Career Progression of Minority and Women Officers.

摘要

The American Military is widely viewed as a pioneer in providing equal opportunity for its uniformed members. From the 1948 Executive Order signed by President Harry S. Truman that formally began the long process of racial integration to more recent admission of women into most military occupational specialties, the Military Services have compiled a record of providing equal opportunity that often exceeds the progress of civilian society. That record has been achieved only through constant effort and self-examination, and it will be maintained and improved only through continuing effort. It is in this spirit of self-examination and improvement that this study was undertaken. The study reviews the key stages of officer career progression: recruiting, commissioning, training, assignment, evaluation, promotion, and retention. It is limited to active duty commissioned officers in the four military branches of the Department of Defense, and examined data collected through 1997. The study employed several approaches to analyzing the career progression of minority and female officers, including trend analysis, statistical modeling, and focus groups and interviews. This report sets out the findings of the study and suggests a number of actions that could be taken to improve the process of providing equal opportunity to minority members and women in the officer corps. There were about 212,000 active-duty commissioned officers in 1997, with two- thirds of them in the Army and Air Force. The distribution of officers by grade shows that four out of five were at the level of 0-1 through 0-4 (2nd lieutenant/Navy ensign to major/Navy lieutenant commander), with the majority of these at 0-3 (captain/Navy lieutenant). Less than one-half of one percent were in the very highest grades of 0-7 through 0-10 -general and flag officers reflecting the pyramidal structure of the military organization.