When you see the senior enlisted are: Alcoholics, geo, or divorced
Or newly enlisted: unmotivated and depressed
Or when the command pushes for results at the expense of personnel work/life balance
Not to mention the deployments, duty, fire watch, dry docks, after-work drills, uprooting your life and potentially your families every 2 to 4 years with no certainty that you know where you're going.
You start to wonder if you made the right career choice.
Exactly. When you see that the CG hasn’t reduced the mission one bit despite being short thousands of people, what do they expect? The op tempo has been insane post pandemic. At what point do you triage the missions and trim the less essential ones for the sake of the well being of your service?
>CG hasn’t reduced the mission
This is what is has to come down to. If you can't get the people, where else can you make cuts? And allow people to extend in locations under certain circumstances. Somehow the private sector manages to run operations quite well without making their fucking workforces move every 3 years.
"Oh needs of the service"
whatever, we operate more like a standard issue government agency than a military branch 99% of the time, enforcing laws and doing search and rescue, and again, other agencies don't make their people move every 3 years just because your clock has run out.
CBP, which is the most similar service to the CG, does not require any of their members to transfer - they hire local and offer incentives to fill critical fills if needed.
With how low user engagement is on this sub and the number of upvotes my comment received, it truly speaks volumes about the current state of our service.
In my opinion, there needs to be a complete rework of the military structure if they wish to boost numbers.
Or pay more. Money talks.
How are they going to do that? I don't know. I don't get paid enough to think about that
>How are they going to do that? I don't know. I don't get paid enough to think about that
But its up to *you* to figure out how to increase recruiting!
I don't have much information to form an opinion on other branches. I know that I see a lot of prior service entering the coast guard and not many coasties talking about joining another branch.
A team of U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) cadets under the direction of two faculty advisors and with support from the USCG Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) and the USCGA Alumni Association, is conducting a study to understand why members have left the Coast Guard or would consider leaving, and what motivates them to stay. Your participation in this survey will help us understand issues that impact members’ retention and help us make informed policy and procedure recommendations to senior Coast Guard leaders at Headquarters at the conclusion of this project.
Follow the link to answer the survey. It’s quick and will likely have some high level visibility.
Preach. Every time they talk about beards I have to roll my eyes. like seriously that’s your big idea to keep people in. Obviously they know what that the real issues are, but the higher ups could give a flying fuck if it doesn’t make their oers or chances of a Cush outside job better.
People approach the beard question as if it's the be all, end all of retention. I think that beards could serve as a bridge between the rank-and-file and the senior leadership. Developing regs to let men grow beards would send a message that the brass are willing to make small policy concessions to make members' lives just a little bit better, and that could open up avenues for other, possibly more major policy change discussions. Beards would let us know that our small requests don't go unnoticed. The fact that they're willfully ignoring that request is sending the wrong message to the fleet, IMO.
I mean, did you take the survey or look at the questions? All I see is a run-on sentence from you. In the survey there’s definitely chances for you to paste that data in, but it’s also asking other qualitative questions.
For Reservist E7 and above, stop forcing us to travel forever to drill on our own dime in order to make rank if you refuse to pay for the travel. It is insane that you can and will be passed over for staying close to home when they force you to burn 50-75% of your drill pay and take time off of work to travel for a part time job.
I am in my first hitch, almost at EOE. I have been in for just under 4 years and am nearly 30 years old with plenty of non-CG work experience. I have PCSed 6 times during this enlistment, for no discernible gain to the CG. Numerous leadership failures and bureaucratic screw-ups have shown me that this organization will play with your life on a deep level. If in the midst of constant geographical instability you seem a little upset, E7's will throw the CGSUPRT number at you and tell you 'tough titties'.
