A new Army pilot program is asking junior officers to address quality of life issues driving their peers out of the service.
In 2020, the Army started using an annual career engagement survey to better understand why its junior officer corps were leaving the service. Now, the Army wants to hear from junior officers themselves with a program modeled off a similar idea used in the Navy.
“Issues they’re going to solve are going to affect not just junior officers but all folks in the Army,” said Maj. Chris Slininger, the current director of AJOC. “Junior officers are closer to the soldiers on the ground.”
The goal of the Army Junior Officer Counsel, AJOC, program is two-fold: get feedback on what quality of life issues are driving junior officers out of the Army and put junior officers in leadership positions to hear from their own units about personnel, technology, and training problems affecting all soldiers. The program is being piloted in three units: 3rd Sustainment Brigade at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the 16th Sustainment Brigade in Germany and the 11th Military Intelligence Brigade in Arizona.
“It’s like a retention program and that goes to if we get junior officers involved in identifying and solving the issues that are driving them out of the Army, we can mitigate those,” Slininger said. “Quality of life to me means if we can take care of those ankle biters, the death by 1,000 cuts, we can have junior officers focusing on their mission which is to train and fight wars.”
The program empowers junior officers to distribute surveys, collect data and come up with solutions on barracks issues, permanent change of station moves, PCS, and work flow obstacles. While the Army has several existing mechanisms for feedback, fears around reporting those concerns through the chain of command are pushing soldiers to social media to draw attention to those issues.
“It provides that venue for lieutenants to feel comfortable standing up and being like, ‘hey, this is my idea,’” Slininger said. “It provides that ability for captains to sit down and listen and also provide their ideas, their guidance, their expertise that they’ve gained over their six to 10 years that they’ve been in and really work as a cohort without that fear of the field grades or senior leaders being upset or frustrated or saying the wrong thing.”
Slininger, who is leaving his director position because of his promotion to major, said it will remain “junior officer owned data and feedback” and emphasized that their surveys will be “a little bit more honest, a little bit more raw” because they’re not trying to “dress things up” for an audience who can see it as “unprofessional or uncouth.”
Stability for military families and spouses
In the Army’s 2023 career engagement survey, five out of the top six reasons listed as “extremely important” to enlisted soldiers and officers centered around family. In 2024, former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth proposed the idea of fewer moves, citing the survey’s findings that soldiers wanted more predictability and stability.
For AJOC, their first pitch to ‘big Army’ is the “spouse stabilization program,” a formal process for soldiers to request extended time at a duty station for their non-military spouse who might need more time in a place at a pivotal point in their careers. There are ways for soldiers to get extra time at their current base, but there isn’t an established policy, Slininger said.
“Junior officers are a big group of individuals who get married during their time and with marriage comes spouse and their spouse’s career because we’re no longer generations of
single income. We’re dual income, dual careers,” Slininger said. “You get married; your spouse has training, education, certification, probationary time in their career that — them moving would hamper their career. They can put in a packet to stabilize for a year or two extra so that their spouse can fulfill their career requirements.”
Without impacting readiness, Slininger said one solution could be transferring the soldier to another unit on base so they can stay in the area but do a different job if the Army needs it.
Getting buy-in from leadership
The Army’s current methods for receiving feedback are through informal methods like commanders’ open door policies or its formal annual career engagement survey. And while they are asking soldiers to fill out yet another survey, Col. Kris Saling, a senior mentor for the program, said it’s set up to make sure their feedback actually goes somewhere.
“Survey fatigue happens not because people are done with surveys. I mean, you watch people on social media and they fill out surveys to find out which character in a TV show they are,” she said. “If the survey is engaging and you get something out of it, people will fill out surveys. People will not fill out surveys if they feel like they’re just shouting into the ether and nobody will hear them.”
Under the program’s charter, commanders have to guarantee that they will support the junior leader’s efforts to bring back actionable data on a quality of life or soldier-specific problem and propose a solution.
At Fort Stewart, Georgia, the 3rd Sustainment Brigade’s Col. Jennifer McDonough asked their AJOC chapter: “how can we lessen a company commander’s workload?” said Capt. Michael Henao, chair of the 3rd Brigade’s AJOC chapter.
“What the brigade wants to look at is the things that they can’t see all the time,” Henao said. “Junior officers have different points of view.”
Saling said the program can help nip quality of life problems in the bud through junior officers, and hopefully solve retention issues for those officers who will eventually become senior leaders in the Army — if they stick around.
“The payoff for us as ‘big Army’ is I’m not going to be receiving these folks coming in as colonels and it’ll be their first time in the building, and they’re learning how the Army runs from scratch,” she said. “They’ll have had some exposure to leadership and problem solving at the enterprise, and they can take that throughout their careers.”
The Navy’s version
The Army’s program is modeled off of the Naval Junior Officer Counsel, set up in 2019 and has representation across 21 Navy career fields. The Navy counsel’s mission is also set up for retention issues and is being co-sponsored by the chief of naval personnel to look at technology solutions derived from feedback by sailors.
The Navy counsel helped Lt. Daniel Conley develop a prototype for a new unified breathing mask which combines multiple use cases for fire and smoke, hazardous gases, air deprivation, and flooding.
As for retention, the Navy counsel found that junior officers wanted more career flexibility or “not to be beholden to a rigid path that only leads them to command,” said said Lt. Cmdr. Liz Elrod, director of the Naval Junior Officer Counsel. For a sailor who entered into the service wanting to be a pilot, the milestones they need to hit in order to be promoted are very clear, but changing jobs and still progressing might not be. For the service’s wanting
“When you commission in the Navy, you’re assigned and commissioned into a certain community already and you don’t really know what else exists out there,” Elrod said.
Elrod said that the counsel advocated for better transparency around career progression, adding that if the services are most interested in retaining its troops for their “war-fighting capacity,” then “if you need someone in a job, it might be more beneficial to you know get them to where they wanna go.”
“The biggest thing is just making sure that when [junior officers] are given information, it’s more transparent — they see the whole picture as opposed to just the part of the picture that the service is driving us towards because they want an officer to commission and make commands,” Elrod said. “But they’re now hearing what we want to know.”