{"id":56442,"date":"2014-11-14T12:46:36","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T17:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=56442"},"modified":"2014-11-14T12:45:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T17:45:40","slug":"mustangs-bear-brunt-of-army-manpower-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=56442","title":{"rendered":"Mustangs bear brunt of Army manpower cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/a> reports that Mustangs (officers who were once enlisted soldier) are three times more likely to get their pink slip than a West Point grad;<\/p>\n

Many of those former enlisted officers had been encouraged to make the jump to the officer corps between 2006 and 2009 when the Iraq war was raging and the Pentagon was struggling to replace junior officers who were leaving the Army as soon as their initial commitments were over, often because they were worn out by multiple deployments.<\/p>\n

The soldiers who volunteered to fill the gap \u2014 older than most junior officers because they had already served in the enlisted ranks \u2014 were picked from the best of the ranks, and some had to earn bachelor\u2019s degrees to make the cut.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember after Vietnam, the Army gave 90-day-wonder folks the option of returning to the enlisted ranks to draw down the officer corps, but apparently, that’s not an option in this case.<\/p>\n

A Haitian immigrant who enlisted as a teenager, [ Capt. Elder Saintjuste] deployed three times to Iraq, missing so many birthdays and Christmases that he sometimes felt he barely knew his four children. He hid symptoms of post-traumatic stress so he could stay in the Army, because he loved his job and believed that after 20 years he could retire with a captain\u2019s pension.<\/p>\n

Then this summer, on the day Captain Saintjuste reached his 20 years, the Army told him that as part of the postwar downsizing of the force he would have to retire. And adding insult to injury, he would have to retire as a sergeant, earning $1,200 less per month, because he had not been a captain long enough to receive a captain\u2019s pension.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, at least he made it to 20. I guess that the last time he held a rank for three years was as an enlisted man. His retirement rank might be sergeant, but I’m pretty sure that they averaged my last three years for my retirement pay. The New York Times spelled his name wrong – it’s Edler, and he’s a Transportation Corp officer in an MI battalion at Bragg – not that it has anything to do with the story.<\/p>\n

But all of you officers raise your hands if you’re surprised by this story…yeah, me neither. Its not what you know, it’s who you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times reports that Mustangs (officers who were once enlisted soldier) are three times … Mustangs bear brunt of Army manpower cuts<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-army"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}