Deployments Scrubbed from AF Promotions
More bull**** for our troops! :wow::steamed:
February 11, 2009
Military.com|by Bryan Mitchell
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Imagine leading perilous convoys across Iraq's deadly streets for nearly a year and learning it won't mean squat when it comes time to compete for the senior master sergeant promotion board.
Or how about providing vital close-air support in Afghanistan and discovering it won't be included when a board decides whether to promote you to lieutenant colonel.
That's the reality scores of Air Force officers and senior NCOs are facing now that the Air Force, in a move sure to cause confusion -- if not outrage -- will be deleting deployment history from duty qualification briefs for officer selection and pre-selection, and from senior NCO evaluation briefs. The new policy will apply to all active-duty members as well as Reserve and National Guard Airmen.
"These changes will impact management level reviews, as well as officer and enlisted central selection boards," Air Force Lt. Col. John Giles, chief of Promotions and Evaluations at the Pentagon, said in a Feb. 4 Air Force release.
And the change is coming soon.
The deployment data will be scrubbed from evaluation briefs starting with the February 2009 senior master sergeant promotion board.
The June 2009 lieutenant colonel (line of the Air Force) and medical service corps promotion boards will be the next to be affected.
The Air Force release did not say who proposed the change, whether it is permanent, and why the change does not apply to junior enlisted Airmen. The Air Force did not respond to a series of questions from Military.com by post time, but the service says it will hold a media roundtable soon to provide additional details.
While many Airmen may consider service to the country, especially in a time of war, a reward in and of itself, there's also the unspoken recognition that deploying to a dangerous combat zone and spending months away from loved ones will enhance a career.
Now, the Air Force contends, it's too difficult to measure a deployment overseas against Airmen who support the so-called Global War on Terror from a stateside installation.
"Many factors have led to the recent change in policy, especially since deployments now take many forms across the Air Force," Giles said.
Many forms is another way of saying the Air Force was possibly having difficulty weighing the promotable merits of a chair-bound Airman who spends his days flying a Predator drone from the air-conditioned safety of a desert trailer against one who sprints to the flight line to make an emergency launch of an F-15 to drop 500-pound bombs on a Taliban ambush site.
"In addition to 'traditional' deployments, such as long-term deployments to the area of responsibility, some career fields such as space and missile and unmanned aircraft system operators do not typically deploy but provide daily support to the war on terrorism," the Air Force release states. "Many global mobility Airmen, as well as Guard and Reserve Airmen, do not spend 45 consecutive days in the Area of Responsibility (minimum requirement for documentation), but often deploy for more than 45 cumulative days within a calendar year."
Giles stressed that other documentation will demonstrate overseas deployments, including decoration citations, bullets on officer and enlisted performance reports, promotion recommendation form statements and letters to officer promotion boards.
"All of these are valid and important deployments," Giles stated, "but they are documented elsewhere in officer selection records and senior enlisted selection records."
But that may be little comfort to those Airmen who toil quietly far from home but close to danger, and who long assumed their sacrifice would boost their chances for promotion and all its benefits.
More bull**** for our troops! :wow::steamed: