The Military Electronic Specialist Gap
July 1966 Radio-Electronics

July 1966 Radio-Electronics [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Radio-Electronics, published 1930-1988. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

As reported in this 1966 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine, the U.S. military faced a severe shortage of electronics specialists - radar technicians, missile systems operators, and communications repairmen - across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. The Navy needed 44,000 electronics repair petty officers but had only 19,900. To retain skilled personnel, the Pentagon introduced lucrative re-enlistment bonuses (up to $6,400 - $62,975 in 2025 money - for radar technicians) and monthly proficiency pay ($50-$100 extra). The Vietnam War had intensified demand, with civilian contractors like ARPA also scrambling for electronics experts to develop counterinsurgency tech. Meanwhile, the Air Force tested accelerated training programs to quickly deploy draftees for basic repairs while reserving in-depth instruction for careerists. Despite these measures, trained technicians continued leaving for higher-paying civilian jobs, forcing the military to compete with industry. Defense Secretary McNamara emphasized that retaining these specialists was critical to maintaining advanced weaponry like BMEWS radar and naval tactical systems.

The Military Electronic Specialist Gap - Career Opportunities - Sixth of a series

 By S. David Pursglove

If you have any kind of electronics training - or would like to get some - the Armed Forces will pay you a premium!

Are you an electronics servicer? Do you know anything about radar? Are you able to learn missile control systems?

If you are, Uncle Sam needs you. He needs you badly enough to pay you well and hand you a bonus for staying with him. He needs you as an electronics specialist in the Army, in the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

The expression used to be: "Join the Army and learn a trade." Now it's: "Know a trade? The Army needs you!"

That trade is electronics, the most critically short skill in the armed services. In the past year, the Army has grown by more than 180,000 men to a force of over 1,145,000 men. The electronic technicians, radarmen, radio repair men, and missile systems specialists have not grown apace.

The situation is even worse in the Navy, where a much larger percentage of the personnel must be electronics specialists due to the nature of a modern navy. The Navy needs 44,000 electronics repair petty officers and has only 19,900. There also are less than half the petty officers needed for communications and intelligence (operation of electronic intelligence gathering and processing equipment). The Navy has 15,000 and needs 38,000.

Here is the way the Navy's critical shortage looks when broken down into a few specific electronics jobs:

The Navy has only 8,650 of the 9,604 petty officer radar-men it needs. There are but 7,650 of the required 10,190 communications technicians. The Navy can meet only 80% of its critical demand for 5,850 sonar technician petty officers.

The Air Force needs electronic skills as badly as the Army and Navy. Right now, however, the Air Force cannot say precisely how many technicians of various types it needs because it recently changed its technician training policies and has yet to see how well things are working out. If the new plan fails, Chief of Staff Gen. John P. McConnell says, the Air Force will be in the same desperate condition as the Navy; if it succeeds, the Air Force will merely be in bad shape.

Beyond the armed forces' needs for electronic skills, the Government and its contractors urgently need civilian electronics specialists for duty in Viet Nam and other overseas posts. Operating at the Defense Department level, above any of the military services, is the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which has, among many other unrelated assignments, the responsibility for coming up with military answers to counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare and low-level "limited warfare." Although generally hush-hush in its operations, ARPA estimates that well over half of its interests in Southeast Asia are electronic. Many are pursued by military specialists on duty with ARPA, some by Government civilians and many others by civilian contractors. The job of all is to study insurgency, watch the fighting and then come up with solutions - often electronic-to help the white hats defeat the black hats.

ARPA specialists evaluate front-line radar, night-vision devices, communications equipment and intelligence devices. They have helped adapt burglar alarms to counter-guerrilla activities and have conceived balloon-antenna systems for getting radio communications out of remote stations in dense jungle.

The Defense Department and the military services have civilian operations research firms - "thinking factories" - working for them in Viet Nam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia and in Africa. These firms, such as Research Analysis Corp., RAND Corp., Operations Research Inc., and the Center for Naval Analysis, send electronics-oriented "opsearchers" by the scores to Asia and Africa to examine, define and try to solve problems in communications, intelligence data-processing and equipment maintenance.

The Agency for International Development (AID) has a handful of communications and electronics specialists working in Viet Nam hamlets and in Saigon to develop low-cost, simple and foolproof radio communications equipment that can be distributed in great numbers to relatively untrained villagers. Recently, one AID expert received a commendation and a $5,000 bonus for developing such a radio to enable even a totally uneducated village chief to call the national police at the first sign of a Viet Cong attack.

