:Unable to get paygrade increases, the navy has responded
:by simply promoting people faster into higher grades.

: And drastically watering down what it means to be a Petty Officer.

Indeed. When I was in the term for someone coming right out of
a school was 'IPO' - Instant Petty Officer. But it was becoming the
norm. The normal response, upon seeing a non-rate in the field, was
"what did you do to get busted?" I recall listening to a Master Chief
who described making PO3 after 3 years in (I made E5 in almost 3 years
to the day, from E1). He was in a new berthing area that day, and
instantly became the 'first line' supervisor for a dozen non-rates. He
wrote evals (rarely changed) as an E5, so on and so on. Of course that
was in contrast to our (then) current structure. As an E5 I never even
had input on evals (heck, many times our PO1 had to bitch just to get to
write an eval or two for "practice").
But we were overloaded with CPOs. And PO1s, etc. which I guess
is the point. Nothing like dividing up one good job 3 or 4 ways to mess
things up. I'm not familiar with current manning practices, but this
may be true at sea now, as well. (at least as far as EW/CT is concerned).

regards,
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