NCS updates/news?

[Foy]

Thanks to NCMedic for establishing this forum on NCS issues.

My son, a newly-minted Seabee on a NCS contract, just started his 15 months active duty hitch this week, having graduated from A School a week ago today. He's always been a fairly laid-back kid and it's nothing less than astonishing to see him so motivated. I've told everybody willing to listen (and a few who were captive) don't doubt the military's ability to take an individual and make a team-member out of him in just 8 to 9 weeks.

So it with some trepidation that I now look at the calendar and figure his contract will have him become a drilling reservist in June 2008. The nature and terms of the contract are accurately described in the originating post, but what's not emphasized is how the 24 month period is written up in the contract. In essence, the contract seems to give the NCS sailor a choice in whether or not he/she remains active for 24 months after the 15, or, seemingly at his/her option, goes immediately to the Selected Reserve for 24 months. The terms are that the sailor "may serve another 24 months active duty or may join the Selected Reserve". The contract language, the recruiter's pitch, and the MEPS detailers all give these young men and women the idea that they have a choice. The reality is they don't. The operative party in the "may" is the Navy, and the Navy's policy is to treat NCS as purely a Reserve recruiting tool, something that's not well explained to potential recruits, if it's explained at all.

There is a fair amount of NCS discussion on Military.com and the consensus is that few NCS sailors are being allowed to stay active after 15 months. Rod Powers at About.com/Military has a good piece on the relative difficulty of a wholesale switch from the Reserve to Active duty, with the summary being somewhere between "it's difficult" and "it's not going to happen". What I hope to see this forum become is something of a clearinghouse for NCS information, information that can be used by those NCS sailors who want very much to remain active for at least the 24 month period and those who want to remain active for longer than that by becoming active duty sailors.

I have recently heard from a parent of a NCS sailor who has applied for cross-rating in order to leave his NCS duty and take on an active duty contract in a different job. So, there appears to be a ready method of leaving the NCS program honorably, but changing jobs seems to be the key. My son really likes being a Seabee and is thrilled with his UT training and I don't know if changing ratings is what he'd prefer to do. So again, some reports from other sailors or their families on what their experiences with NCS have been would be of great interest to everybody else.

Thanks for looking in. Who has more recent information about NCS to share?

Foy

[02152007navy]

Foy...

I could ask my sister about all this...She is a classifier in a recruiter office. Just let me know.

[Foy]

Thanks for the response and thanks for the Hello on the intro forum.

Sure, any info from a classified would be welcomed. For my son, and for many others, I think, the principal question is: what is the current environment as to NCS sailors staying active for the 24 month period following the mandatory 15 months of active duty? The Navy's last official position, to the best of my knowledge, is that only those in ratings which are undermanned and have a direct involvement in the Global War on Terror will be allowed to remain active. A second question would be: What can an active duty recruiter do to assist in arranging a "conditional release" from the NCS contract, which is a Reserve contract, in favor of the NCS sailor signing an active duty contract? As I understand it, a Reserve sailor, including the NCS enlistee, must first obtain a "conditional release" from the Reserve, and that is only possible if he/she is wanted by the active duty component. With the general situation supposedly being the active duty component is overmanned and the Reserve component is undermanned, many commentators are saying it's unlikely a sailor will be allowed to make the switch without cross-rating to an undermanned active duty rating.

All of that said, I've heard several active duty Seabees say "no way a good sailor is going to be closed out of staying active", but with all due respect, these guys aren't connected with current recruiting and have little, if any, knowledge of the NCS program. And lack of familiarity seems to be present within the recruiting community, too, perhaps (I hope) contributing to the misinformation that they're disseminating about NCS. Practically everybody who claims to know something about Reserve/Active interaction says, basically, "it ain't gonna happen" when asked about remaining active in NCS or making the switch to active. I've read many posts on Military.com about the situation, too, from sailors who very much want to remain active, thinking that they'd have a choice, and bitterly learning that they don't.

A final comment, and adding to the confusion, is a comment I got from a

So heck yes, any information you can get from the recruiting community would be more than we've got now. I appreciate your interest.

Foy

[glennsmom]

Foy and Patty,

I am the mom of a NCS MA who wants to stay active. I would love to learn about anything that can be done to give him that option. I know of one MA who was just separated even though he wanted to remain active. I have heard that there is a shortage of MAs but then that they are overmanned, so end up very confused. I am so glad to have both of you to learn from. If I learn anything I will definitely share that info with anyone here.

