Until 2013, gender identity disorder was indeed considered a mental illness as defined in the DSM 4. Then it was renamed gender dysphoria and the focus shifted to treatment for discomfort over the condition rather than treating the actual condition. It is still a defined condition in the DSM 5 though, but now considered a mental condition rather than a mental illness. Wielding a ban hammer over this politically created distinction without a difference would be overreach I wouldn’t expect on this site.
Coast Guard Academy supports transitioning (male to female) cadet
- Thread starter acecreator71
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Standards are mostly arbitrary. Even when not, they still need to adapt. Imagine what the aviation community would look like without vision waivers.
I think we've made some good changes that some might view as "lowering standards." HYT is out. Yes, there are "dead weight" sailors, but we were cutting perfectly fine sailors because they weren't "competitive," and those that were "competitive" were often not good at their real jobs as a result. And is there something fundamentally wrong with a good E-5 or E-6 that isn't ready for a leadership position?
ASVAB waivers are fine. We're all realizing the flaws with judging personnel based solely on standardized testing instead of any number of other factors. There are other things to worry about.
I hope CWAY goes too. Imagine telling a perfectly good boatswain's mate that they need restart their career and learn how to hack computers now, because they weren't good enough to make BMC. Makes no sense.
Fit and fill is another one to fix. Maybe stop telling SWOs they should be able to do any and all jobs and let them specialize a bit and feel like they know something beyond the first half-inch of depth.
Most JOs aren't putting in papers because of the latest transgender or abortion policy, or vaccines. Most roll their eyes and chalk it up to political grandstanding from both sides. A small minority makes headlines and become the focus. Everyone else just wants to do their job and mind their own business.
The frustrations came from doing a different job every 6 months and only ever learning enough about anything to understand some key vocabulary words, and having senior leadership insist that that will be all you ever need to know.
You get the feeling that, despite everyone treating you nice and special, despite all these flag officers at the academy telling you about how much of a difference you'll make to our Navy and our nation, you're just the assistant to the assistant to the regional manager.
Then you put on LT and think you can finally make that difference, just to realize you're now the assistant to the regional manager.
Standards are not arbitrary. You either achieve a certain score or you don't. You have a qualification or you don't. Saying that there is only a perception that standards have been lowered is naivety. Standards have been objectively lowered in numerous instances across the military.
Sailors use to have PRT standards that they have to be able to achieve in order to stay in. A couple of years ago the Navy erased all previous PRT failures from sailor's records because they were desperate people and didn't want to kick out the fatties. Now we have guys on ships that can't even fit through scuttles. I'm not even joking. There are multiple people on my ship right now that are 2-3x the size of a scuttle. If the ship is sinking they are dead and they're killing everyone else behind them when they get stuck in the hole. Wouldn't want to hurt their feelings and hold them accountable to a PRT standard though.
ASVAB waivers are not fine. There's a difference between not being good at taking tests and just being dumb. The minimum ASVAB scores have been lowered in an attempt to increase recruiting. Now we have people joining that can't even read. That's not an exaggeration. I'll do spot checks with sailors and they mispronounce or can't read every 5th word on the page of a maintenance pub. If they can't even read what the publication says, do you really think they understand it and can perform the procedure correctly?
I don't mind spending time teaching people how to do their jobs or how to do something they haven't seen before. The problem is now we're getting more and more of these ASVAB waivers and people who barely pass the lowered standards. I'm not going to spend my time teaching somebody how to read. There needs to be a minimum set of standards and qualifications people possess in order to be a useful member of the team.
Lowering standards lowers the quality of people you have to work with and makes everyone else have to work harder. Lowering standards is definitely not the only part of the recruiting and retention problem, but it is definitely a contributor.
Sailors use to have PRT standards that they have to be able to achieve in order to stay in. A couple of years ago the Navy erased all previous PRT failures from sailor's records because they were desperate people and didn't want to kick out the fatties. Now we have guys on ships that can't even fit through scuttles. I'm not even joking. There are multiple people on my ship right now that are 2-3x the size of a scuttle. If the ship is sinking they are dead and they're killing everyone else behind them when they get stuck in the hole. Wouldn't want to hurt their feelings and hold them accountable to a PRT standard though.
