Seniority Among Ensigns and June 1st Promotions to Lieutenant

Or: If I commissioned on May 14th, why do I have to wait until May 28th to promote to Lieutenant Junior Grade, and June 1st to become a Lieutenant?

First, a Sea Story

So there I was: it was me, the Captain, and four of my fellow Ensigns sitting around the wardroom table aboard the good ship McCain. Fittingly enough for our present topic, it was the day after a wardroom wetting down, and there were two things on the Captain’s mind. First, he wanted to know which of us little SOBs came back to the ship falling over drunk and then proceeded to piss all over Berthing One (to include at least one occupied rack), and second, he wanted to appoint the new George (and it is George, mind you, not JORG). In somewhat of a surprise decision, the answer to the first question would not be used to come up with the second. Instead, the Captain proceeded to ask us a series of questions, ostensibly to determine which of us was the most junior:

1. Who here went to the Naval Academy? There were two–eliminated.
2. Any OCS? Nope.
3. For NROTC, when did you commission? I was in the middle–no eliminations. Hmm…
4. When did you report to the ship? I was also in the middle–no eliminations. Hmm…
5. What order were you for ship selection? Again, in the middle–no eliminations. Hmm…

So is that it? Is that how seniority among Ensigns is determined? Well, no, actually, but it turns out that wasn’t really the point. In the end, when the Captain ran out of questions, never quite managing to whittle the pool down to one (or rather, the one he wanted), he just slewed around to me and said, “You’re it.” Because I’m pretty sure it was less about identifying “the junior Ensign” and more about identifying the most awkward/weirdest/least-funny-joke-telling Ensign, and here I must admit he had me dead to rights: I really can’t tell a joke, and I hate making my bed.

And why not use such non-standard criteria to identify the George? Who cares about seniority among a bunch of newly reported Ensigns? Is that even a thing? As the saying goes, “Seniority among Ensigns is like virtue among…” well, I don’t wish to disparage the usual targets of this particular analogy as they may be victims of human trafficking and exploitation and neither of those things are all that funny, but needless to say the idea of seniority among Ensigns is supposed to be laughable.

“But wait!” you say. “If it’s so laughable, why go into all that? And what does any of this have to do with why Lieutenants promote on June 1st? Is this just one more excuse you’ve come up with to piss and moan about how lame your first division officer tour was and how ‘mean’ your first CO was?“

Well, yes, but also, it really does tie-in. Here’s how:

Date of Rank

“Dates of rank determine seniority among officers of the same grade.” That’s straight out of the instruction. But what is the date of rank of a newly appointed Ensign? You might think it’d be the same date the Ensign is commissioned on, and ten months out of twelve you’d be right in all but a handful of fringe cases, but May and June are special. See, just a couple pages into the instruction, you’ll read, “The date of rank of officers appointed as ensigns in the Navy in May or June of any year is the same as the date of the graduation of the class of midshipmen of the United States Naval Academy in that year.” Which is to say that when the greatest bulge of newly-appointed Ensigns occurs in a given year, the date of rank is pegged to whatever day a bunch of Captains and Admirals feel like getting together and enjoying the spring weather in Annapolis. Okay, it’s not quite that capricious: the Academy tends to hold graduation in the latter half of May, maybe just ahead of Memorial Day, maybe just after.

What this means, in practical terms, is that you may well graduate from State University in early May and receive your commission through NROTC, and you may even make it to a ship weeks ahead of the Naval Academy’s graduation date, and you absolutely (okay, well, probably) will get paid as an Ensign during that time, it’s just that the date of rank on your commission will be post-dated to whenever USNA is supposed to hold graduation. Hypothetically, were you to commission sometime after USNA, but still before the end of June, your commission would be backdated. It also means, per my little sea story above, that all of us newly-reported “spring Ensigns” had the same date of rank, and so none of us could be deemed junior or senior by date of rank alone. Our individual graduation or commissioning dates counted not at all.

And it kind of makes sense, right? In a tail-wagging-the-dog sort of way if nothing else? It’s not much of a selling point for USNA to say, “Come to Annapolis and then, in addition to a lengthy Plebe summer and years of abuse with a curriculum that emphasizes science and engineering to the point that even English majors will graduate with a BS, you’ll commission into the Navy and be junior to everyone who went to colleges where they could stay out all night, live off campus, and only show up for classes when they felt like it!” Yeah, good luck with that.

I should be amazed that anyone would attend USNA as it is, but then I did make my own questionable decisions when it came to undergrad.

