Thoughts?

I knew a guy, way back in the early 90's, retired with over twenty as a YN2. Why was he allowed to sit back and do nothing? In the mid-80's, I knew an AET refused to make Chief. They told him once he made Chief he was leaving Kodiak. His wife ran the exchange, civilian job, they owned a house, he was on Kodiak for over 8 years. He stayed a first for more than 12 years. He not only slowed the advancement rate for his own needs, he was allowed to tie up a billet for more than 3 tours. So I agree, you can't advance, you're dead weight, time to move on.

It is greatly reducing the wait times for A schools. I don't remember the wait lists being so short across the board in my 13 years, which is great for the applicants I'm trying to recruit. Just a couple of years ago AST A school had zero class convening dates, ME and IS were 3+ year waits. Those days are gone, for now.

Great. I wonder if this explains why the sudden need for more recruits? Got to keep the schools filled as much as possible now that the wait times are almost non-existent now.

Who knew? Maybe the USCG was so so called "selective" due to high retention rates amongst the enlist? Perhaps we'll see a new generation of USCG with higher enlisted numbers.

I can Guarantee you we're still selective.

I mean no disrespect. I think the Coast Guard benefits from being the most "niche" of the service branches - I wonder if the majority of casual people somewhat interested in joining the Coast Guard end up disqualifying themselves due to the time it takes to go from meeting a recruiter to boot. Waiting a year before things happens is, for most people, an incredibly difficult task especially if one has other mouths to feed or other plans in life.

Certainly most recruiters get to be selective with the eligible pool of candidates due to the fact that, I think, one really must want to be in the Coast Guard to be willing to wait so long. That and with my experience of seeing how stretched out my local recruiter's branch was, I find it easy to see that the Coast Guard has the privilege to be so selective.

And of course, I was blessed and lucky to have such a relatively casual recruitment process. I mentioned earlier I'm still waiting on one final waiver to go through, but if the USCG was and is selective then I would feel honored to be part of such a team and family. I did try to the best of my ability to stay in touch with my recruiter and to show my local branch my willingness to put in the effort and time to be given such a privilege.

I wish I was in boot now so I could continue to express such sentiments with the USCG.

I tend to see the USCG in a similar way you do. Although I am going reserve I share the feeling that recruiters are able to be more selective due to the small size of the branch. There were many things that originally drew my interest in the Coast Guard but this was one of the initial draws. And if you want to talk about waiting, I submitted my application in Charleston in June of 2013. Due to a number of things (waivers for shoulder surgery, lack of open reserve billets, FY16 dates) I have just finally received all my dates and will finally get to be a Coast Guardsman. I was as patient as I could be, ended up graduating college and getting married, but didn't give up on one day getting to boot camp. I feel there is no better service to be selected for than the USCG and if people can't wait on the process they don't really want to be apart of a select group of individuals who work 24/7 on US soil protecting their country and it's citizens.