First off, thanks for the helpful responses. As for career paths, what is the norm? Just keep climbing until maybe you're CO someday 30 years down the road? Or is there other ways to progress into a more combat related, tactical role?
The norm, which is what the SWO community managers, placement officers, and detailers will all push you towards is the traditional two division officer tours, shore duty, then two department head tours, then shore duty, and then finally XO/CO fleet up. All of this should occur on board a DDG or CG and make sure you get plenty of AEGIS time.
But not everybody wants that and many will depart this path for a tour or two. There are some new programs available like the Weapons & Tactics Instructor (WTI) program that is in its infancy right now. You would still follow the original golden path to command but you get to go to a bunch of schools and become a subject matter expert (SME) in a particular part of Naval Warfare, be it Anti-Submarine Warfare, Mine Warfare, or Air-Missile Defense. There is also the Specialty Career Path (SCP) program that is designed to billet officers from all communities into a certain "pipeline" so that we can have warfare-qualified professionals in areas like Anti-Terrorism, Acquisitions, Finance, and the like. These officers give up command but will get detailed differently to different staff billets worldwide.
Be advised that both the SCP and WTI programs are new, weird, and non-traditional, and therefore their future is iffy and those who have been selected into them may or may not have vibrant SWO careers ahead of them because they have departed from the golden path of command.
There are also some new initiatives where you can take a break in the middle of your career for a year or two, but this is all brand spankin' new (I literally got the brief from PERS-41 himself about 2 months ago) and the kinks are not worked out. Also, they don't change the trajectory of your career towards command. I guess what I'm saying is, you're only really going to be tactical as a division officer and maybe on your first shore tour. After that your job becomes mainly administrative with some watchstanding thrown into it.
If your dream is to stay on the tactical level your entire career, go enlisted. The job of an officer is to be groomed to eventually rise to the level of the strategic so he or she can make those high level decisions. That's what all career development programs across all communities are based upon.
Yeah, it'll be a long while...OK... I can tell by some of your posts that you are some seriously damaged goods. I'm genuinely sorry to hear that and I wish you the best of luck on the outside.
I'm glad we could agree to disagree on the approach we want to take with mentoring aspiring officers and discussing possible pitfalls within the community. I've done my best to fix them and I know many others who have done their part to change things as well. But, I won't say we're perfect or anywhere close to fixing the issues that consistently cause us retention problems. I also won't pull the wool over people's eyes just because I'm freebasing the kool-aid. These aspiring officers should come in armed with all of the information. And if you've read a lot of my posts you've seen me discuss the good and the bad of the SWO community.