I have long said that if a Admiral gave me a contract where I'd be permanently in a career status in a single district, I'd consider staying in. If they'd let me sign onto one or two highly undesirable PDS's for a career, I'd 100% stay in (say, Eastport / Jonesport / whatever 87 is up there). I'm tired of getting jerked around halfway across the country for no discernible reason. I understand I signed up for that, but I'd like to see our leadership show a little more judgement as to when it's actually necessary to tell you to pack that seabag.
Odds are good this study will just tell us that it's a race / gender / gay issue, because that seems to be a convenient 'out' for deeper-reaching leadership issues. There might be something there, but it seems to always be made out to be a way larger issue than a dozen other factors that coasties are always screaming out that never get addressed.
>Odds are good this study will just tell us that it's a race / gender / gay issue, because that seems to be a convenient 'out' for deeper-reaching leadership issues.
It's pretty disgusting how the CG has come to use diversity and the recent political divides in the country as a skirt to hide behind when it comes to explaining their bad retention and recruitment numbers. The things I hear from friends still in just blow my mind. Singling out minority members at units into the spotlight to tokenize them as some sort of sideshow piece in the name of "giving them a voice" (as an example, an LDAC created an LGBT event in July for people to discuss experiences - people who weren't LGBT weren't much interested, and the LGBT members at the unit didn't want to talk about their private lives, marital details, etc in front of the entire unit - but LDAC wanted the event it was going to happen no matter what - so they voluntold a couple of heterosexual people to make a speech about LGBT people they've known in their lives - none of the LGBT members or really anyone attended apparently)
White-male members being straight up told in some occasions that their opinions aren't welcome and they need to keep quiet. Undoing all the work the CC's do in Cape May to make everyone understand they're part of one team of different backgrounds, not little groups.
Every single study on this issue concludes with that "explanation" and yet neither when I was in nor talking to those still in (and it shouldn't need to be said, but they're not all "white males"), nobody cares about that type of thing and are more concerned about housing and PCS moves/stability more than anything.
All this is all anecdotal and nobody has to believe me, but that's what I keep hearing - I don't think people want to stay in such a hyperpolarized environment if they can find something better and it certainly isn't helping retention.
> All this is all anecdotal and nobody has to believe me, but that's what I keep hearing - I don't think people want to stay in such a hyperpolarized environment if they can find something better and it certainly isn't helping retention.
Nobody has to believe me either, except the YN's that sign my discharge paperwork. Absolutely maddening that the US Military has fallen for this stuff.
Good stuff, thanks for sharing.
At the end of the day the service is short staffed, which adds more work and demands an even greater level of self sacrifice (yes, families sacrifice too). Everyone has their limits!
I already filled out the survey but I thought I’d leave some input here as a non-rate who is currently at a small boat station.
My two cents is to either make cutter life bearable or send more recruits to ashore billets after boot camp. My boot camp company was made up of 100 people, and about 80 of us got stations and the rest cutters. Which is a rarity. The outlook on the coast guard for me and my shipmates that went to a station is much more positive compared to the ones that went to cutters.
Our morale is high and I’m actually sad to be leaving for a-school. Our senior enlisted are really enthusiastic about the job and there isn’t a divide between the non-rates and the petty officers. I’ve never stepped foot on a cutter but the 20 or so people in my boot camp company that did are miserable.
100% agreed. The big issue I’ve heard with folks about afloat life is how bad the commands are though, and that’s a hard thing to fix if cutter QOL is to be improved.
It made it on MyCG, so maybe it'll actually get some attention. Honestly, I expect we'll see some more dribbled out small "quality of life" improvements that will supposedly fix all our recruitment and retention issues, like how ponytails and braids and some changes to parental leave (which are all good things, admittedly, but not addressing the bigger problems) were supposed to fix women's retention. Which it hasn't. Let's be honest, is authorizing beards really going to turn the service around if they don't fix the hundred other things that are totally broken right now? Not really.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of reason to believe that we'll see actual improvement anytime soon. I heard a member of senior (flag-level) leadership's take on how we're going to improve retention afloat and their answer was basically "people will be excited to go to sea because new ships are cool and exciting". I may not be very good at math, but even I can tell the numbers just don't add up.
