@brock.j.young, I concur with your assessment about the “forgetting who you work for”. While the Army does serve the American people, this doesn’t mean that we serve the DA Civilians who work in our organizations, at least in the sense of exercising our official duties together. There are military personnel (me, for instance) who are rated by DA Civilians, but I think you’re speaking to the civilians who provide services like CIF, range operations, etc.

I work on an installation that is predominantly DA Civilian, but they do a great job of showing that the Soldier is put first. You see it in their creeds that are posted all over the installation. You also see it in preference being given to uniformed personnel for services like ID cards, appointments, etc.

As you stated, the union piece can get in the way quite a bit, as far as disciplining/separating civilians for unsatisfactory performance. My civilian counterpart (who has the supervisor for ~60 civilians), whom I worked with very closely in company command, went through trying to separate a civilian employee who said they couldn’t physically do the work anymore. The union stepped in and eventually was able to curtail the separation. This happened, despite the civilian supervisor following all the protocol and a drawn out process.

I think a lot of the discomfort about having civilians is the belief that it is “difficult or impossible” to separate them. I do not have an answer on this, however, that is why having a civilian *supervisor* under you can be a strong point. That supervisor is likely not unionized but also gets to lean on the strengths inherent in civilian service. That civilian supervisor will/has been there for quite a while, so they know or have the continuity time to get to know the process to correct or separate their civilian employees.

This also brings up another point. It is critical that when key position vacancies, like a civilian supervisor position, are being filled, that it is taken seriously. Full consideration should be given on the magnitude of the impact filling that job with a certain individual will bring. This should also be imparted to civilian supervisors who are hiring authorities, their decisions hiring people can have consequences (or benefits) on timeline much longer than most decisions made by military personnel.

In the end, the civilians, by and large, eventually answer to military personnel somewhere. It may be many levels up, but somewhere. ICE Cards, in my experience, are EXTREMELY effective in addressing issues. The only limitation is that these mostly concern installation service agencies, so it may not work if your issue is with a civilian who works somewhere in a more operational based unit. As a commander, I filed many ICE Cards against various support agencies and everyone of them was answered and resolved in a matter of days.