasts to take it, and anybody could take it. Same concerns about bias arise, but the data is reported and used as well.
 
ben4prez said:
...and anybody could take it.
Click to expand...
Including me and I've been out for 8 years now. That's kind of a problem. But to be clear, I am not suggesting that the data itself is not good. I was simply commenting on the margin of error and not relying on it to help convince senior leadership to take note of the importance of this study.
 
Steve Wilkins said:
Do not confuse tactical/professional competency with responsibility. The two have absolutely nothing to do with each other (in the way you are connecting them).
Click to expand...
Point taken, but at the JO level, ground responsibilities are often more queued to time-in-squadron than lineal number. I don't know if this is where you're going with it, but Sailors managed doesn't necessarily equate to the seniority of the billet. In my community, the senior LT who is AOPS or PersO is feasibly, though not necessarily, more likely to be the guy who is bucking for the #1EP over the Aircraft or Av/Arm Divos, who may have 20-40 people. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but the point remains. And the Super JO is likely the Training Officer, who may chop evals on like 3 ISes, but be the Skipper's right hand in evaluating the tactical competency of every aircrew in the squadron. Conversely, a senior JO could get their ticket punched, be past their high-water competitive FITREP, and finish their tour in a gentlemanly way as a skeds writer. Yet they have significant unwritten power as everyone knows they're senior and know their shit. How do we evaluate responsibility?

And in order to continue in the community, the level III-equivalent qual is a must. Don't get it (at a minimum), and you're not competitive for any flying followon tour, TRACOM included. So if LTs are going to compete against each other for promotion to LCDR and DH, why throw in the mix those who aren't competitive? Does the guy who had "the talk" with his TO and skipper, and who got kicked back to finishing his tour as Legal O, really need to be thrown in the mix with the FRS-bound AOPS as cannon fodder?

Just throwing stuff out there for discussion; I'm not claiming the ACTC idea is the be-all and end-all, but it's worth feeding the debate. I'm offering a slight counterproposal to the paper on Bus and Ben's site. Let's hear some countercounterproposals.
 
Steve Wilkins said:
...I sure wouldn't be relying on a margin of error to prop up the validity of the study...
Click to expand...
Then we will have to agree to disagree. According to the Central Limit Theorem, you can take a statistically valid sample with only 30 respondents. 1,000 is good. 5,536 is great. Bus clearly laid out the limitations of his method like any good researcher and he had the help of pros. Might there be some selection bias inherent in the sample? Probably. But that does not discount the fact that a sizable sample of the target segment (Sailors with a choice to stay in or get out) responded clearly.
 
I think that you're confusing the CLT with the inspection paradox; the former being the sample size needed to account for a reasonable standard error and the latter being the method of obtaining a sample that provides an unbiased estimate. You usually can't quantify bias. So while the Navy's survey might have a low standard error from the sample size, if it is centered on the wrong value for the estimates (ie biased because a disproportionate amount of disgruntled Sailors bothered to take the survey), it would still be wrong and no one will ever know how wrong it is.

Even the Gallop poll struggles with making sure that its estimates are unbiased. All sorts of weird existential factors affect bias in the estimate.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top