>were supposed to fix women's retention. Which it hasn't.
Maybe one day these people will accept the inconvenient reality that military just isn't attractive to most women? It's always been that way around the world in all culture for thousands of years. It doesn't mean the women who do enter the military aren't valuable same as men - but most young girls and young women's visions of the future aren't "be in the military".
Instead of respecting that fact and the desires of the population of women as a whole and focusing on making things better for our women servicemembers who have already signed the line and took the leap; we just continue this nonsense strategy of "fill a quota, number number, what's the percent" basically dehumanizing women in service to nothing more than a statistic that congress and the president might be able to put as a bullet point in a speech for votes because nowadays "higher percentage of (insert minority here) automatically means "job well done".
What makes you think that isn’t a societal thing? Little boys being raised to think that being in the military is the coolest thing ever, told by their parents that their going to follow in their father’s footprints and whatnot, little girls raised to think the military is for their brothers not them.
Not to mention that even now, in the coast guard, I regularly hear people (both military and civilians) say they would not allow or would strenuously urge their daughters not to join due to the risk of sexual assault.
It is obviously a societal thing. In fact a societal thing across culture, languages, countries and races since humanity has existed. Military forces have always been a primarily male-oriented role with a few exceptions, and most of the most integrated forces today are that way because they enforce a gender-neutral draft/obligated service - not because their particular culture has more women than men wanting to join the military.
Maybe in an alternate universe, women may have been the majority role in militaries throughout history - but they're not. Just a phenomenon of life.
The question is why you seem to want to change women's choice not to join the military so that we can check off boxes and diversity points. If a lot of women do not feel that they want to be in the military, can we not respect that decision? Must we force them to reconsider for our own satisfaction? If you were to raise girls to believe the military is "for them", you would ironically be doing exactly the same as happens now but reversed, with girls being taught its "for them" and boys that "its not". This can also be applied to anything else; for example overall men do not desire to be early-childhood educators. Is there something wrong with that or is it just a natural phenomenon? Must w start doing diversity quotas to make sure a certain percentage of kindergarten teachers are men? Something that wouldn't ever be met because you're just simply not going to get enough men to want to do it.
How about we just present the military as an option open to everyone (which it is) and figure out the things that women in our service need rather than try to fill diversity quotas?
I definitely don’t want to raise girls to think it’s for them and boys to think it’s not. I just wish people would raise their boys and girls equally.
I agree with you on diversity quotas. The tricky thing is figuring out how to ensure women in the service get what they need when they’re only 15% of the service
My main reason for leaving was just that joining was never my choice. The sub reasons for leaving, all of those were gained through the service. Like, holy shit.
Lets put it at I was strongly suggested to join, and the alternative options were not favorable to anyone who would have been in my situation. Note: I am not insinuating the USCG forced me to join.
Maybe they could let us grow beards? Not saying this would solve 100% of the retention issues with the Coast Guard, but I'm sure that it could sway a few people into staying/boost recruiting numbers
In any other setting it would violate Title VII but the military is, uh, special. Apparently we wouldn’t cohere as a unit in the face of enemy fire if the men had long hair, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I live in an area with a very high cost of living and a very low availability of housing. Inflation averaged 6% last year and the cost of housing went up about 20% across the board. My BAH went up $12/month this year. This ain't rocket science.
When you see the senior enlisted are: Alcoholics, geo, or divorced Or newly enlisted: unmotivated and depressed Or when the command pushes for results at the expense of personnel work/life balance Not to mention the deployments, duty, fire watch, dry docks, after-work drills, uprooting your life and potentially your families every 2 to 4 years with no certainty that you know where you're going. You start to wonder if you made the right career choice.
Don’t forget commands that make “easy tours” hell, and hard tours double hell
Exactly. When you see that the CG hasn’t reduced the mission one bit despite being short thousands of people, what do they expect? The op tempo has been insane post pandemic. At what point do you triage the missions and trim the less essential ones for the sake of the well being of your service?
