Should the Department of the Army release the reasons that a NCO was NOT picked up by a DA Centralized Promotion Board?

When you are being considered for promotion to SFC and above you are past the "what's the maximum effective range of a M4 carbine" level of promotion boards.

The board members are given specific guidance on what to look for during the board process and truthfully it changes very little from year to year. As a CSM I always counseled my NCOs that were not selected by the centralized promotion board. I used the board AAR as a reference. I also made myself available to look at their records prior to the board although, very few took me up on the offer. That made it very easy to counsel them on why they were not selected.

You are correct there are goals that the board members must achieve, this is usually why you have a delay in releasing the promotion list. That is not any different than how major corporations operate. Regardless of the goal if you have done what you were supposed to do according to your MOS career path not to mention, exceeded your career path. You should not have to worry about "goals" because you should be above your peers anyway.

The centralized promotion board may not be perfect but I do not foresee it changing much in the coming years.

I whole heartedly believe that you should be told why you did not get selected. I applied for warrant last year, and did not get selected. I have no idea why. How am I supposed to improve myself if I don't know what my deficiencies were? Not knowing only makes you and your leadership guess as to what you need to improve.

This really wouldn't be that difficult to do either. I know there are thousands of nco profiles to consider, but when they choose no, they could annotate why they chose no.

No. I don't think so.

Everyone knows what the standard is for selection to the next level. I well understand, when we don't get selected (we are all non-select for something), we always want to know the answer to - what was wrong with my file, what was wrong with me.

Promotions boards first select all who qualified, then they select the best qualified, then they rank order the best qualified from 1 to n and draw a cut line. Those selected for promotion are based on the slots/spaces available.

I too, would like to know why I was selected, why I did not get the job, etc., but there is not enough time in the day to provide that level of feedback.

In the current era, with the Army downsizing, and many NCO pay grades/MOSs over-strength, the reality is NCOs that might have been selected during normal times, are not getting selected. That is what happens when we have too many faces for the spaces.