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Service members are entitled to 30 days of leave per year, accrued at a rate of 2.5 days of leave per calendar month. Leave is an entitlement, not a privilege.* Service members may accrue no more than 60 days of leave. Any leave accrued over 60 days is forfeit at the end of the year.  Informally, any leave over 60 days is termed “use it or lose it.” Most commands closely track the leave accrued by individual members, and strongly encourage those with over 45 days on the books to take leave.

While service members are entitled to take leave, when they take leave is up to the discretion of the unit chain of command. For instance, you aren’t going to get two weeks of ordinary leave authorized right smack in the middle of your unit’s planned rotation to the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, or right as your aircraft carrier or destroyer is slated to deploy to the Western Pacific.

As a rule of thumb, units returning from a lengthy deployment authorize what is known as “block leave.” Ordinarily, units are only authorized to have a limited percentage of troops not available for duty, around 10%, as I recall. But block leave waives that requirement, and everyone is encouraged to take as much as 30 days of leave. Unit commanders may authorize 30 days of leave, even for those service members with less than 30 days leave accrued, provided they have sufficient time left on their enlistment to accrue the excess leave.  Other types of leave include PCS leave, that is, time off taken in connection with a Permanent Change of Station; maternity leave; convalescent leave, not chargeable against their accrued leave, and terminal leave, taken in conjunction with ones separation from the service.

In the Army, leaves and passes** are requested and authorized via a form known as DA 31. A service members accrued leave is tracked on the Leave and Earnings Statement, or LES, the military equivalent of a pay stub.  In the Army, requests for ordinary leave are (usually) approved at the battalion level, and tracked by the battalion S-1 (Personnel) shop, after approval by the company chain of command. 

Here’s a scenario. Your humble scribe is a Sergeant stationed at Fort Carson, CO.  With a balance of something like 45 days on the books, I decide to go visit the dear old folks in Washington. A quick look at the unit training calendar to ensure no major training rotations or other critical events are coming up, I pick a block of 30 days that should work. I pick a 30 day window that is about a month out.  I chat with my squad leader and platoon sergeant, and see what they think of the dates in mind. I then fill out a DA 31, and attach a photocopy of my latest LES. I turn it in to my company First Sergeant, who in turn has it signed by the company commander. I then hand carry it across the street to the S-1 shop. Within two or three days, S-1 has the paperwork logged. Then, on the day I’m due to depart, I check with the battalion Staff Duty NCO desk, and sign out on leave in the log.  A month later, I sign back in on the log. And go to work the next day. Easy peasy.

Take a look at DA 31.

So, why is it that some unit at Ft. Campbell, KY has decided to take something simple, an entitlement, one of the more important ones, a key factor in individual and unit moral, and make it a trial to be endured simply to request that which one is entitled to?

I’m sure the commander who issued this puerile policy has his or her reasons. I can generally understand the Privately Owned Vehicle inspection and vehicle registration. Lord knows, the chain of command doesn’t want some young solider setting off driving across country in a car that shouldn’t be on the  road, and doesn’t have valid tags or insurance, driven by a troop with an expired or suspended license.  But one begins to suspect that the commander doesn’t want this to happen not so much out of a deep concern for the well being of his charges, but rather because he wants to cover his own ass in the event something unfortunate should happen. PFC Smith died in a car accident on the way home? Well, here’s the paperwork that shows we mitigated that risk! Can’t blame me!

What the training qualifications have to do with authorizing leave is beyond me. The soldier is entitled to his leave. It’s the commander’s responsibility to ensure he is trained. Those qualifications listed are on the commander’s shoulders, not PFC Smith. If he’s not current, that’s the CO’s fault, not his.

The Army is struggling to keep quality people even as it downsizes. What it really, really doesn’t want to do is brightsize, where the best people get out while the getting is good, leaving behind only those that need instructions to put on their velcro sneakers.

Here’s a hint- 95% of your troops are bright, motivated people. They’re smarter than the national average, and guess what? You have trained them and are willing to take them to war and literally trust them with your life. Why not act like it? Trust them, trust their NCOs. You know who your problem children are. Do they deserve an enhanced level of scrutiny? Of course. There’s the old saying that you’ll always spend 80% of your time on 20% of your people. So why force the good ones to jump through hoops when you know, deep in your heart it is unnecessary, and frankly, insulting.

I cannot tell you how many great soldiers I knew that loved soldiering. Actually getting to do their job, with other great Americans doing theirs. Being challenged to do difficult things under difficult circumstances. And yet these same troops, because they were the competent, mature people the Army supposedly most cherished, were consistently treated as on a par with the lowest common denominator. If the Army wouldn’t unleash them to do great things, they’d unleash themselves from the Army.

We saw the same reaction to infantilization today from a letter from an Airman.

A fair amount of chickenshit in the Army, and the other services, is a matter of the old saw, the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. There was often a real reason for sometimes seemingly nutty procedures. But simply piling more and more burdens on the back of a troop to cover every possible contingency is the worst sort of leadership. It shows the commander doesn’t trust his troops, his NCOs, or even his own judgment.

 

*with certain very specific exceptions.

**While technically service members who leave an installation after the duty day or are not on duty during the weekend are considered to be in a pass status, a DA 31 approved pass is generally not required, except in unusual circumstances, such as if a member plans to drive an unusual distance from his duty station. Passes, either verbal or on a DA 31, may not exceed 96 hours. That is, you can’t have more than a four day weekend. You have to have at least one complete duty day before you can take another pass. If you want more than four days off, put in for leave.