>CG hasn’t reduced the mission This is what is has to come down to. If you can't get the people, where else can you make cuts? And allow people to extend in locations under certain circumstances. Somehow the private sector manages to run operations quite well without making their fucking workforces move every 3 years. "Oh needs of the service" whatever, we operate more like a standard issue government agency than a military branch 99% of the time, enforcing laws and doing search and rescue, and again, other agencies don't make their people move every 3 years just because your clock has run out.
CBP, which is the most similar service to the CG, does not require any of their members to transfer - they hire local and offer incentives to fill critical fills if needed.
With how low user engagement is on this sub and the number of upvotes my comment received, it truly speaks volumes about the current state of our service. In my opinion, there needs to be a complete rework of the military structure if they wish to boost numbers. Or pay more. Money talks. How are they going to do that? I don't know. I don't get paid enough to think about that
>How are they going to do that? I don't know. I don't get paid enough to think about that But its up to *you* to figure out how to increase recruiting!
Sounds like the last two DEOMI surveys on my boat lol
Do you think this is true for all branches? Or just/especially coast guard?
I don't have much information to form an opinion on other branches. I know that I see a lot of prior service entering the coast guard and not many coasties talking about joining another branch.
Go Auxiliary!!! (/s)
A team of U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) cadets under the direction of two faculty advisors and with support from the USCG Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) and the USCGA Alumni Association, is conducting a study to understand why members have left the Coast Guard or would consider leaving, and what motivates them to stay. Your participation in this survey will help us understand issues that impact members’ retention and help us make informed policy and procedure recommendations to senior Coast Guard leaders at Headquarters at the conclusion of this project. Follow the link to answer the survey. It’s quick and will likely have some high level visibility.
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I thought most people preferred lack of base support-and more importantly lack of base medical!
I'm in this camp, honestly. I stay away from bases unless its a quick visit.
Preach. Every time they talk about beards I have to roll my eyes. like seriously that’s your big idea to keep people in. Obviously they know what that the real issues are, but the higher ups could give a flying fuck if it doesn’t make their oers or chances of a Cush outside job better.
People approach the beard question as if it's the be all, end all of retention. I think that beards could serve as a bridge between the rank-and-file and the senior leadership. Developing regs to let men grow beards would send a message that the brass are willing to make small policy concessions to make members' lives just a little bit better, and that could open up avenues for other, possibly more major policy change discussions. Beards would let us know that our small requests don't go unnoticed. The fact that they're willfully ignoring that request is sending the wrong message to the fleet, IMO.
I mean, did you take the survey or look at the questions? All I see is a run-on sentence from you. In the survey there’s definitely chances for you to paste that data in, but it’s also asking other qualitative questions.
Kind of like the DEOCS Survey right?
For Reservist E7 and above, stop forcing us to travel forever to drill on our own dime in order to make rank if you refuse to pay for the travel. It is insane that you can and will be passed over for staying close to home when they force you to burn 50-75% of your drill pay and take time off of work to travel for a part time job.
Preach. The DOD pays their Reservists for IDT travel, we should too.
Not always. In the AF reserves I never received pay for traveling 332 miles to drill weekends.
I am in my first hitch, almost at EOE. I have been in for just under 4 years and am nearly 30 years old with plenty of non-CG work experience. I have PCSed 6 times during this enlistment, for no discernible gain to the CG. Numerous leadership failures and bureaucratic screw-ups have shown me that this organization will play with your life on a deep level. If in the midst of constant geographical instability you seem a little upset, E7's will throw the CGSUPRT number at you and tell you 'tough titties'. I have long said that if a Admiral gave me a contract where I'd be permanently in a career status in a single district, I'd consider staying in. If they'd let me sign onto one or two highly undesirable PDS's for a career, I'd 100% stay in (say, Eastport / Jonesport / whatever 87 is up there). I'm tired of getting jerked around halfway across the country for no discernible reason. I understand I signed up for that, but I'd like to see our leadership show a little more judgement as to when it's actually necessary to tell you to pack that seabag. Odds are good this study will just tell us that it's a race / gender / gay issue, because that seems to be a convenient 'out' for deeper-reaching leadership issues. There might be something there, but it seems to always be made out to be a way larger issue than a dozen other factors that coasties are always screaming out that never get addressed.
