Gen. Eric Smith, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, speaks to Marines during a re-enlistment ceremony held at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, VA. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Alfonso Livrieri)
WASHINGTON — After spending a year revamping the Marine Corps’ recruitment and retention policies, the service’s second-most senior officer says one of the key changes has been the ability to get rid of some old, rigid rules.
“I think the removal of policies that are outdated or no longer make sense is incredibly important,” said Gen. Eric Smith, the Marine Corps’ assistant commandant. “I won’t say it’s thing one — [it is] incredibly important. I think what’s the most important is the commandant, Gen. [David] Berger, gave us the latitude to do it.”
Smith, and other senior brass charged with shaping the service’s recruitment policies, spoke to reporters on Friday ahead of the release of the Marine Corps’ update to “Talent Management 2030.” That document [PDF] is one element of Berger’s Force Design 2030 initiative, which seeks to overhaul a variety of aspects about the Marine Corps to prepare it for the future fight.
The new document outlines a handful of changes the service has made throughout the past year, such as tweaking the contract lengths for different military occupational specialties and giving Marines more latitude to temporarily pause their service — without penalty — for the sake of pursuing higher education.
But over the course of a nearly two-hour discussion with reporters, Smith and the service’s top manpower official, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, repeatedly highlighted situations where Marines were put between a rock and a hard-and-fast policy — often for no good reason.
Smith described one situation where a Marine had nearly a decade of experience in a complex field like cybersecurity or cryptologic linguistics and would seek a leave of absence or other sorts of relief to deal with a family issue.
“In the past, we’d say that’s a ‘you problem,’” Smith said. Given the choice between continuing their military career or helping their family member, the Marine would leave the service. To find a replacement and train them up to the same level of expertise would take years. That rigidity was costing the service incalculable amounts of time and money having to replace highly-trained Marines that may have otherwise re-enlisted, if only they were given some flexibility.
“Now, they take an intermission for a year… And then they come back,” Smith said. “We were just doing some things that were foolish in my opinion.”
The generals referenced another situation where a Marine was about to make sergeant and wanted to remain at their current base so their spouse could have job continuity.
Smith said he has heard criticism of allowing flexibility in these types of situations because, critics say, it doesn’t ostensibly do anything to make the service more prepared to win a war.
It “sounds very touchy feely,” he said. But “that’s about warfighting and winning because the Marine stays in the ranks for another four years and is ready to deploy on a moment’s notice.”
Col. Eric Reid, director of the Marine Corps Talent Management Strategy Group, who was speaking to reporters alongside Smith and Glynn, said most of the policies that have been terminated had good intentions and may have made sense at the time. But now “we’re able to make decisions or remove delays and … be more responsive than we could in the past,” he said. “And sometimes it takes somebody complaining about a product of a policy for us to find those” issues.
The changes have made noticeable differences in the service’s re-enlistment numbers. According to the document the Marine Corps published today, the service had a 72 percent increase in first-term re-enlistments in certain geographical regions just by streamlining the process to sign a new contract.
Smith referenced one re-enlistment ceremony recently held at the Marine Corps War Memorial “because the Marines said I’m ready to do it now. In the past, we would have said just wait a while. Why would we do that?”
The updated document comes as all the services find themselves struggling to keep up with recruitment numbers. Berger himself made an appeal in the Dallas Morning News in January, asking older generations to speak with their younger family members about “the value of military service.”
But at the end of the day, recruiting problems — not just for the military, but for the entire federal government — often come down to the money. And that is an area where the Pentagon, and especially a smaller service such as the Marines, have rarely been able to keep pace with private industry.
During the West annual symposium in February, Smith, to applause from the conference’s attendees, suggested the title of “US Marine” is priceless when discussing the notion of enlistment bonuses, an incentive the Marine Corps rarely uses.
“Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine,” he said. “That’s your bonus… there’s no dollar amount that goes with that.”
