Joint-duty credit rules ease Oct. 1
By Tom Philpott
The number of career officers who are joint-service qualified, and thus more competitive for promotion, will rise sharply under a new Joint Qualification System that the services will begin to implement Oct. 1.
The current list of almost 5,400 designated Joint Specialty Officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps could climb by at least 1,000 over the next year.
The prized designator of JSO will also change this October to JQO, for Joint Qualified Officer.
One factor driving the overhaul of joint officer management are complaints from many officers that their "real world" experiences — particularly since Sept. 11, 2001 — are ignored by narrowly defined joint qualification rules set by the Goldwater-Nichols Act before the Cold War ended.
Goldwater-Nichols "was on target" in 1986 in setting requirements to ensure that officers, by the time they reach flag rank, are educated and experienced in joint operations, said Navy Rear Adm. Donna L. Crisp, director for manpower and personnel on the Joint Staff. But all of the services have become expeditionary forces since Sept. 11 and are operating more jointly today than the architects of Goldwater-Nichols had envisioned, Crisp said.
As a result, the services need more tools and flexibility to ensure that their officers get proper credit for any and all joint experiences.
The new system will give thousands of officers involved with contingency operations — including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relief missions at home or abroad and joint task forces — more opportunity to gain joint duty credit.
The credits will be gathered retroactively, too. Active-duty officers will be able to ask their services to apply joint credit to duty and experiences back to Sept. 11, the start of the global war on terrorism.
For the first time, joint credits also will be tallied for reserve component officers. These officers will be able to look back even farther, to the enactment of Goldwater-Nichols in 1986, to find assignments, education and training that might be counted toward joint qualification.
All joint experiences will be recognized. Two more reasons why the number of joint qualified officers will rise are:
Congress included broad authority to reform joint officer management in last year's defense authorization act at the urging of defense officials. Crisp worked on an implementation for months, coordinating with the Joint Chiefs, defense officials and combatant commanders.
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