LFCFan
*Insert nerd wings here*
@acrjr718 Where are the contacts from?
There is a lot of bad gouge out there about clearances, especially from people who have a clearance and would have zero frame of reference for what would stop a clearance: they have never done anything stupid or interesting (not to say that the two are the same!) with their lives, and have never left the US or met someone from overseas prior to joining the military or the three letter agency that they work for (to be fair, some of those agencies have extra requirements for certain programs, in which case the gouge would be different). People seem to think that if you aren't someone who never left the country, hasn't laid eyes on a foreigner, has never done anything stupid in your life, and so on, that you aren't getting a clearance. It just isn't true. They are looking for honest people, not perfect people. They want to make sure that you aren't in a position to be bribed or blackmailed, and that your contacts and travel don't show patterns of concern. The clearance process is not like medical/NAMI, there aren't waivers (except in weird cases, like if you have relatives in countries very hostile to the US), it is just a whole person big picture thing. I can list all sorts of things people have done and places they've been and still got a TS/SCI. Anyway, it is true that a clearance is not guaranteed, but in the grand scheme of OCS issues it should really be on the back burner.
I saw a guy get held up at intel school trying to get info on his estranged Colombian father (but got cleared eventually), and one guy get dropped (we think) because he had too many contacts/family/etc in the middle east. Another guy at OCS was going IW and had to be dropped from it...but he had originally served in the air force of a former soviet country, so I can't say that I was shocked.
Here is how the clearance thing works:
There are two types of investigation, the NACLC (for secret; not very intense) and the SSBI (for top secret and SCI; lots of interviewing your friends from Kindergarten kinda stuff). If you are going URL, you should just get a NACLC. IDC jobs will need an SSBI. If you go aviation, you'll get an SSBI later if your platform needs it. I'm not sure about the nuke and SPECWAR types, but I'd imagine that an SSBI is in their future if not before OCS.
A preliminary clearance is generally granted once the investigation is open if everything looks in order. If the investigation is close and adjudicated, you are good to go. The same goes for upgrading clearances from secret to TS. So yes, it is possible to lose your clearance and possibly your designator at OCS due to security stuff, but if you aren't hiding anything, don't have anything that should have already been flagged like our comrade aspiring IWO, you shouldn't be worried.
There is a lot of bad gouge out there about clearances, especially from people who have a clearance and would have zero frame of reference for what would stop a clearance: they have never done anything stupid or interesting (not to say that the two are the same!) with their lives, and have never left the US or met someone from overseas prior to joining the military or the three letter agency that they work for (to be fair, some of those agencies have extra requirements for certain programs, in which case the gouge would be different). People seem to think that if you aren't someone who never left the country, hasn't laid eyes on a foreigner, has never done anything stupid in your life, and so on, that you aren't getting a clearance. It just isn't true. They are looking for honest people, not perfect people. They want to make sure that you aren't in a position to be bribed or blackmailed, and that your contacts and travel don't show patterns of concern. The clearance process is not like medical/NAMI, there aren't waivers (except in weird cases, like if you have relatives in countries very hostile to the US), it is just a whole person big picture thing. I can list all sorts of things people have done and places they've been and still got a TS/SCI. Anyway, it is true that a clearance is not guaranteed, but in the grand scheme of OCS issues it should really be on the back burner.
I saw a guy get held up at intel school trying to get info on his estranged Colombian father (but got cleared eventually), and one guy get dropped (we think) because he had too many contacts/family/etc in the middle east. Another guy at OCS was going IW and had to be dropped from it...but he had originally served in the air force of a former soviet country, so I can't say that I was shocked.
Here is how the clearance thing works:
There are two types of investigation, the NACLC (for secret; not very intense) and the SSBI (for top secret and SCI; lots of interviewing your friends from Kindergarten kinda stuff). If you are going URL, you should just get a NACLC. IDC jobs will need an SSBI. If you go aviation, you'll get an SSBI later if your platform needs it. I'm not sure about the nuke and SPECWAR types, but I'd imagine that an SSBI is in their future if not before OCS.
A preliminary clearance is generally granted once the investigation is open if everything looks in order. If the investigation is close and adjudicated, you are good to go. The same goes for upgrading clearances from secret to TS. So yes, it is possible to lose your clearance and possibly your designator at OCS due to security stuff, but if you aren't hiding anything, don't have anything that should have already been flagged like our comrade aspiring IWO, you shouldn't be worried.
