In 2013, the Marine Corps released an administrative message with an intriguing offer: Through a special pilot program, troops could hit pause on their active-duty career and transition to the Individual Ready Reserve for up to three years — giving them the chance to go to school, start a family or fulfill some other non-military pursuit.
There were two catches: Marines had to commit to return to the service to serve double the amount of time they took off; and they had to apply for one of a limited number of spots — 20 per year for enlisted Marines and 20 for officers.
A dozen years later, fewer than half of the spots from the first year alone have been claimed.
According to Lt. Col. Emma Wood, a project manager with the Marine Corps’ Strategic Talent Management Group, as of Nov. 24 of last year, only 16 Marines have taken advantage of the service’s Career Intermission Program, or CIP, since it stood up as a pilot. And the individuals who have opted into the program don’t fit a specific category.
Seven of those Marines, she told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in a December briefing, had fulfilled their post-intermission obligated service and remained on active duty; three had transferred to other services to pursue career paths the Marines don’t offer, including military nurse and chaplain; two had taken advantage of Temporary Early Release Authority to depart after fulfilling their CIP obligation; three had gotten out after the end of their contract; and one was still paying off the post-intermission service.
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For the planners who envisioned CIP as a way to hang onto Marines who might otherwise be tempted to depart for other pursuits, the program would appear to be a swing and a miss.
For the three Marines who had left service after completing a single post-intermission tour, Wood said she saw a potential missed opportunity to take a more conventional path.
“If I look at those three service members, I think, ‘Oh, they would probably be better served to have done an [Active Duty Operational Support] period, maybe, and also maybe a drill during that time in CIP,” she said. “That’s one of the limitations of CIP, is that you, the service member, cannot drill during that time. So, if it’s a three-year period, particularly, you’re not maintaining readiness or affiliation with the Marine Corps.”
Active Duty Operational Support, or ADOS, is a program that allows Reserve Marines to fill an active-duty role for a set time period.
Part of the vanishingly low take rate on CIP may be due to the Marines’ lack of targeted advertisement of the program, Wood suggested. But it may also be that the program’s terms and limitations simply don’t add up to a good deal for many Marines.
She compared CIP to an “[active component]-minus” arrangement that took Marines out of the active community for a period of time.
Another option that “might offer more agency” for Marines, she said, is a “[reserve component]-plus” model in which Marines remain in the Reserve component, but participate in significant activation periods.
“It might be more appetizing,” Wood said.
Wood added that the Marine Corps was developing a legislative proposal that would change the terms of CIP and send Marines from active duty into a Reserve drilling component rather than the non-drilling IRR, allowing troops to stay more ready and engaged with their service, and potentially do a better job of preserving interest in returning to service for a significant amount of time after their career pause concluded.
“I don’t know if we see that as being very likely soon, but that’s something that we’re actively looking to pursue,” she said.
All the military services, including the U.S. Space Force, now have their own version of CIP. And while not all have made their numbers public, the Marine Corps is not alone in its struggles.
In a Navy presentation also delivered to DACOWITS, service officials cited a series of lessons learned about obstacles that kept sailors from participating in CIP.
In addition to the Marine Corps’ finding that a transition to the Selected Reserve would be more appealing than a sabbatical in the IRR, the process for transitioning in and out of CIP lacked clarity, said Rear Adm. Jennifer Couture, the service’s director for Military Personnel Plans and Policy. And, she said, both service members and their dependents lose their benefits, including health care and base access, during their time out of uniform.
Since 2009, according to the Navy, 190 women and 177 men have entered CIP. The Navy, Couture said, has changed to allow for applications on a rolling basis and is seeking to remove limits on when sailors can apply for CIP relative to their projected rotation date to further remove barriers.
“We’re continuing to iterate on the feedback that we receive from our sailors about how to make these programs more meaningful,” Couture said.
Katherine Kuzminski, the deputy director of Studies and program director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at Center for a New American Security, told Military Times that the career sabbatical programs, often promoted specifically as a way for women to step away from service to have children, also had cultural drawbacks that manifested “behind closed doors.”
Kuzminski, whose research has involved focus groups with service members who have participated in CIP or considered it, said a lack of familiarity with the program may end up affecting the career progression of participants.
“One of the biggest flags is, you never want your file to look different from anyone else’s,” she said. “And so, if you took the career intermission program and there’s only 20 officers in an entire service who took it, the folks who are serving on the [promotion] board don’t know what that is. So, it’s not that they’re punishing you for taking the career intermission program — [they just think], ‘We’re gonna select people whose career path we understand.’”
For many pursuits that might require time away from active duty, like education, other existing military programs might be a better fit, Kuzminski said. But she maintained that the costs of keeping CIP as an option were probably low enough to keep it active.
In total, the Marine Corps spent $175,638 on CIP for the program’s first three years. In addition to the changes that Wood proposed, Kuzminski said she’d like to see prominent leaders promoting CIP success stories to show troops that career success with the program was possible.
“If the 75th Ranger Regiment commander … says, ‘I took the career intermission program because we had a toddler and a newborn at home, and my wife’s job mattered more than mine, and then it enabled me to stay such that I’m now in this leadership position,’ that would sell it,” she said. “But that person, that experience is never going to be selected for that position, I don’t think.”
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