Latest news with #NCOs
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Pentagon wants troops to change duty stations less often
The Pentagon is asking the services to come up with plans that would limit the number of moves that military families make every few years, officials announced. The Department of Defense is asking the military services to determine which permanent changes of station are lower priority and would help families 'seeking greater geographic stability' and provide 'efficiencies' for cost cutting, according to a memo released Wednesday by Tim Dill, who is performing the duties of the deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Dill told reporters Wednesday that the policy changes are directed at both improving military families' quality of life and 'being efficient with taxpayer dollars.''The most important thing in this policy is that we're taking care of service members and their families. If we thought it'd be detrimental to them, we wouldn't even pursue it,' he said, adding that they want to make sure they're also 'deliberate' with spending taxpayer dollars. Joining the military comes with the expectation that service members and their families will need to pick up their lives and move between states or even countries every few years. Military family advocates have long asked for a change, citing challenges like finding new child care, the disruption caused by having kids change schools, or forcing spouses to find new jobs, on top of needing to find a new home. 'While these permanent change of station (PCS) moves support mission requirements, the frequency can reduce quality of life for service members and their families, harm spousal employment, and disrupt functional communities, unit cohesion, and long-term talent management,' the memo states. In the Blue Star Families 2024 survey, a third of active duty service members and spouses cited PCS moves as one of their top issues with military life. The memo directs the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Reserve, and National Guard to submit plans that consider how reducing the number of PCS moves might impact the careers of officers and noncommissioned officers, since they would be able to live, and work, in one place longer. The memo calls for recommendations that would allow NCOs to 'to specialize in lieu of gaining generalized experience.' Dill told reporters that the changes could mean fewer PCS moves for both single service members and those with families. 'It impacts all of them when they move. There are some impacts that are additional for a family,' he said. 'For those with families, it's a huge factor when they're making a retention decision. If their family is enjoying military service and wants to stay, if their family is not supported, if the service member is staying in service, that's a very high predictor of whether or not [the] service member will decide to stay.' Each year, the department spends nearly $5 billion on PCS moves, according to the memo. In order to reduce costs, each of the branches are directed to develop plans to curtail PCS 'discretionary move' budgets with proposed percentage cuts for travel within the U.S., overseas, and to training sites. Dill said the Defense Department estimates that about 80% of PCS moves are 'in the discretionary category' and 20% are mandatory. Officials did not immediately respond to requests following the press briefing for examples of discretionary PCS moves. The memo calls for the plans to account for PCS budget cuts over the next few years that are based on the fiscal year 2026 budget and account for inflation. The cuts should equate to 10% in fiscal year 2027, 30% in fiscal year 2028, 40% in fiscal year 2029, and 50% in fiscal year 2030, according to the memo. While the memo lays out prescriptive cuts by fiscal year, Dill said they're leaving it to the services to tell the Pentagon what cuts are actually doable without negatively impacting troops. 'We want them to come back and tell us if that seems like the right number for them because again, on top of being efficient from [a] fiscal perspective, the other goal of this policy, as a people-driven policy, is to ensure that this works well for service members and their families,' he said. At the same time, the memo says that the services should weigh whether any proposals would lead to increased costs for the military, like temporary lodging reimbursements or dislocation allowances for moving costs. For military families, beyond the stress of moving, finding new schools, new housing, and employment for spouses, and then settling into a new community — all of which can place significant stress on a family — there are also underlying costs that come with a move. The Military Family Advisory Network recommends that families attempt to save $10,000 for each move to account for multiple security deposit and rent payments, furniture and wardrobe changes, depending on how far afield the move is, among other costs. Even so, the organization acknowledged that the recommended savings are not realistic for most. In the Blue Star 2024 survey, more than half of active duty family respondents who had out-of-pocket expenses said it would take a year to return to their 'pre-location financial state.' 'When relocating every 18-36 months, military families need to begin preparing for the next relocation almost as soon as they arrive in their new community, something that is difficult to do given the amount of time it takes to regain financial footing from the most recent PCS,' according to the survey report. The issue of moving every 18 to 36 months is one of the top sources of stress for military spouses because of the impacts on their careers and child care. In the Defense Department's 2024 active-duty spouse survey released last week, one in three spouses said they'd prefer their family separate from the military, with one of the top reasons for dissatisfaction being the frequent moves. The survey found that spouses who moved within the last year and had children younger than six were more likely to be unemployed. The services are required to submit their official plans by Sept. 25, only five days before the end of the 2025 fiscal year. 18 Army Rangers suspended for allegedly firing blanks at Florida beach Hegseth announces accountability review of Afghanistan withdrawal Coast Guard rescue swimmers saved a worker stuck in hardening concrete after roof collapse This National Guard unit went completely analog to simulate a cyber attack Fewer reenlistment options for soldiers amid high Army retention
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Marine Corps Faces Initial Hurdles in Long-Term Vision to Upgrade Barracks