ASVAB waivers are not fine. There's a difference between not being good at taking tests and just being dumb. The minimum ASVAB scores have been lowered in an attempt to increase recruiting. Now we have people joining that can't even read. That's not an exaggeration. I'll do spot checks with sailors and they mispronounce or can't read every 5th word on the page of a maintenance pub. If they can't even read what the publication says, do you really think they understand it and can perform the procedure correctly?
I don't mind spending time teaching people how to do their jobs or how to do something they haven't seen before. The problem is now we're getting more and more of these ASVAB waivers and people who barely pass the lowered standards. I'm not going to spend my time teaching somebody how to read. There needs to be a minimum set of standards and qualifications people possess in order to be a useful member of the team.
Lowering standards lowers the quality of people you have to work with and makes everyone else have to work harder. Lowering standards is definitely not the only part of the recruiting and retention problem, but it is definitely a contributor.
Kierkegaard
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If I was a rich man, I’d rent out billboard ads all over Pentagon City with this paragraph.
Kierkegaard
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I don’t totally disagree—standards are important—however the Navy isn’t doing this because it hates the idea of standards. It’s not about the meme how “kids these days are all snowflakes who need participation trophies”. It’s just the reality of an all-volunteer force when recruitment and retention are down the toilet. They have been for years now. Sailors and would-be sailors are looking at what the Navy can offer vs what’s offered on the outside and are less often choosing the Navy. When the Navy can’t compete for the most qualified people, it has to dip its standards a bit. Apparently they’ve determined that they can put in waivers for certain standards without degrading readiness. Who knows to what extent it’s true, but I’d rather have a couple sailors who failed BCA than have gapped billets in my division.
A1Janitor
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How many 3Q with noms don’t get in to USNA?
Kierkegaard
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Talking about enlisted sailors. Officer recruitment is quite good to my knowledge (Retention is a different story). And Academy admissions is a separate rabbithole with the convoluted nomination system.
SamAca10
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Whatever dude. Just know that the military is going to continue having retention and recruitment issues. The current generation and the younger one (Gen Z) doesn't want to lower their standards for pay and quality of life to serve in the military.
I'm proud that I served. The military gave me a lot of opportunity that I earned - college education tuition-free, practical job experience, a GI Bill for a masters degree if I want, a VA home loan that I used to buy a home, VA healthcare to treat conditions I developed in service. I'm grateful for those opportunities.
I'm also glad to be away from toxic leaders who think DEI is simply having people with a different skin tone but similar thought. The only people who are interested in joining the military are the bottom of the barrel types if the ASVABs are that low.
Why would someone want to serve a 20 year career in an org that doesn't treat them well when they could work a fully remote, well-paying job and buy an affordable home?
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Some people feel a calling or an obligation to serve. For them it is not all about the Benjamins.
Hard to sell that statement to an E-5 struggling to feed their kids. Hard to explain to an E-4 why they are required to continue to live in mold-ridden barracks.
We expect the best of them, yet at the same time they cannot expect the best from the service. At least you're not in a foxhole, I suppose.
A1Janitor
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Especially when we are failing the audits every year.
Took my DD to an appointment earlier this week to work on AMI. Doc is almost 2 years retired from Air Force. She legit said DD should just go to Cornell and be a college programmer to figure if she is legitimately interested in the military. Doc said that the pay, benefits, etc. are not what they used to be and that, while military service might be worth it for a young person pulling themselves out of poverty, generally the juice is not necessarily worth the squeeze. I don’t fully agree with her but, regardless, was taken aback by her thoughts having just served 20 years.
Surely you'll see to it that they pass the next one.
They have high school degrees. That's more a function of a lifetime of poor education than the ASVAB.
There were sailors that didn't know how to read before these ASVAB waivers, it never made a difference.
I do agree, but what I'm saying is that there are standards that are absolutely arbitrary and dumb. There are hills we should die on, and then there are hills not to die on.
What really burns out a good sailor is being on a ship at 88% manning. Given a choice between a 9-12 month billet gap and a warm body, I'll take the warm body every day of the week.
