The Growth of the Junior Officer: Gold Bar to Gold Leaf
By: Capt Kelli Moon
It stands true that the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) corps is the backbone of every military service component. They are the ones that are on the forefront of battle, the ones that maintain our aircraft so that we are capable of getting troops and supplies to theater, and they are the ones that help train and teach our junior officers how to be effective leaders. Whereas the NCO corps is the backbone of the military as a whole, arguably it is the Lieutenant and Captains that are the backbone of the officer corps.
Company Grade Officers (CGOs) are doing many of the same jobs as Field Grade Officers such as flying in the cockpits of the Air Force’s most valued assets; developing technology for future space programs; directly responsible for programs that will shape the force of the military; developing policy recommendations that affect all military members (i.e. the MGIB, child care, and PCSs); deploying to locations around the globe; and briefing senior leaders on issues that impact the entire dynamic of how the military operates. CGOs are also doing much of the legwork to prepare briefings, congressional testimonies, ensuring key policies are implemented across MAJCOMs as well as serving in Executive Officer and Aide de Camp positions. They are accomplishing all of these duties—and many more-- and meeting these difficult challenges all while giving back to the military and community in so many other ways.
As a CGO myself, I’ve heard many a senior officer say “back in my junior officer days…all networking was done at the officers’ club on Friday nights.” This was during a time when it was socially expected to have a beverage with your boss in an informal and a non-attributable setting and ‘develop’ as an officer. These were also times when commanders kept a list of who were and were not club members and if you were not, it was frowned upon. It was a measure of who wanted to succeed. If you couldn’t be sociable, then you obviously didn’t care about your career progression. But those days and that mindset have passed. We now work in a time where we are expected to do more with less personnel and dropping everything to go have a drink with others from work every Friday is just not doable. Does this mean that we do not care about our development as CGOs? No, this means that we havehad to find other ways to develop professionally. Established in 2001, the Air Force Company Grade Officers’ Council (CGOC) formed as an organization to provide CGOs with opportunities to give back to the local community, support the base, socialize and network with other CGOs, and professionally develop through seminars, conferences, and tours of installations world-wide.
The CGOC has a hierarchy of leadership, ranging from Air Force level, to Regional level (Eastern, Western, Europe, and Pacific regions), and down to the base level. This leadership helps provide opportunities for CGOs to gain leadership skills and develop as officers. At the base level, CGOs are involved in planning base-wide events, such as dining-ins, festivals, luncheons, fundraisers, distinguished visitor tours, along with many other base-specific events. They are also involved in local communities, such as partnering with local Young Professionals organizations as a military representative, cooking and feeding at local shelters and Fisher Houses, devoting time to the Habitat for Humanity to build homes, serving as a Big Brother or Big Sister, and tutoring students at local schools. In 2009, CGOs participated in more than 17,000 hours of community service and raised more than $125,000 for local charities.
On a regional level, CGO leadership is working hard to capture the contributions of CGOs across their region and recognize them for it through awards, as well as to share those contributions with all CGOs for them to learn from. They ultimately serve as conduits between all of the bases in a given region and the Air Force level CGOC. At the Air Force level, CGO leadership is working with and providing senior leaders at the Pentagon with the issues that are important to junior officers as well as highlighting their accomplishments as an organization. They also sponsor an annual professional development conference. This conference is open to the more than 36,000 CGOs across the Air Force, as well as sister service CGOs. The agenda for these conferences contains many senior leader speakers and events that inspire thought, foster questions, and provide insight on a myriad of hot topics covering current and future operations of our military.
In 2009 Air Force CGOs spent more than 14,000 collective hours on professional development. This development ranges anywhere from having a senior officer speak on a given topic, to hosting seminars on “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders,” to holding multi-base professional development conferences. The CGOs of today are driven to accomplish much more than just making it to the next rank; they are hungry for more knowledge that will make them better officers and leaders.
The Army, Marine Corps, and Navy do not have such an organization. They develop within their own specialties and through deployment cycles, where they get ‘boots on the ground’ development and have hands-on training with other cultures. They also have the occasional mentoring sessions with senior leaders and/or the XO. Some even seek out opportunities to develop in other ways as well, such as lectures, conferences, and giving back to the community, but they have not been traditionally focused as Air Force CGOs on these issues. To give credit where credit is due, however, the Marine Corps has given back to the community through programs like “Toys for Tots” and the Marine Corps Marathon, as well as the Navy-Marine Corps and Army Relief Funds. However, CGOs in these services have not been provided with opportunities to develop the way that Air Force CGOs have. CGOs in the Air Force develop within their own specialties and through deployments as well, but they also have this CGOC organization that gives them a voice to senior leaders on issues that impactthem—and other military members—and the chance to make a difference as high as legislation. As Air Force officers, we do not all get the chance to fill leadership positions early in our careers like our Army, Marine, and Navy counterparts do, so we have produced the best alternative to allow our CGOs to get the development they need as young officers. In all branches of service, we teach officer candidates that it is important to be well-rounded officers by being leaders of character, being competent, and being servants of the nation; however, only the Air Force has structured such an organization that helps develop junior officers into what the Air Force and nation needs them to be.
General David Petraeus, in his article titled Beyond the Cloister, argues that warfighting must remain a primary focus of military leaders, but that our officers need to be capable of more than that. He also encourages officers to attend civilian graduate schools to help build civil-military relations as well as experience life beyond the ‘cloister’ of military thought and views. By attending these civilian schools, Petreaus argues that we can “discover just how diverse and divergent views can be.”[i] This same concept can be achieved through community relations and service, one of the four primary pillars of the Air Force CGOC organization. By CGOs working with local communities, they are serving as representatives of the military and are offering the public a different side of what can only be seen in movies and the news. In today’s deployed environment, the need to understand other cultures is paramount. The best way to understand other cultures and worldviews is to live within that culture. The same can be said of military members interacting within their local communities. This will only help prepare our military leaders for the challenges of culture immersion when they are deployed overseas.
The Air Force CGOC has expanded this organization out to the other services by establishing several Joint Junior Officers’ Council in the National Capitol Region. These councils have done well in providing the joint networking that is important in today’s expeditionary environment. However, the growth of a separate CGOC for the Army,Navy, and Marine Corps outside these areas has not yet sprouted. This will take a joint effort of the CGOs in those services and their senior leadership’s support to make this organization succeed to its fullest potential. Investing in our junior officers is an investment in our future. The Air Force has made this investment and serves as a role model for other branches of service to emulate.
[i] GEN Petreaus, David H., Beyond the Cloister, The American Interest, Vol 2, Number 6 , July – August 2007