The Marine Corps touted its ongoing barracks improvements on Tuesday but acknowledged the effort has hit some early snags -- and uncertain funding from Congress threatens to extend the already far-off expected completion in the late 2030s by nearly a decade. The improvement effort, known as Barracks 2030, is a top priority for the commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, and has added furniture, renovations and big-ticket items such as air conditioning to the on-base housing, which is home to more than 80,000 Marines. But at least one pilot program is at risk of fizzling out for legal reasons, and the Pentagon's ongoing hiring freeze has delayed bringing on more than 100 civilian housing specialists. Meanwhile, funding may be the biggest challenge for the initiative, according to presentations this week at the Modern Day Marine expo in Washington, D.C. If Congress does not allocate enough money in the next several years -- a total price tag of roughly $11 billion -- Barracks 2030 could get pushed into the 2040s, long after most current junior Marines have left the barracks. Read Next: GOP House Chairman Asks Justice Department to Investigate Top Biden VA Officials "There are still many areas where our Marines -- for the next year or two -- will not live in conditions that we want them to, but we are actively getting after," said Maj. Gen. Jason Woodworth, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, or MCICOM, who also oversees the service's facilities. "That's why it's going to take us to 2037 if fully funded" to get facilities where they need to be. While Marine Corps officials said barracks conditions were improving, they have not been adequate homes in recent years for Marines. As of March 2023, 17,000 Marines were living in substandard housing, according to a Government Accountability Report that year, citing information from service leaders. reported early last year that Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, had a pilot program where eight staff noncommissioned officers moved into the barracks "for the purpose of advocacy, mentorship, and the maintenance of good order and discipline for all residents," Maj. John Parry, a spokesperson for MCICOM, said at the time. It was likened to a resident adviser program, such as those common at universities, and mirrors a similar Navy program. But more than a year later, that program may be in jeopardy because of a legal issue revolving around how many entitlements those staff NCOs would receive under the initiative. "We ran into some legality issues," Eric Mason, the unaccompanied housing team lead for MCICOM, said Tuesday during a presentation at the expo. "It seems that our Marine Corps legal team doesn't see things the way the Navy sees them, meaning that if we have a senior or staff personnel that lives in the barracks that are getting [basic allowance for housing], it requires them to have two entitlements. And we couldn't get behind that. So our legal team is still looking at how we do this." Another such initiative was to replace Marine barracks managers with trained civilians. Previously, young Marines were charged with handling barracks, from managing repair requests to in-processing newcomers into housing, juggling those difficult responsibilities with their military duties. Now, Mason said the service has hired and trained 347 civilians across the fleet whose sole focus is to manage the day-to-day operations of the barracks. That took 532 enlisted Marines off the hook for those responsibilities, according to Mason's presentation. The Pentagon's recent hiring freeze under the Trump administration has delayed the staffing of 115 of those civilian barracks managers who were supposed to be onboarded in February, Mason said. He said the service plans to hire those individuals once the freeze is lifted. "How do we measure success at the end of 2037, or 2045, or however long we go to, how do we measure if [the] Barracks 2030 initiative was successful?" Mason said. Tracking progress data was one way to identify the program's outcomes, Mason said, but he added that another litmus test will be to gauge how Marines feel about the barracks being their "home." "No Marines identify barracks as home," he said. "When you start hearing Marines say I am going to my home, and they're referring to barracks, I think that's a great way to measure" the program's success. Mason could not provide an exact number of how many Marines are currently living in substandard housing, but said "that [17,000] number has decreased and will continue to decrease" as the service works to fulfill its initiative, hopefully by the mid-2030s. Much of that progress relies on steady funding from Congress. Mason said that "if, for some reason, God forbid, we don't get all the money we're asking for, then we have a backup plan, an alternate plan, which takes [us] out to about 2045, 2043, depending on how much we end up getting." Meanwhile, the service has poured the facilities money it currently has into barracks renovations as well as programs and systems in the near term. In 2023, MCICOM saw to it that installations began using QR codes to generate barracks maintenance requests. By the fall of that year, the division began developing a program called QSRMax that is meant to institutionalize the practice. Now, the system is getting 1,000 requests per week, officials said. Officials added that a pilot program at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, will begin soon allowing Marines to use their Common Access Card, or CAC, to enter their barracks instead of having to rely on key cards that may get lost more frequently. Last spring, the service completed a massive wall-to-wall inspection of more than 60,000 barracks rooms around the world. A year later, the Marine Corps has not released the results of that effort, but Maj. Jose Castillo, an official with MCICOM, said it has directly informed their efforts. Common trends that officials saw included "water intrusions," meaning plumbing issues and leaks, ventilation and security concerns regarding broken locks, for example. Castillo and other officials said the Marine Corps has contracted the Urban Collaborative LLC design firm to collect data on the entire Marine Corps portfolio of unaccompanied housing and provide the service with data in the next year or so. "This is going to tell us what barracks we need to keep, what barracks we need to refurbish or renovate, and what barracks we simply need to get rid of," Mason said. The company did not immediately return request for an interview on Wednesday. Service leaders have admitted barracks fell by the wayside during the Global War on Terrorism. Poor conditions such as squatters, mold, vermin, ventilation issues and general dilapidation became common. "The idea is not to fix it and forget it. It's to fix it directly and then maintain it," Lt. Gen. James Adams III, the deputy commandant for programs and resources, said on Tuesday. "Because, quite frankly, we got ourselves in the position we're in now because we didn't fix it and we did forget it." Related: Marine Corps Says Half of Barracks Had Issues, Though Only 118 Marines Moved, After Worldwide Inspection
