Mabus responds to sailor concerns over radical career shake-up

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK, Va. — To all the sailors angry or dejected by the stripping of their historic rating titles, the leader who ordered the unpopular change urged patience and highlighted the heightened career flexibility the service is promising in coming years.

“I know that some people are complaining about it, a lot of them are retired — and I understand that,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the roughly 600 sailors here. “I think there’s a lot of goodness there. It’s reasonable to have a lot of questions now, but as the information gets out they will understand and like what’s going on.”

Mabus' move overnight stripped sailors of time-honored titles that defined their jobs and even their Navy lives. Boatswain's mate. Fire control technician. Engineman. Hospital corpsman. And more than 80 more. Sailors have launched a White House petition to restore these titles.
Mabus says the move -- which also removed the word "man" from all job titles except "seaman" -- will prevent the use of force-out panels like enlisted retention boards and any return to tough re-enlistment approval policies. The ERB forced out 2,947 sailors in 2012.



“ERB, Perform-to-Serve were terrible. We only did those because we had ratings that were way overstaffed, some were way understaffed and we’ve got that back into balance — there are absolutely no plans to ever do that again,” Mabus said in answer top a sailor’s question about those programs, asking what was being done to make sure they aren’t used again.




“One of the way we’re going to keep from doing that is by making ratings more flexible so you can move between them and get qualified in more than one specialty.”