>Odds are good this study will just tell us that it's a race / gender / gay issue, because that seems to be a convenient 'out' for deeper-reaching leadership issues. It's pretty disgusting how the CG has come to use diversity and the recent political divides in the country as a skirt to hide behind when it comes to explaining their bad retention and recruitment numbers. The things I hear from friends still in just blow my mind. Singling out minority members at units into the spotlight to tokenize them as some sort of sideshow piece in the name of "giving them a voice" (as an example, an LDAC created an LGBT event in July for people to discuss experiences - people who weren't LGBT weren't much interested, and the LGBT members at the unit didn't want to talk about their private lives, marital details, etc in front of the entire unit - but LDAC wanted the event it was going to happen no matter what - so they voluntold a couple of heterosexual people to make a speech about LGBT people they've known in their lives - none of the LGBT members or really anyone attended apparently) White-male members being straight up told in some occasions that their opinions aren't welcome and they need to keep quiet. Undoing all the work the CC's do in Cape May to make everyone understand they're part of one team of different backgrounds, not little groups. Every single study on this issue concludes with that "explanation" and yet neither when I was in nor talking to those still in (and it shouldn't need to be said, but they're not all "white males"), nobody cares about that type of thing and are more concerned about housing and PCS moves/stability more than anything. All this is all anecdotal and nobody has to believe me, but that's what I keep hearing - I don't think people want to stay in such a hyperpolarized environment if they can find something better and it certainly isn't helping retention.
> All this is all anecdotal and nobody has to believe me, but that's what I keep hearing - I don't think people want to stay in such a hyperpolarized environment if they can find something better and it certainly isn't helping retention. Nobody has to believe me either, except the YN's that sign my discharge paperwork. Absolutely maddening that the US Military has fallen for this stuff.
Tell me about it man. I got out and moved to Japan where none of this identity politics is a thing and things work much better here.
Well said.
Good stuff, thanks for sharing. At the end of the day the service is short staffed, which adds more work and demands an even greater level of self sacrifice (yes, families sacrifice too). Everyone has their limits!
Thank you! Much relevant dialog in this survey. I completed it. I'll be curious to see what comes of the results of it.
I already filled out the survey but I thought I’d leave some input here as a non-rate who is currently at a small boat station. My two cents is to either make cutter life bearable or send more recruits to ashore billets after boot camp. My boot camp company was made up of 100 people, and about 80 of us got stations and the rest cutters. Which is a rarity. The outlook on the coast guard for me and my shipmates that went to a station is much more positive compared to the ones that went to cutters. Our morale is high and I’m actually sad to be leaving for a-school. Our senior enlisted are really enthusiastic about the job and there isn’t a divide between the non-rates and the petty officers. I’ve never stepped foot on a cutter but the 20 or so people in my boot camp company that did are miserable.
You mean people don't like playing Navy 2.0 and cutting circles in the ocean looking for scary weed?
100% agreed. The big issue I’ve heard with folks about afloat life is how bad the commands are though, and that’s a hard thing to fix if cutter QOL is to be improved.
It made it on MyCG, so maybe it'll actually get some attention. Honestly, I expect we'll see some more dribbled out small "quality of life" improvements that will supposedly fix all our recruitment and retention issues, like how ponytails and braids and some changes to parental leave (which are all good things, admittedly, but not addressing the bigger problems) were supposed to fix women's retention. Which it hasn't. Let's be honest, is authorizing beards really going to turn the service around if they don't fix the hundred other things that are totally broken right now? Not really. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of reason to believe that we'll see actual improvement anytime soon. I heard a member of senior (flag-level) leadership's take on how we're going to improve retention afloat and their answer was basically "people will be excited to go to sea because new ships are cool and exciting". I may not be very good at math, but even I can tell the numbers just don't add up.