[nvnavymom]

Hi everyone,
Nice to see you over here. Thought I would jump in here as I have some fairly current information about NCS. My Seabee son seems to have gotten a preliminary approval to be transferred out of his NCS contract and go to EOD "bomb squad" school once his current deployment is completed. I think that should be sometime around Oct. 2007. I think it was pretty hard for him to get this done, though, and he was fortunate enough to have someone in his command make some calls. Like the others he was very upset about how all of this was presented. I am happy that he gets to stay active duty but not that happy about his new job!

Tami

[02152007navy]

Having a hard time getting ahold of sister but as soon as I do...
I will let you guys all know what she comes up with!!

I have not forgot about it...she is just so darn hard sometimes
to get on the phone..I'll keep trying!!!

[Foy]

Ladies and Gents-
I have done a little more homework on NCS matters and can summarize my understanding of the situation at present as follows:

NCS remains the "red-headed stepchild" of Navy recruiting. The recruiting community concedes they had little knowledge of the program when signing people up for it, the contracts themselves were changed at some point due to the entirely misleading wording concerning remaining active for the 24 month follow-on period, the standing policy remains at sending NCS sailors directly to the Reserve after their 15 months, some active duty commanders have tried, without success, to keep their NCS sailors active, the Navy now says they've used NCS purely to staff the Reserve right from the get-go (albeit without telling the recruits that little nugget of fact), and the Command Career Counselors are agitated about it.

Within the BUPERS website material is a statement that can be paraphrased as follows: "The NCS sailor's commanding officers have no say in keeping a NCS sailor active. Remaining active for the 24 month period requires the dual concurrence of the Active and Reserve Enlisted Community Managers. " With this as standing policy, it seems highly unlikely that the two ECMs are going to stick their necks out for a few thousand NCS sailors, doesn't it?

But here's my position: NCS enlisted something over 5,000 sailors. Most were high-quality recruits, from the standpoint of ASVAB scores, prior college experience, and other factors. In fact, this was one of the stated legislative intents behind the creation of NCS. But, the recruiters said NCS sailors could stay active for the 24 months and the written contracts supported these statements with highly misleading language. Since NCS was first enacted in late 2003, only in the past 12 months or so have the first wave of NCS sailors completed their 15 months active. Many (most?) have requested staying active, and very few have been retained. Many (most?) of those rejected are disappointed (bitter?) about being forced out of active duty. It is my opinion that after experiencing over a year of full-speed active duty (and, in the case of many Seabee NCS sailors, combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan), these NCS sailors are going to be bored to tears with Reserve duty and will decline to re-enlist in the Reserves in droves. With that, the Navy will have essentially recruited a particularly well-qualified batch of enlisted men, most of whom believe they were tricked, will have trained them and gotten their feet wet with active duty, then kicked them out to a duty they neither want nor realized they were signing up for. After two years of that duty, the Navy will lose them forever.

So what to do? Well, I found out that Senator John McCain was one of two named Senators on the legislation, the other being Senator Bayh (sp?). I have further learned that a member of the association of Navy Counselors plans to submit data and observations to the MCPON, data full of concerns about losing thousands of good junior enlisted men. It seems to me that a widespread faxing or email campaign to targeted members of the Congress, SecNav, BUPERS, and the MCPON might serve as a wake-up call to what I believe is a sorry tale of recruiting and personnel management on the part of the Navy.

Yes, I understand the Reserve is undermanned and is sorely in need of experienced sailors. My response to that situation is "Recruit for the Reserve openly and without trickery". My son never talked to a Reserve recruiter, citing his desire to be an active duty, career path sailor. He was talked in to the NCS contract at MEPS with the logic that the NCS hitch was overall only a year or so shorter than the 60 month active contract and he could decide to leave for the Reserve or stay in after 15 months active. If the long-term mission of Reserve recruiting is to attract reserve enlistees and keep them for a long time, I think NCS deception is a lousy way to staff the Reserve and is nothing less than a modern-day Shanghai job.

So, is anybody interested in a collective effort to contact persons who might be in position to very quickly change the policy of kicking some very good recruits out of the Navy? Chime in here if so.

Foy

[glennsmom]

Foy,

Bless you for pursuing information on this. You can count me in on any faxing or email campaign. Just give me the info. Please post this as well on Navy-Parents and anywhere else so we can reach everyone. Thanks.

[glennsmom]

Well I had an interesting phone conversation with my son last night. He is due to separate the end of November or around there so I was asking him if they have started talking to him about it yet. Well he said he was asked if he wanted to stay active. Because he didn't' think it was going to be possible he had pretty much gotten used to the idea of coming home I wasn't sure if he would be interested anymore. He said it would depend on where he would be sent. So I guess now it is a waiting game to see if he actually can remain active. I still have doubts and maybe the person speaking to him didn't really know all the particulars about NCS. I will keep you all posted.