///AMG
Well-Known Member
It's based on a minimum of 20 years of service, not rank, same as the other services. For officers or enlisted. Though depending on your career advancement there may be points where if you get passed over for promotion (twice usually for officers, no set number of times for enlisted) you may not be allowed to continue to reach retirement because you may effectively reach a mandatory years of service for your rank. That would pretty much mean you were early in your career when you got passed over twice though, otherwise a person would have likely been close enough to retirement to make it. I've heard of people getting as far as O-4 and being passed over for O-5 and not making it to 20 years, but anyone getting passed over twice usually has had some situation that's a career stopper.
Super old thread jack, but at least in the Navy (I believe this is in US code, so would apply to all services), as a non-prior enlistee, if you make O-4, you can get to 20 and retire without hitting the officer version of high year tenure.......non-prior O-4's can serve until exactly 20 years, without a waiver. This means you can FOS x2 (fail of selection twice) for O-5 and still retire. Conversely, if you are an O-3 who FOSx2 for O-4, you will be separated without retirement 6 months later, IIRC. I imagine the FOSx2 rule applies to O-1/O-2's as well, though that is extremely uncommon, as those promotions to O-2 and O-3 are automatic and don't involve a board......unless you really F it up. Prior enlisted folks have various flavors of timelines, depending on designator/community/commissioning obligation, but generally speaking, they can at least retire at enlisted years + commissioned years if that = 20. So you have a lot of junior O's retiring fully due to previous E time. Whether they retire at their highest rank depends on all the factors I mention above, as well as "high 3" (which we are all subject to, until the new retirement system completely reaches the masses).
Back on topic, man, prosecutors in Navy cases are really having a tough time fighting their way out of a wet paper bag. I don't know in this case if they legitimately picked the wrong guy in a fervor to convict, or if they just screwed it away so badly that they allowed the guilty party to walk. I tend to assume the former, but it is really bad if the latter.