“The easiest way that I look at this is we’re trying to build a flexible career path into one’s career,” Brig. Gen. Gregory Johnson said.
The Army is slowly beginning to use a promotion authority Congress granted the military to give certain officers more flexibility in how they move through the ranks.
Since 2019, the Defense Department has had the ability to use the alternative promotion authority after lawmakers passed sweeping reforms to the military’s officer promotion system. The change followed years of debate inside the Pentagon and Congress about how to modernize the outdated promotion system to meet the needs of a modern force.
Specifically, the annual defense policy bill allowed the military to establish alternative promotion processes for certain competitive categories of officers, end some up-or-out rules that end officers’ careers who didn’t get promoted within certain timelines, and remove strict time-in-grade requirements and the traditional promotion “zone” structure.
The changes modified parts of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, the 1980 law that governs most of today’s promotion policies for officers.
But none of the reforms were mandatory, and the military services have been slow to adopt them.
The Army only recently initiated the use of the alternate promotion authority for the Army Medical and Dental Corps. Lt. Gen. Mary K. Izaguirre, the Army surgeon general, said the traditional promotion model can at times disproportionately affect medical professionals because the extensive time required for medical training can slow their promotion timelines.
“What we’ve been doing is trying to consider those highly technical career fields that oftentimes take a lot more of an educational or technical aspect of things, so they would not necessarily fall into the normal pipeline when it comes to promotions and maybe have to go out for things such as getting PhD or training with industry or something of that nature,” Col. Troy Alexander, chief of promotions at the Army’s Directorate of Military Personnel Management, told reporters last week.
“We were trying to examine how we can fully make sure that they stay on track for promotion, and that we can retain and promote those individuals that are getting those highly specialized degrees, or some type of technical training,” he added.
Part of the effort includes eliminating the up-or-out rule, which typically requires officers to leave the military if they are passed over for promotion twice, while also allowing promotion boards to consider officers across multiple year groups rather than limiting promotions to a single cohort.
“What that allows us to do is to really find the top performers and give them an opportunity to start to rise earlier in their career timeline, as well as making sure that those that that have been moved out to highly advanced degrees or something like that, so that we can still reward those top performers for promotion opportunities,” Alexander said.
The current pilot is limited in scope, but Army officials are looking to expand the alternate promotion authority for subsequent fiscal years to additional functional categories, as well as some of the Army’s “emerging branches that are coming on here in the next 12 to 18 months,” Alexander said.
“The easiest way that I look at this is we’re trying to build a flexible career path into one’s career. This pilot, and we’re starting very small, like with smaller branches that are very technical and generally have lengthy training tracks, to see if it helps with that flexible career path approach,” Brig. Gen. Gregory Johnson, director of military personnel management, told Federal News Network.
“We definitely know that as the world is more complex and its capabilities become much more technical across all career fields, it’s something that we really wanted to think about. We will learn a lot over the next year, but our eye is to, ‘Could we create a broader, flexible career path model that we could use in the future.’ We’re optimistic,” Johnson added.
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