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Surplus of reserve colonels prompts logjam

Because there are too many colonels in the Air Force Reserve, captains, majors and lieutenant colonels will wait longer to get promoted.

New fixes to the “inventory problem” — as one official put it — will mean Reserve O-3s, O-4s and O-5s will have to serve more time in grade before they can be considered for promotion. Also, colonels will be able to retire sooner, if they wish, to open up O-6 billets for rising talent.

The 1996 Reserve Officer Personnel Management Act brought reserve promotion models more in line with active-duty ones. There were more authorizations for majors and lieutenant colonels, resulting in “very generous” promotion opportunities, according to Air Force briefing materials.

But colonel policy was relatively unchanged, resulting in a sort of O-6 logjam.

A Reserve lieutenant colonel must be in a colonel’s billet before he can pin on as an O-6. But with so many O-5s coming up, there weren’t enough billets to go around, and many colonel-selects were left in limbo, losing time in grade at the higher rank.

In 2006, the Air Force Reserve commissioned a working group to devise a solution. Several small changes after 1996 reduced the percentage of promotion-eligible officers, but “it was time for another bottom-up review,” said Col. Shaun Kelleher, chief of personnel force management policy for the Air Force Reserve.

Captains and majors will now be considered for a position vacancy promotion only once, after five years in grade. Previously, position vacancy promotions were possible after four years — and commonplace. Now, they “should be the exception, not the norm,” according to Air Force briefing materials.

Lieutenant colonels will now need four years time in grade, up from three, to meet a colonel board. Only O-5s with a date of rank of March 31, 2005, or earlier will be eligible for the October 2008 colonel board.

Also, colonels are now eligible to retire after two years in grade, down from three. But not many are expected to take that option, Kelleher said. Last year, the law allowed the Air Force Reserve to offer early-outs to 2 percent of its O-6 ranks, meaning 30 colonels. He said only nine took the offer.

The changes are designed to balance the interests of the reserve and its officers, Kelleher said.

Kelleher said the Reserve will benefit from the greater experience each incoming class of colonels will have from their extra time in lower grades. The time will also benefit lieutenant colonels, who were pressured to prove themselves in just three years while meeting all of their promotion requirements during a high-operations, frequent-deployment era.

Reactions from the field were decidedly mixed.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Mullen already has a colonel’s billet as commander of the 917th Maintenance Group at Barksdale Air Force Base, La. But he’s a month short of the time-in-grade cutoff to meet the October 2008 colonel board, and will have to wait until October 2009.

“I feel that if you’re put into an O-6 billet, the hiring authority obviously felt you had the ability to perform at that level,” he said. “So I’m not sure that the experience portion is a real factor.”

But in the view of Lt. Col. Chris Rounds, the changes could have gone further. A five-year time-in-grade requirement for O-5s “gives you more opportunity to get the second-in-command or the leadership position to validate that you should be promoted to colonel,” said Rounds, who’s with the 917th Operations Group’s B-52 standardizations and evaluation unit.

Maj. Kenneth Ratliff’s plans to retire as an O-6 are now three or more years further off. The commander of the 917th Mission Support Flight is planning to fill that extra time with extra deployments.

Beyond promotion changes, though, Ratliff believes stricter enforcement of the Air Force’s physical fitness policy could thin the herd of eligible officers. Current regulations don’t have a clause for automatic elimination of repeat failures, Ratliff said — but “that might help.”