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Yes, I've had lots of folks with those problems over the years both in uniform and then in civilian life.
There are lots of those well paid and remote jobs that the typical E4/5 will not find or will have trouble finding.
Many of my students are getting ready to graduate with Engineering or Comp Sci degrees and even they often
have issues finding those types of jobs where they want them to be.
Not trying to preach to the choir, I know it's been a decades-long issue and I just find it both saddening and ridiculous.
It's just not great for morale to have a flag officer tell you in no uncertain words that none of these issues will be resolved any time soon.
Or have a flag officer respond to a question about re-enlistment bonuses with "if we can't count on your patriotism, just leave."
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That is an apples to carburetors type of relationship. Pay and (especially) housing are paid exactly as Congress decrees it to be paid.
If the audit were clean this year, it would not suddenly "free up" additional $$s for mold remediation or especially not pay. A lot of the audit issues are miscoding and/or improper records/documentation with regards to spare parts and consumables.
During my first tour as an Ensign/LTjg, one of my duties was ammunition administration and surprisingly, among the toughest problems were accounting for 5" shells which weigh over 70 pounds. When you're doing an exercise and firing two guns, it was actually pretty hard to keep track of how many rounds you actually fired, especially when your firing at multiple targets and my own duties were occupying me with more than just the guns. At the end of the firing day, I had to count on my guys telling me how many we'd shot and it was only the 2nd or 3rd day when we'd actually fired the weapons when the numbers seemed screwy so I looked into it further and discovered that what my guys were really doing was saving a little disc that came off of the powder container in a pike and counting them later. Well, a couple of them rolled under some equipment and BINGO, we had a error in the accounting system - the Navy thought that we had more of them at a couple of thousand dollars each than we actually had. Another issue later during a missile shoot had us jettison a dud missile (which is right into the ocean) and we didn't fire it so the usual expenditure report that I was trained to do did not go in so the Navy thought that we had one more multi-million dollar missile then we actually had. Luckily, we figured out the problem and fixed it within a couple of hours which was a bit shorter than fixing the gun projectiles issue but that too was figured out but I know of similar things that were found much later and would be an audit issue in the current environment.
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Well said…for decision makers it’s where do you accept some risk.
WestCoastRefugee
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I’m sorry, if an E-5 is struggling to feed their kids, that’s financial mismanagement. E-5 pay @4 in my area when you factor in base pay and entitlements is equivalent to about $75k a year. Thats not even factoring in that you are not paying for health insurance that would cost at least another $1k in a civilian group plan. Thats a damn good pay package for somebody that has 4 years in and is likely in their early 20’s. Not many people that age are making that kind of money, and except for very few outliers, they wouldn’t be doing any better in the civilian world. And before some comeback, I own a mortgage company, and I see what people make and what they have in the bank. If I have a client in their mid to early 20’s with money in the bank, they are usually military. The college grads are drowning in student loan debt, and even with good jobs are struggling.
Yeah I'm not gonna enumerate every case here, but consider a situation where an E-5 is not in their early 20s and also does have college debt. And because they have a wife and two kids, they're not renting a JO bachelor pad; they've got to find a somewhat decent 2-bedroom house near school.
Poor financial decision to have two kids when you have existing debt and your salary can't support? Sure, I guess, but that ship has sailed. But it's not always because they bought a Mustang at 25% interest.
It's not a common occurrence or anything. I have also seen many cases where 22-year-old E-5s have their finances in great shape. But there's always a couple in every division/department with some real problems. People don't always join the Navy in the best of situations. Some of them join after a failed career somewhere else, saddled with debt after half a year or more of being unemployed.
WestCoastRefugee
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But that’s not the Navy’s fault. I am tired of hearing about how the pay and benefits stink. Try when I was in. Pay was low, GI bill was practically worthless, virtually no bonuses, no access to the TSP, and VA disability after discharge was almost unheard of. The reality is that junior enlisted pay and benefits are outstanding and saying otherwise is devoid of reality. Hell, Post 9/11 GI Bill is worth at least $150k-$180k. I would enlist again just for that benefit alone.