NEWS Navy to end ending all enlisted ratings!

[Uncle Fester]

Well for one thing, rates don't really describe your job or what you do in a lot of cases any more. A YN on a sub has a very different set of responsibilities than a YN on a surface ship; I didn't know that until the SUBLANT CMC described it. For that matter, neither did the 10+ other master chiefs in the room. He also described the headaches merging/splitting rates has caused in the sub community.

A SEAL Corpsman does a completely different job than an IDC on a destroyer, FMF Doc, or a pharmacist's mate at a shore station, yet they're all HMs. PRs and AMEs wind up doing exactly the same job and qualified to do the same things in the rigger shop but being one rate instead of another limits their promotion prospects. There are a lot of specializations that are valuable and expensive to train, but in the end they're getting lost in the rate-grade pool - "an AO2 is an AO2". Witness also the fiasco of merging and now un-merging the Aircrew rates. The list goes on.

Point is, the rates system had the virtue of tradition - which definitely ain't nothing - but trying to bend it into something usable with a modern HR system was getting to be way more trouble than it was worth. It's just got to the point where the badge under your crow doesn't describe what you do or what you've been trained to do any longer. Unfortunately SECNAV's office led with the "take '-man' out of everything" thing and that's all anybody heard. Ditching the system altogether and putting the emphasis on subspecialties is sensible.

Of course, this is the Navy, and we've never yet found a sensible idea we couldn't completely fuck up in execution.

 

[Ektar]

Of course, this is the Navy, and we've never yet found a sensible idea we couldn't completely fuck up in execution.

There is so much sad truth in this statement....

 

[Jim123]

Did anybody else's NMCI block the live stream of the CNO talking about this yesterday? That kind of thing hurts the communication piece...

 

[Gatordev]

Kind of on topic, but has anyone else seen the Ready Relevant Learning brief?

Massive changes coming to A schools and C schools training! Expect new arrivals to have less training.

I haven't heard an AMO who has been happy with the idea.

 

[Flash]

...It's just got to the point where the badge under your crow doesn't describe what you do or what you've been trained to do any longer.

What happens to the rating insignia? Is everyone going to go to one insignia (maybe the crossed anchors of the Boatswain's Mates?) or will it go away altogether?

 

[Uncle Fester]

What happens to the rating insignia? Is everyone going to go to one insignia (maybe the crossed anchors of the Boatswain's Mates?) or will it go away altogether?

I figured it'd go away altogether, but CNP said this yesterday:
“It’s definitely our plan to cross that bridge, but it will be one of the last thing we’ll do for a couple of reasons. One depends on how we draw the career fields lines and something may fall out, based on that, I just don’t know, yet."

My guess will be they'll wind up with insignia for the "groups" (Aviation, Seaman, Construction, Engineering, etc).

Problem will be that whatever solution they come up with for rating badges, it'll piss off someone. Think an OS would want to wear bosun's anchors? Or for that matter, would the bosun's mates want OS's wearing anchors?

Maybe a better path would be to just carry over the old E-1-3 colors to the groups. So 'surface group' rates would wear white/blue, construction group rates the light blue, aviation green, etc.

 

[Flash]

I figured it'd go away altogether, but CNP said this yesterday:
“It’s definitely our plan to cross that bridge, but it will be one of the last thing we’ll do for a couple of reasons. One depends on how we draw the career fields lines and something may fall out, based on that, I just don’t know, yet."

Okay, so the quote above and Brett's point about how little notice this came out with shows me that the rollout of this wasn't really thought through all that well. The biggest change in over 100 years to the Navy enlisted personnel system and they do a soft rollout with few details, few answers to basic questions and quite a few 'don't knows' doesn't really bode well for a smooth execution of this proposal.

 

[Gatordev]

There was some discussion this morning about the practicality of the policy in some situations. Note, it wasn't complaining. There SHALL NOT be any complaining...

As someone joked earlier, DEMOT makes less sense now, but on a more serious note, what do you actually call for when you check in with base? "Base, can you send a Petty Officer troubleshooter?" "Uh...sure." There was also some discussion about how you identify the 4 different PO Smiths you have in a department. Kind of like in Die Hard when Agent Johnson answers the phone:

"This is agent Johnson. No, the other one."

My forecast is that everyone will work to stay within policy, but also find workarounds in order to actually be effective at conducting business until the culture changes...to whatever is next.

 

[ea6bflyr]

Somebody started a Whitehouse petition to "Restore the Traditional Navy Rating Specialty Titles Disestablished on 9/29/2016."

 

[robav8r]

My forecast is that everyone will work to stay within policy, but also find workarounds in order to actually be effective at conducting business until the culture changes...to whatever is next.

So, in other words, as if the Fleet doesn't have better things to do, this will just create more work & headaches for the folks that actually get the job done for the Navy. Solid work . . . . .

 

[squorch2]

As someone joked earlier, DEMOT makes less sense now, but on a more serious note, what do you actually call for when you check in with base? "Base, can you send a Petty Officer troubleshooter?" "Uh...sure." There was also some discussion about how you identify the 4 different PO Smiths you have in a department. Kind of like in Die Hard when Agent Johnson answers the phone:

"This is agent Johnson. No, the other one."

Great point! We should ask the Marines how they manage.

 

[Uncle Fester]

Great point! We should ask the Marines how they manage.

Pretty much what I was going to say. We're just changing to more how the other services do it.

Everyone 's still going to have specialties; they're just not going to have a "rate". You'll be Petty Officer So-and-So, not AWR2 or HM1.

This wasn't socialized around the Fleet much, but I can tell you that BuPers - the people who'll actually have to implement this - were involved from the beginning. This wasn't a wild impulse SecNav farted out one morning.

 

[707guy]

(Disclaimer: I'm long removed from active duty so my viewpoint isn't current by any means.)

This seems like change for the sake of change. More "inclusion and diversity" taken to an absurd level. Folks are rightfully proud of their rating and many, especially those who enlist into an apprenticeship program, work very hard to attain that rate. Sounds like it became too hard to remove "man" from most job titles so the result was "F it - we'll get rid of them all..." Just my $.02.

 

[xj220]

For an organization where change takes forever (if at all), they sure did drop this one pretty quick. Was it the ultimate in FITREP bullets? It seems like there's some potential for good with the change, but they did a poor job of explaining that to everyone. The "diversity and inclusiveness" portion is only going to anger people and should not have been brought up at all, even if it was part of the reasoning. Something as major as this, you'd think they'd give a warning in advance like "hey, in 6 months we're about to change the way we organize our Enlisted, for the first time. Ever." instead of "Hey, you no longer have a rate, surprise!" I'm sure (I hope) something like this was in development for a long time so most of the details are ironed out, but the announcement of immediately no rates still puzzles me.

 

[Uncle Fester]

The idea was to do a comprehensive review of rating titles. I really don't think they should have highlighted the gender-neutral thing because, as I said, everyone heard that and went bugfucknuts and stopped listening. The objective was to see if the rate titles still described the jobs sailors were actually doing - for the Navy's purposes of managing manning properly, and for the sailors' sake in promotion and using what they did on the outside. The more it was looked at, the more it seemed that the whole rate system wasn't really working any more, for Big Blue or the sailors.