Politicians and Operators: the Virtuous and Vicious Cycle of the Air Force's Promotion Systems

When I was promoted to O-5, I had a wise O-6 tell me that Lt Col was the last rank I would make based on merit.

Lt Col (Join to see) wow- goes to show you how times have changed. Solid compare and contrast of the Air Force's promotion system over time. Good read and share also.

I watched the promotion system--actually the evaluation system that drives the promotion system--change three times in my 22-year career. Every time the USAF tried to make the evaluation system accurately convey to supervisors, leaders, and promotion boards the level of desirable characteristics an officer possessed. Unfortunately, the first two systems (9/4 and controlled 1-2-3) failed over time because leaders didn't hold other leaders accountable for properly rating their subordinates. Over time almost everybody was given the highest numerical rating. Consequently, the words in the OER became more important along with the rank of the most senior officer weighing in on the officer's rating (endorsement). These provided "discriminators" for promotion boards scrunched for time to review officer promotion folders. The last evaluation system I worked under was the "DP" system. The awarding of a "Definitely Promote" was controlled to a percent of all officers rated. The AF was trying very hard to hold senior officers accountable by putting the onus of awarding the DP in the hands of Colonels and Generals. The number of "Promote" wasn't controlled and the Do Not Promote rating was seldom used unless the officer had committed a truly egregious act. I don't know what happened after I retired, but the article makes it sound like the DP system has deteriorated like its predecessors.

The tension in the Air Force is often between officers in the operations career fields and all other officers. The Air Force is the only Service in which the front line combat troops are mostly officers. The other services use enlisted personnel to physically conduct combat operations almost exclusively. (Naval and Army aviation approximate the Air Force model.) The Air Force tried to create an evaluation and promotion system that would equally reward excellence in operations and operations support officers. It doesn't work out well, especially for the operators. The Service may value the accomplishments of operations support officers more highly because they appear to support the valued attributes of a military officer more highly than the accomplishment of an operations officers. Compare two captains (O-3); a supply officer and a transport pilot. The supply officer may be the operations officer for a Supply Squadron being responsible for the daily performance of the Squadron's mission. He can point to the number of personnel supervised (possibly over 100), the number of reenlistments in the enlisted force, the dollar value to resources managed, savings resulting from his effective management, etc. Good quantifiable stuff. The airlift pilot, assuming she's an instructor pilot, can take credit for numbers of safe missions some of which now may be in a hostile environment, supervising an aircrew of 3 or 4, planning and leading formations of aircraft (usually 3 to 18), instructing new pilots in safe operations in her theater of operations, keeping training folders accurately, and perhaps one or two high visibility (HQ USAF/DOD Interest) missions in a year. In a Service oriented on corporate values (personnel, money, etc.), the supply officer's record looks better. Hence, the need for operations officers to become more "corporate"--what the author of the article calls "political." The captain instructor pilot will learn that her "additional duties" and "special assignments" will weigh at least equal to her operational excellence. She will still do her flying job as well as she can, but she knows to be promoted, she has to take on extra work to beef up her OER to compete with the operations support officers. So she becomes the politician described in the article and gets promoted. Then she emulates her success and by the time she's up for Colonel, she has largely lost a full appreciation for the operational world in which she started.

BTW I met Brig Gen Olds and heard him speak. I was an ROTC cadet at the time. Very impressive person and officer, but perhaps the last of his breed. Things were already getting very political, or corporate, by the time I heard him speak in 1969 and he knew it.