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Why are you Leaving?
- Thread starter B.D. Drummond
- Start date
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
I didn't get the impression that she was surprised at being deployed. I got the impression that she was frustrated that frequent moving and deployment cycles became incompatible with maintaining a close personal relationship with a significant other.
IMO, there are good reasons for separating and bad reasons. Her #1 is a bad reason: If she thinks she's going to instantly be placed in a position of significant authority for some hard work or a successful project, she's probably in for a rude awakening. A HM wrote an article that complained that former military frequently have too high of expectations on where they fit in the pecking order and how quickly they should climb the corporate ladder.
However, her #2 and #4 are good reasons. She wants to have a stable home life where both adults have a career. There is nothing wrong with these goals, and that's simply not compatible with military life. I am someone who stayed past a JO tour and my wife's inability to return to her $60k earning status when moving on a bi-annual basis is a constant point of tension in our marriage. This is not a new phenomenon by any stretch, but perhaps her point #3 arises from responses similar to yours - that it's simply a matter of poor expectations - when she raised the issue.
Yea, I don't like her referral to senior officers as 'privileged,' but she has a liberal arts degree and they are teaching students in many universities that successful straight white men are successful because they are a privileged class. This is going to be a perception we increasingly have to work with whether we like it or not.
But we don't have to accept it.
I made the decision to leave in the middle of RIMPAC 2012. I hadn't enjoyed my job in years, but I took a look around the watch centre one day and came to the realisation I didn't like who I was working with and didn't want to be like who I was working for when I grew up. I've been out a year, am in grad school with a good summer internship, and have zero regrets.
Maybe I'm veering outside my lane here, but it always strikes me in these conversations that everyone seems to want the military to be what works for them. If they don't like it, it's wrong. If it doesn't work for them, it is broken.
This young lady seems to have served honorably and gotten something out of it. She decided it wasn't for her, at least not anymore. Great. Why does that have to mean it is flawed? It wasn't right for her (anymore) and maybe she wasn't right for it, either. It doesn't work for her personal life, she wants a more liberal and diverse environment because she heavily values that. Okay. I hope she finds that in her next endeavor. That doesn't mean the military is doing it wrong or badly, and yet that's always the conclusion--"I was unhappy, so the system should be different," "I didn't promote, so the process is flawed," "It didn't fit within the lifestyle I want, so it should change". No one seems to be able to say, "it wasn't right for me, nor I for it", and to own that as being about them personally, shrug it off, and move on. Instead, they have to blame a broken system, as though somehow they are entitled to the Navy they want and that works for them. Sure, there are unhappy people in the Navy, but I've met a hell of a lot of happy ones, too. So clearly, the system as a whole works for a lot of people. Change it and guess what? The spread of whom it works for and whom it doesn't work for changes and different people are unhappy in different ways, but is that progress?
I'm not saying that even those who are happy don't have gripes. Or that the military is perfect. But it seems these conversations are always pushed by people who use their own dissatisfaction as proof of some inherent brokenness of the system, rather than being able to own the fact that maybe it is personal and they just weren't a good fit. (And not in a judgmental way--just different strokes for different folks.)
My bestie is a therapist and professor, working for a couple universities. It sounds miserable to me. That doesn't mean her employers are messed up or they are doing it wrong. It just means it isn't for me. Another friend is a defense attorney. I'd rather remove my eyes with a rusty spoon. I could name a hundred jobs I don't want to do and a hundred companies I don't want to work for. It doesn't mean they are flawed and broken and need to change. It means I need to find something different and let someone for whom it does work carry on.
This young lady seems to have served honorably and gotten something out of it. She decided it wasn't for her, at least not anymore. Great. Why does that have to mean it is flawed? It wasn't right for her (anymore) and maybe she wasn't right for it, either. It doesn't work for her personal life, she wants a more liberal and diverse environment because she heavily values that. Okay. I hope she finds that in her next endeavor. That doesn't mean the military is doing it wrong or badly, and yet that's always the conclusion--"I was unhappy, so the system should be different," "I didn't promote, so the process is flawed," "It didn't fit within the lifestyle I want, so it should change". No one seems to be able to say, "it wasn't right for me, nor I for it", and to own that as being about them personally, shrug it off, and move on. Instead, they have to blame a broken system, as though somehow they are entitled to the Navy they want and that works for them. Sure, there are unhappy people in the Navy, but I've met a hell of a lot of happy ones, too. So clearly, the system as a whole works for a lot of people. Change it and guess what? The spread of whom it works for and whom it doesn't work for changes and different people are unhappy in different ways, but is that progress?
I'm not saying that even those who are happy don't have gripes. Or that the military is perfect. But it seems these conversations are always pushed by people who use their own dissatisfaction as proof of some inherent brokenness of the system, rather than being able to own the fact that maybe it is personal and they just weren't a good fit. (And not in a judgmental way--just different strokes for different folks.)