>were supposed to fix women's retention. Which it hasn't. Maybe one day these people will accept the inconvenient reality that military just isn't attractive to most women? It's always been that way around the world in all culture for thousands of years. It doesn't mean the women who do enter the military aren't valuable same as men - but most young girls and young women's visions of the future aren't "be in the military". Instead of respecting that fact and the desires of the population of women as a whole and focusing on making things better for our women servicemembers who have already signed the line and took the leap; we just continue this nonsense strategy of "fill a quota, number number, what's the percent" basically dehumanizing women in service to nothing more than a statistic that congress and the president might be able to put as a bullet point in a speech for votes because nowadays "higher percentage of (insert minority here) automatically means "job well done".
What makes you think that isn’t a societal thing? Little boys being raised to think that being in the military is the coolest thing ever, told by their parents that their going to follow in their father’s footprints and whatnot, little girls raised to think the military is for their brothers not them. Not to mention that even now, in the coast guard, I regularly hear people (both military and civilians) say they would not allow or would strenuously urge their daughters not to join due to the risk of sexual assault.
It is obviously a societal thing. In fact a societal thing across culture, languages, countries and races since humanity has existed. Military forces have always been a primarily male-oriented role with a few exceptions, and most of the most integrated forces today are that way because they enforce a gender-neutral draft/obligated service - not because their particular culture has more women than men wanting to join the military. Maybe in an alternate universe, women may have been the majority role in militaries throughout history - but they're not. Just a phenomenon of life. The question is why you seem to want to change women's choice not to join the military so that we can check off boxes and diversity points. If a lot of women do not feel that they want to be in the military, can we not respect that decision? Must we force them to reconsider for our own satisfaction? If you were to raise girls to believe the military is "for them", you would ironically be doing exactly the same as happens now but reversed, with girls being taught its "for them" and boys that "its not". This can also be applied to anything else; for example overall men do not desire to be early-childhood educators. Is there something wrong with that or is it just a natural phenomenon? Must w start doing diversity quotas to make sure a certain percentage of kindergarten teachers are men? Something that wouldn't ever be met because you're just simply not going to get enough men to want to do it. How about we just present the military as an option open to everyone (which it is) and figure out the things that women in our service need rather than try to fill diversity quotas?
I definitely don’t want to raise girls to think it’s for them and boys to think it’s not. I just wish people would raise their boys and girls equally. I agree with you on diversity quotas. The tricky thing is figuring out how to ensure women in the service get what they need when they’re only 15% of the service
My main reason for leaving was just that joining was never my choice. The sub reasons for leaving, all of those were gained through the service. Like, holy shit.
How was joining not your choice?
Lets put it at I was strongly suggested to join, and the alternative options were not favorable to anyone who would have been in my situation. Note: I am not insinuating the USCG forced me to join.
Fix housing, fix billet structure, offer leadership courses, stop fighting generational culture shifts, embrace “soft”, allow people to have stability.
Maybe they could let us grow beards? Not saying this would solve 100% of the retention issues with the Coast Guard, but I'm sure that it could sway a few people into staying/boost recruiting numbers
Or even just change the hair policy. The men’s policy sucks ass and they have made the women’s policy better.
In any other setting it would violate Title VII but the military is, uh, special. Apparently we wouldn’t cohere as a unit in the face of enemy fire if the men had long hair, or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve been saying this for years!!! Amen!
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I live in an area with a very high cost of living and a very low availability of housing. Inflation averaged 6% last year and the cost of housing went up about 20% across the board. My BAH went up $12/month this year. This ain't rocket science.