“But, again,” you ask, your expression all the more strained as you read with growing impatience, “what the hell does any of this have to do with promoting to Lieutenant on June 1st?”

Look: really, truly, I’m getting there. It took me almost fourteen years to retire from the Navy, and it takes most people twenty or more, so you can rest assured that I’m moving faster than most recent retirees would. But first, I wanna talk about…

Precedence or “Lineal” Number

An officer’s *precedence number (same SECNAVINST as before) can be used to determine seniority without reference to date of rank. This is because each officer’s precedence number takes date of rank into account when it is assigned and is unique to the officer for a given period of time. While this precedence number will change with every promotion to account for shifts in seniority relative to one-time peers who did not promote, it will otherwise remain unchanged. As to how it is determined… first, a few common myths:

Myth 0: Precedence among officers with the same date of rank is determined by graduation/commissioning date.

Reality: Nope, and we already discussed why.

Myth 1: Precedence is determined by commissioning source, with even the lowest-standing USNA graduate (the “anchor“) taking precedence over all other officers with the same date of rank.

Reality: The first-standing USNA graduate by Overall Order of Merit will take precedence over all other Ensigns with the same date of rank. But from there, all Ensigns with that same date of rank are thrown into one pool and racked and stacked according to a percentile standing calculated within their particular program (NROTC uses GPA and Naval Science course grades): the percentile standings are used for comparison between newly appointed Ensigns, regardless of commissioning source. As a result, the top-standing (#1 out of 1000, .1%) NROTC graduate nationwide is likely to be placed between the #1- and #2-standing USNA graduates. Further, since USNA and NROTC produce a roughly equal number of graduates each year, this is likely to lead to a rough pairing of graduates, with alternating USNA and NROTC grads on the precedence list. For example, an Ensign who graduated 237 out of about 1000 from USNA will likely be placed on the precedence list as junior to the NROTC graduate who graduated 236 out of about 1000 nationwide, but senior to the next-standing NROTC graduate (237 out of about 1000 nationwide). As clear as an un-muddied lake, right? Oh, but there is one snag: since it takes the bureaucracy time to rack and stack so many Ensigns with data coming in from programs nationwide, “[o]fficers commissioned as ensigns… will not be assigned a precedence number until completion of at least 1 year of active commissioned service. Until then, precedence is indicated by date of rank and alphabetical sequence by last name.” Yep, you read that right: for the first year of commissioned service, the A’s have it. Some small payback for always getting called on first for book reports, no doubt. And god help you if your name is Zachary Zyra or something like that: you would surely be among the lowest of the low.

Myth 2: Precedence gets re-stacked after every promotion board based on how well your record stood out in the tank.

Reality: This is actually sort of true now, but it used to be just flat out wrong. Until very recently, an officer’s position in the order of precedence didn’t change relative to peers unless one was selected for promotion and the other wasn’t (precedence at the new grade was determined by date of rank and relative precedence at the old grade and nothing more). Since class standing, and therefore precedence, for both USNA and NROTC graduates tended to be most heavily influenced by GPA, that meant precedence number was primarily a factor of college GPA, and exclusively a factor of overall performance in college for officers commissioned through USNA and NROTC. This effect was not only perpetuated, but amplified throughout one’s career as year groups were and often still are “split,” meaning that not all the officers within a year group, or even with the same date of rank, become eligible for promotion to Lieutenant Commander (and by extension Commander and Captain) at the same time. Those with lower precedence numbers (more seniority) could end up on one side of the split while their classmates with higher precedence numbers (less seniority, but still same date of rank) could end up having to wait another year to go before a promotion board, and all of this as an extension of entering conditions based solely on performance in college. But then, with changes included in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, they came out with merit-based reordering, which allows for selection boards to select up to fifteen percent of officers selected for promotion to re-ordered, effectively moving them to the head of the line to promote sooner and with a lower (more senior) precedence number than they might otherwise have had. So Myth 2 is sort of true, but only applies to promotions to Lieutenant Commander and beyond, and only to a minority (fifteen percent) of those selected for promotion.

Myth 3: “Seniority” or “precedence” does not matter among Ensigns. Duh.

Reality: Sort of? I mean, it’s a rare thing to see a couple of Ensigns quibble over seniority (and even rarer for it to matter), but even when they do, should push come to shove, level of experience and positional authority based on things like billet and watch station are likely to be what really matters. On surface ships, the Ensign who has their pin and stands Officer of the Deck underway will tend to have their voice heard above the Ensign–and quite possibly the JG–who doesn’t.

