Enabling Officer Accession Cuts While Limiting Laterals
Published Date: July 1, 2004
The Navy officer personnel system allows some officers to transfer from one community to another during the course of a career. These lateral transfers often flow from the unrestricted line (URL) to RL and Staff communities within the first 5 or 6 years of service and give these communities valuable warfare experience used to support the URL. Most warfare-qualified laterals come from Surface Warfare. Surface Warfare accesses and trains more junior officers than it needs partly to support lateral transfers to RL and Staff communities. This excess of junior officers reduces the quality of training and overall readiness and increases total personnel costs. We find that reducing yearly Surface Warfare accessions from 780 to 620 and cutting laterals from the Surface community to RL and Staff communities by one-third saves $91 million per year in personnel costs. This reduces the number of warfare-qualified officers in RL/Staff communities by 448 without a large effect on overall officer seniority. A warfare-qualified RL/Staff officer would have to be worth about $200,000 more than a non-warfare qualified RL/Staff officer in the same billet for the above SWO accession cuts and consequent restrictions on laterals not to be cost-efficient.
