kbay hombre

Understood; I've met some terrible O6''s, and the Navy has a few communities best described as dysfunctional. On the unrestricted line side, the SWO community is going through a lot right now in the wake of the Fitzgerald/McCain accidents though it never was known for being "healthy" and it has produced a disproportionate share of awful command climates in the navy. On the restricted line side, pretty much everyone who goes to the 2-week "fork and knife" school in Newport and then gets a commission directly as an O2 or O3 (navy's version of zero to hero) and subsequently spends a decade in school and specialty assignments and doesn't get leadership experience until they are O5's is usually set up to fail and that can also produce some fairly awful O6's.

To be fair though, it goes both ways. I've met warrants in certain rates and communities who got to where they were through a combination of luck and dinosaur points and were fairly incompetent and/or dysfunctional. That's just the navy. You want to talk army? I have much respect for the army and it's WO pilot corps, but it's fair to say that a lot of these guys on the aviation side who are WO1-CWO3 are as naive, ignorant, sometimes incompetent (and dangerous), and inexperienced as any O1-O3. The reason the navy didn't follow the army's WO pilot program is because it didn't want 20 year old warrant officer pilots even less mature or experienced than the 23-24 year old O2 pilots commissioned via ROTC or OCS, and those 20 year old aviators do exist in the army. Don't get me wrong, they earned their wings, but you can't tell me that a 20 year old warrant officer aviator is going to be any better than a 24 year old O2 aviator, in any branch.

My understanding is that the army's timeline is WO1 to CW2 in two years, CW3 in five years, CW4 in six years, and CW5 in five years. So, for a non-prior enlisted "high school to flight school" warrant officer, that means if they progress this way, they'll be CW2's by 20, CW3's by 25, CW4's by 31 and CW5's by 36. They do this with some leadership responsibilities but nowhere near the leadership or admin experience that their commissioned counterparts get over the same period even in the army, so that a 36 year old CW5 and a 36 year old O5 might have roughly the same skill and experience at flying but they are in vastly different worlds in terms of leadership experience and responsibilities. I can't speak to the other services, but in the navy, you don't get to O6 until you're usually 18-20 years in, which is about age 42. That's 20 years of spending as much time leading as flying. A hypothetical 42 year old W5 could probably hand fly the approach better than the same O6, because he's spend most of his career specializing in just being a pilot, but he doesn't have the depth that comes with either being a prior enlisted leader/NCO (or if they were prior enlisted, probably not for long and certainly not an NCO for 20 years) or being a commissioned leader for two decades.

Apples to oranges, and a catch 22 as the navy found out. You treat them differently and both groups get angry and cry unfair about career opportunities and deployments. You can't treat them the same because a sizeable portion of the "high school to flight school" warrants have zero substantive leadership experience and all of the warrants have spent most of their careers focusing on flying rather than flying and leadership, and in addition to that, if you treat them the same, what's the point of having warrants who specialize? Why not just make them get a degree and go to OCS since they're all intelligent, capable individuals.