Promotion Delayed

In the past, Marine Active junior enlisted, all Marine Reserve enlisted, and Marine Reserve Warrant Officers were promoted en masse, usually by this process: at the end of a particular month, a Department of the Navy message (ALNAV) announced the Marines selected for promotion. Within 48 hours, a Marine Corps message (MARADMIN) is published authorizing the promotion of all the selected Marines, the effective date of the promotion being the 1^st of the same month in which the MARADMIN is published. Since the ALNAV announcing my promotion came out April 4^th, I expected the MARADMIN to come out shortly thereafter, and my promotion to be effective by (at the latest) May 1^st. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps has decided to transition the Reserve Warrant Officer promotion process to the same process utilized by Active SNCO’s and Active and Reserve Commissioned Officers (just Murphy’s Law, I guess, that they happened to choose the year I get selected), which works by the following process: the Promotion Board concludes its deliberations and the ALNAV is published; USMC Manpower Management takes a look at the payroll for the rest of the FY, decides how many officers they can promote to the next grade each month and still get by in the black, and determines how many officers they will have to promote the following FY due to a payroll shortfall. Once the promotions have been spread out over the next 18 months (generally a trickle to start with, ending with large blocks at the end, delaying the major fiscal impact of the promotions until the last moment), a MARADMIN is published announcing by name the officers (who have already been SELECTED) who will be promoted, by month, for the next two months. These MARADMINS are then published every other month until all the selected officers have been promoted (some of you have already figured out that if a promotion board meets annually for each rank, it would seem possible for the #1 selection of the 2^nd annual promotion board to be promoted before the last of the selected officers from the 1^st annual promotion board—however, this does not happen, the 18 months can be accounted for by the fact that the promotion board for the FY07 promotions just made their selections this month, and the promotions don’t HAVE to start until October 1^st 2006, and all selected officers need not be promoted until September 30^th 2007). The ALNAV contains information on where each officer is on the Selection List (eg. you were the 42^nd officer on the list of 320 officers promoted of a total of 700 officers eligible), so officers can kind of “guesstimate” when they will be promoted based on what their number was and how many officers are being promoted each month. Another concern at the Manpower Management level (under the second process which now includes Reserve Warrant Officers) is that there cannot be a higher percentage of any particular rank of officer in the Reserve structure than there is in the Active structure, so often the Reserve officer’s promotion will be delayed until the appropriate Active “counterpart” is promoted.

The MARADMIN that came out yesterday announced that there would be one promotion to CWO5 effective May 1^st, (obviously, this is the guy that was #1 on the Selection List) and there were NO projected promotions for that grade for the month of June. My name was #2 on the Selection List, so I will be promoted, I just have no idea when (obviously no earlier than July 1^st, but possibly some months following).

Semper Fi, Jon G.