Professional pride and military tradition compel me to write in the hope of clarifying something I have read at least five times in both print and social media over the past few days regarding the military service of Gov. Tim Walz.
My knowledge is somewhat dated in that I retired from the Army in 2006.
It bothers me that there is a common thread that at best could be considered semantics and at worst an outright deception about Gov. Walz’s Army rank as Command Sergeant Major (CSM). His rank has been characterized as one of the highest enlisted ranks. It is in fact the highest enlisted rank.
Army ranks differ from pay grades. Enlisted ranks begin at pay grade E-1 — rank Private and end at pay grade E-9 — rank CSM or Sergeant Major (SGM). This is the highest enlisted pay grade; there is no “E-10”.
People are also reading…
CSMs are selected by a centralized promotion board which bases selection of eligible E-8s (rank Master Sergeant or First Sergeant) on vacancies or pending vacancies in a finite number of CSM assignments. The “Command” in the rank designates exclusivity in that any unit of a certain size, normally Battalion and larger has one Commander and one CSM.
I have also read that the then-CSM Walz’s retirement was timed to avoid deployment despite the chronology of retiring about five months before his unit received deployment orders.
While I suspect he and his unit knew there was a possibility of deployment, retirement requests for CSM’s must be approved by one or sometimes two Command levels above his/her unit and can take months to process precisely because the Department of the Army considers the availability of a qualified replacement for Command-level positions before approval.
Also, I don’t make too much of Gov. Walz retiring at the pay grade E-8 instead of E-9. I have read he didn’t complete some of the course work at the Army Sergeants Major Academy (SMA). The SMA maintains one resident (in person) course per year, lasting nine months and one non-resident course which has a correspondence portion which can take two years followed by a six-week resident portion, also offered only once per year.
Reserve and National Guard Soldiers are normally enrolled in the non-Resident course owing to the part-time nature of their service and their civilian endeavors can easily make both completing the distance-learning portion and scheduling and attending the resident portion challenging.
The idea that retiring one grade lower than the highest achieved while serving is somehow punitive — perhaps equivalent to a dishonorable discharge — is absurd. I don’t know but suspect many more serving General Officers (pay grade O-7) retire as Colonels (pay grade O-6) because they didn’t complete the requisite time in grade or position than CSMs or SGMs retire as E-8s. After all, there are fewer CSMs in the Army than Generals. Retirement from military service is still honorable.
Michael Shaughnessy, Command Sergeant Major, Retired, US Army Sergeants Major Academy Graduate, Non-Resident Class 2000