My bestie is a therapist and professor, working for a couple universities. It sounds miserable to me. That doesn't mean her employers are messed up or they are doing it wrong. It just means it isn't for me. Another friend is a defense attorney. I'd rather remove my eyes with a rusty spoon. I could name a hundred jobs I don't want to do and a hundred companies I don't want to work for. It doesn't mean they are flawed and broken and need to change. It means I need to find something different and let someone for whom it does work carry on.
^post of the year.
She pointed out common knowledge. Good on her for sharing it. But she's no better than those in the system she's railing against since she's not offering any solutions, nor is she attempting to see a bigger picture to explain the persistence of these problems. Maybe there are reasons the evaluation system is the way it is. It ain't perfect, but at the same time, it's been around for decades. If it was truly broken, wouldn't by now there be enough incompetence at the flag level to run the service into the ground? The system could definitely be better, but what would the cost be to institute something different? Why haven't we adopted a new system? And the service is resistant to change because (I'm guessing here) the senior O's have seen the good idea fairy way too often, and figure they've got the wisdom to separate the wheat from the chaff. When the bullets aren't flying, I think we tend to favor what's proven because consistently favoring risk can, with a few key failures, damage your career.
And I can't even get close to being on board with her diversity point. I'm not sure where that is coming from, or how the service is not encouraging diversity. I get the feeling she just wanted out, and needed to come up with some feel-good reasons for her exit.
And I can't even get close to being on board with her diversity point. I'm not sure where that is coming from, or how the service is not encouraging diversity. I get the feeling she just wanted out, and needed to come up with some feel-good reasons for her exit.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Here is a recent female manning/retention brief. Constant trend of recruiting and downward trend of retaining females. 86% of female aviators and 69% of female SWOs from 28-55 are childless, and this includes the Navy's VCNO. Retention surveys confirm (pg 42) that compatibility with raising a family is the primary reason that women choose to either stay or leave the military (sidenote: No idea why the study didn't filter out the 90% "I'm not a female" responses and adjust percentages accordingly, that's just silly).
Is the Navy broken? That depends who you ask and how important you think it is to retain women and men with career-oriented spouses. At a minimum it creates down-range manning problems when a certain demographic voluntarily leaves at a significantly higher rate than another, yet you aim to recruit equal or near equal amounts of both. So my take is that if we're going to actively recruit women to serve, then we need to take a hard look at whether we can do business in a way that makes it more appealing for them to stay. Alternatively, we could 'manage expectations' by making "you can forget about having children" part of our recruiting pitch.
You can't run the Navy into the ground, just like you can't destroy the Earth. You can make it completely strapped for money by screwing up several acquisition programs and then squeeze servicemembers for 5% of their BAH to make up the difference, you can get yourself fired for participating in a whole bunch of debauchery, you can institute restrictive liberty policies that treat everyone like children while barraging them with endless briefs on sexual assault, suicide, and alcohol abuse, but the Navy will survive for as long as the U.S. is still a nation.
See above briefs. The fact is, the numbers don't match the message here.
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Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Yes, there is that - the new mantra among youth is there are a shortage of people who are willing to do manual labor/trade jobs. The prospect of making $15-20/hour at 20 years old vice being in debt and working at a bar/restaurant/coffee shop while struggling to break into an industry is appealing to many young men.
I am not sure how a decline in ship numbers directly correlates to our leadership running the service into the ground. While I would like to see a few more USS hulls in the water (like some FFG's and not LCS's) the ships today far outclass and can do much more any that went before them. Plus the uniformed leadership don't approve the budget, that would be our elected officials.
This discussion got me thinking about why certain jobs remain predominantly male and how society views that. Why isn't society or mainstream feminism wringing their hands over a lack of women in construction, or among diesel mechanics, electricians, or the other trades. Seems like the focus is on public service jobs - police, fire, military, even politics to a degree. Is it because these jobs usually come with more selective entry requirements (physical, mental disposition, judgment under pressure)? Is it because these public service jobs are seen as a greater achievement in the public's eye than the trades? Or, is it that the governmental nature of public service is supposed to be more gender-neutral than the private sector. Does the construction industry or the plumber's union have diversity initiatives to attract women and ensure they have a pathway to have children and raise a family that is compatible with the work environment? One wonders.
Like it or not the military is one of those career fields that will long have a gender imbalance because of who wants to serve, much like police and fire departments to this day have a similar gender imbalance even after opening their positions to women years ago (there were only 41 women in the FDNY out of a force of 10,400 as of last year) . This was exemplified by the recent experiment to get female Marine officers to go through IOC, while the USMC wanted something like 120 to go through during the trial period only 29 volunteered even after they opened it up to O-3's. It isn't discrimination or a recruiting problem, it is reality.