Myth 4: I am making all of these “myths” up. No one really believes any of these things you’re railing against.

Reality: No, really! I have actually heard people make all of these claims in my abbreviated naval career. If you can’t trust an embittered former SWO who never would have made it past O-4 even if he hadn’t been medically retired, who can you trust?

Now then, with the aforementioned myths blown out of the water, we can finally settle how my first Captain should have determined the George (remember the sea story, way up top?) if he had really wanted to designate the junior-most Ensign. Since we had all commissioned in May of that year (same date of rank) and thus had less than a year in the Navy (precedence numbers not yet assigned), a strict reading of the rules would have had us taking precedence alphabetically, by last name. So the Ensign whose name began with a V, in our case, should have been the George. But I get it, really I do: that wasn’t the point. He (probably) felt like I was the ensigniest ensign, and acted accordingly to make me the George.

*Fun fact: It used to be that officers could be sentenced to “loss of numbers,” as happened to the CO of USS Indianapolis, but this is no longer a thing. You also can’t actually demote an officer at court-martial, in spite of what movies like F-Troop try and tell you. It’s also not that hard to make O–oh yeah! About that…

Promotion to O-3

So we’ve already established that, per SECNAVINST 1427.2A, Ensigns commissioned in May or June will share a date of rank coinciding with USNA’s graduation date, which tends to be in the latter half of May. Up until this point, anything of consequence (and I’ll grant you that not much of what I’ve written has been of consequence) has been covered by that instruction. But for the next, intermediate, step, we need to refer to SECNAVINST 1412.6M. Yes, click that link and you’ll see that there is actually an entire, pages-long instruction on how to promote Ensigns to Lieutenant Junior Grade (O-2). Ironically, most of the instruction actually pertains to how to not promote someone to JG since, per the instruction (page 2), promotion is supposed to be essentially automatic: “as soon as qualified [for promotion, not a warfare device], but not earlier than the date of completion of 24 months’ service in grade.” Significantly, time in grade is calculated based on “date of rank as an ensign,” which is perhaps why most Ensigns don’t even realize that there is a difference between date of rank and commissioning date until some smart ass Department Head or XO tells them “hold on, shipmate, we can’t promote you to JG for a couple more weeks: your date of rank is [whatever USNA’s graduation date was the year you commissioned].” But on the plus side, promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade does not require an approved list sent via naval message, much less a promotion board. Which brings us to…

Promotion to Lieutenant (O-3) (for real). Here now we move to SECNAVINST 1420.3. The Navy uses an All Fully Qualified Officer List (AFQOL) to identify officers for promotion to Lieutenant, which means that, like promotion to JG, no board is scheduled, but unlike promotion to JG (and more in line with promotion to O-4 and beyond), there will be a selection message released in the form of an ALNAV (with appropriate names drawn from the AFQOL based on time in grade), and then finally authorized to promote through a NAVADMIN (also like O-4 and beyond). The minimum time in grade as an O-2 prior to promoting to O-3 is 24 months. For… “reasons,” the Navy releases NAVADMINs monthly, and rather than authorize Lieutenants-to-be to promote at precisely the 24-month time in grade mark (which would be the fourth anniversary of the USNA graduation date for Ensigns commissioned in May or June), it sets the date of rank and the authorized date of promotion to the first day of the month after. Now, mind you, I can’t find that in an instruction anywhere (there’s nothing in U.S. Code saying first of the month, and certainly Ensigns and JG’s can be made mid-month), it’s just how the Navy has decided to handle promotions to Lieutenant according to Navy Personnel Command’s website.

So that’s it. You commission as an Ensign with a date of rank that may or may not match your active duty start date (probably won’t if you’re NROTC), then two years from that date of rank you get to put on JG, and then 24 months later (plus some fudge factor to get to the first of the month after) you get to promote to Lieutenant, unless you fuck up as an Ensign or a JG. There’s just one catch…

What if that message doesn’t come out on time? You know, that NAVADMIN that is supposed to authorize promotion to O-3? Well, you should have a talk with your Department Head, XO, or CO about that–it’s not unusual for the message to come out mere days (or less) before promotion is due. A strict reading of the instruction (and past experience) would say that the pinning should wait for the message. Worst case scenario, and whatever your chain of command decides, back pay will be authorized. Just don’t crown yourself emperor. It’s bad…

In Closing…

Congratulations to all the new Lieutenants! (and telephone Lieutenants, too!)

Seniority among Ensigns is like virtue among… Ensigns!

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