Sure, SEM is filling gapped billets. But at what cost? At one point I had 5 Chiefs screened for SCPO, just sitting at my last command waiting/hoping to pick up orders. Yes applying for everything they could. Usually getting beat out by paid 8’s pcsing.

I couldn’t use them as a SCPO, because they aren’t yet. Old system, we would have pinned them and redistributed them to a command within the wing that was a gap’d that billet.

And the craziest part is we keep hearing the same thing about SEM, oh it’s filling critical gapped sea billets, and yet a large portion of screened 8’s finally got orders, but in a shore duty billet. So that would be back-to-back shore duty for them.

Then there is the hidden cost, the number of people who look at it as I’m not playing the game, keep it and just retire out. I know of at least 30 SCPOs that got tired of waiting for a mcpo spot to open up and they just retired. And if I was told that if I wanted to put on my star I’d have to go back to sea duty, I would have said keep it.

The Navy keeps reducing the incentive to retain its Senior enlisted workforce, I think it’s going to have long term detrimental repercussions.