The war in Viet Nam has without question greatly increased and added urgency to the Government's needs for trained electronics specialists. The Government - especially the armed forces- has the figures to prove it.

The draft has picked up momentum, officials point out, and it is not expected to slow down in the foreseeable future. But the needed skills are not being drafted in any greater numbers than are other types such as farming, banking or store clerking. As the military ranks swell, harried generals and admirals have told Congress, the ranks of specialists must grow even faster to support the expanding services.

Yet, the armed forces are seeing their electronics specialists leave faster than new ones come. Aircraft radio repairmen with 31 weeks of specialized training, electronic data-processing technicians with 44 weeks of intensive EDP training and sonar technicians with 32 weeks of training have been fleeing from the services at the earliest legal opportunity, usually after their first tour of duty is up.

Even old-school military personnel officials have acknowledged the reasons and admitted that the technicians have probably been justified. Now the services are doing something about it.

Thanks to some help from Congress, electronics careers in the armed forces are about to become nearly as attractive as the electronics careers in industry that have been spiriting the specialists away.

Optimistic officials believe that the new shake for specialists might even lead men with electronics skills into joining. At the least, a new attitude toward pay for special skills and several bonus benefits are expected to make the fellow who learned his electronics in a military branch think twice about leaving.

No longer does the sharp young electronics whiz have to watch as the untrained incompetent draws more money on payday simply because he has put in more time. The proficiency pay structure - in itself something fairly new in military life - has been changed considerably.

Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara explains it this way:

"To protect our heavy investment in the training of men for electronics and other hard skills, we must reduce to a minimum the loss of these specialists to the civilian economy. To this end, we changed the proficiency pay structure and are instituting a program of variable re-enlistment bonuses. The higher-proficiency pay scales are paid, for example, to guided missile electronics repairmen, radar technicians, and nuclear submarine powerplant operators."

The radar technician provides a good case study of how the special pay for special skills concept works. A Marine Corps sergeant (grade E-5) without any critically needed technical skill is paid a bonus of about $1,600 to re-enlist for six years. A sergeant (E-5) radar technician would receive the same $1,600 plus $6,400 for his special skill!

In addition, once the radar technician re-enlisted, his technical skill would add $100 per month to his pay check. Even at the lowest rank, there is an extra $50 per month in the pay envelope of the electronics specialist.

The variable re-enlistment bonus has been paid in some form for two years. It applies to the first re-enlistment, and will be paid to about 61,000 specialists who are expected to re-enlist in the coming year.

The effects of the bonus on keeping good men are now under study. Early returns indicate that it has helped. Also under study are ways besides pay boosts and bonuses to make military careers more attractive to electronics and other specialists by keeping the men happy.

Authorities see no end to the draft. The armed services will be depending on draftees for the next few years, at least. Because of this, the services are now seeking ways to get the maximum mileage from draftees who will get out at the first opportunity. The services also hope to find ways to encourage many of the more talented draftees to stay, take electronics training and remain as electronics careerists.

One such plan is now being tried in the Air Force and, with modifications, it will go into effect on a trial basis in all the services August 1. The Defense Department-wide program is a two-pronged one:

1. New men - those likely to leave at the end of a first hitch - will be given short functional training courses to enable them to operate necessary equipment. They will be able to make such simple repairs as pulling out and replacing "Module B" when a light flashes and commands "Replace Module B."

2. Career men - men with a minimum 6-year tour ahead of them - will be assured of getting broader training covering electronics fundamentals and practical training in troubleshooting and the use of test equipment.

Defense Department officials told Radio-Electronics that they like the idea because it instructs short-timers in the care of equipment without wasting expensive instruction on men who will soon leave. The program will get short-timers on the job faster, while the services will be able to free their careerists to pursue longer and more comprehensive training without the need to yank them prematurely into the field for simple maintenance.

The Air Force program already under way consists of 750 men divided into three groups. One group receives the present full training in various electronics areas, some 30 to 45 weeks. It includes broad instruction in fundamentals and practical work. A second group receives a course centered on equipment and containing virtually no fundamentals. The third group is receiving 18 weeks of training in electronics fundamentals and very little experience with equipment such as aircraft communications, radar, etc. One group recently finished its course and a second is nearly finished. Results will not be known, however, until sometime after the third group finishes in September. Then they will be intermingled on the job and their performance will be carefully watched and evaluated.

Most of the training is being conducted at Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., near Biloxi. It is the job of that center to train specialists to fill the 81,000 slots authorized in the Air Force for skilled technicians. Said a Keesler spokesman when queried by Radio-Electronics: "We can train the men - if we can get them."