National Guard and Reserve Pre-Test for Warrant Officer Basic and Advanced Course
By CW4 Peter W. Sizemore, West Virginia Army National Guard
| Warrant Officer Journal, January-March 2024 Edition
Read Time: < 6 mins
In today’s Army, money matters, possibly more than almost anything. Saving money is imperative. The Army National Guard and Reserves must allow soldiers to test out of technical courses such as WOBC and WOAC for ground warrant officers due to their civilian training and professional experience, saving everyone time and money.
The Army’s plan to recruit warrant officers is to find qualified personnel with around 6-8 years of service who can meet the required standards. To make this even more complex, the Army has an attrition rate of 29.7% (Marrone, 2020). This leads to fewer and fewer available personnel to pick from. To try and resolve this problem, you have a couple of options. You can either lower standards or change how the standards are implemented. If you lower standards, chances are you get less experience and less qualified expertise. If you modify the bar, you still have the same highly qualified expert performing the job, and you save the Army money and the National Guard members time away from their families and employers.
One possible way to alleviate this problem would be to allow personnel, especially National Guard and Reserves members, to take a pre-test of their technical education to see if they need to attend. Many Guard and Reserve personnel have high-level jobs in the civilian world or government sector. I have met people who are Deans of colleges, who work for three-letter government agencies, who have been undercover being radicalized as a terrorist for over a decade, and many who have high-level technical jobs. I am not saying that Army training isn’t unreasonable, necessary, or beneficial. In some scenarios, the benefit personnel receive from technical schooling must be more significant than their expertise to warrant the cost.
In some branches, such as Signal, there are ways to obtain credit in lieu of Army training. Most of this can only happen if the member has received civilian education in the exact training covered in the course phase. This doesn’t cover everyone and may not even cover the majority. Some of the best Information Technology (I.T.) experts are self-taught to a large degree. Some receive training to become familiar with that skill set, then turn to self-taught research and study.
The Army could pay for a soldier to travel to the schoolhouse, spend a few days taking the same exams students take that are in residence, and then travel home. They could even administer these exams online through a proctored test on Blackboard or something similar. If the student passes the exam, they receive credit for that block. Whatever exams they fail, they would need to attend in person. The student must take an exam at home to ensure they have the skill set to travel to the schoolhouse and take the test.
A Staff Sergeant (E6) with ten years in service earns approximately $6,339.04 monthly (depending on duty location and marital status). This comes to $211.30 per day. For $633.90, the Army could potentially save $9,357.64 ($5,705.14 in pay, $387 in flights, $2,871 in lodging, $394.50 in meals) for a month of training for each soldier that passes a pre-test for a month-long phase of training. According to the Final Report of the Georgia House of Representatives Study Committee on Military Affairs, Fort Gordon trains 12,500 personnel yearly (Final Report of the Georgia House of Representatives Study Committee on Military Affairs, n.d.). In 2022, there were 461,657 active-duty soldiers, 329,705 National Guard soldiers, and 176,171 reserve soldiers (Military Force Numbers by Service Branch and Reserve Component U.S. 2022, 2023). The Army consists of 52% of reserve drilling soldiers and guards with civilian jobs. Using this percentage, just at Fort Gordon alone, there are 6,500 soldiers each year; the U.S. Government has to pay to leave their civilian jobs to travel away from their families to attend training they may already have from another source. This could save a tremendous amount of money annually. If, conservatively, the average school is two months long, the annual savings could be over $121M. It also appears that 18 locations train soldiers nationwide (George N., n.d.). The number of soldiers trained at each site varies, but using the same factors as Fort Gordon, it amounts to a potential savings of just under $2.2B annually. Let’s put that into perspective: that amount would pay for 29% of the members of the Army National Guard (Jim Greenhill, n.d.). That is not an insignificant number. Please remember that all of these calculations are based on an E6, and I have yet to consider the staff reduction that could happen at schoolhouses, which would save additional funds.
A soldier I know works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in his civilian job and serves in the National Guard. He has a degree in information technology (IT), multiple certifications in IT and cyber areas, and over two decades of practical experience. He has to attend the introductory course to get qualified according to the Army to do his job if he decides to become a warrant officer. I am aware of the waivers that can be acquired for the phases of the courses, but these are very cumbersome and difficult to meet since you must meet every requirement in the phase. You must attend the entire phase if you cannot qualify for one block in a phase. If he were to be sent to Fort Gordon on TDY for three days to test on each block, he would easily be able to pass the course and save the Army 21 weeks of pay, approximately $49k. This may not seem significant to many, but in the National Guard, a lower enlisted soldier could be placed on T32 orders for an entire year to perform a project for this savings.
As I spoke earlier, attrition rates are relatively high in the Army. Many soldiers are discharged from the National Guard, at least partially, because of the time away from their families. If we can eliminate or alleviate many of the days soldiers are not able to sleep in their beds, many soldiers would re-enlist. I contemplated it multiple times over my career. I have been away from my home for over a year for Army technichal Professional Military Education (PME) since I was appointed a warrant officer. With all of this training, except for approximately ten weeks, I would have been able to pass a pre-test instead of the training, saving the government over $100k just for me.
In Large-scale Combat operations (LSCO), this could be beneficial or even critical in how it helps commands. Not to even consider the dollars involved or saved, let’s discuss the commander allowing his soldier to still attend PME while in theater. This may not be ideal or even fair to soldiers, but being able to give them a chance to complete a PME while deployed is fantastic. Soldiers may have long workdays, but they could walk away from the deployment promoted when they wouldn’t have been able to initially. Many soldiers look for things to do in their downtime while deployed. Not to mention, “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings” (Benjamin Franklin Quote, n.d.).
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