Military desk jobs.

In the Navy, the job for enlisted would be "yeoman." I think the job is called an "administrative specialist" in the Army, but I'm not sure. The military uses a lot of paper to get the guy who does the shooting in a position where he can shoot, making sure he actually has a gun and some bullets for it.

Paper pushing is perfectly reasonable in the military. My brother-in-law, when he was first in the Army, was sent to a base with a bunch of other guys. Their training wasn't ready to start for a few weeks, so they thought they'd have nothing to do. Sergeant lines them all up, asks "Who's been to college?" My brother-in-law and two or three others raise their hand. They were taken to an air-conditioned office and told to start filing. Rest of the guys were put on butt patrol in the hot, summer sun. He always says it's another reason to go to college.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

People assigned to Quartermaster tasks are basically doing desk jobs.

I thought there was an Quatermaster MOS. When I was at the JPED (A military operation) there was a quartermaster unit stationed with us. Lots of E3s and E4s which are low ranking enlisted soldiers. (If I remember correctly E5s are Sgts, so these were Specialists.)

They did things like ordering supplies, keeping inventory, doling out supplies. etc. We also had lots of E3s filing, answering phones and generally offering admin type support.

HTH
EM

Accounting, logistics, quartermaster's (the Quartermaster is a person, but there are a variety of roles within the Quartermaster's domain, most of which are carried out by Cpls and Pvts.)

Paperwork is everywhere. I used to be an electronics tech, one of the things we fixed was a 'Field Photocopier'.

aurinko said:

Do desk jobs exist in the military?

Click to expand...

Absolutely. After WWII, in particular, the Pentagon took on the philosophies of business management, and have long structured their hierarchies of command accordingly. The quantity of paperwork employed in the military establishment is staggering.

caw

My former boss (a young guy) spent about six or so years in the Navy. He was in network support, think cables, Network cards, communications. Even writing web pages. Never in the battlefield or any of "that" stuff.

I worked (as a civilian) in the pentagon for several years and in the intel community for over a decade. Each service is different, but Army officers have a primary (Combatant) and secondary (non combatant) series skill set. For example, in my military thriller TAINTED HERO the heroine was an Air Defense (Patriot) fire control officer in theater and an Operations Research specialist (SF49 series) in the pentagon (desk job referred to as an Action Officer, and she was modeled after someone I actually worked with. Hope that helps.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

This may come as a surprise, and it may or may not help, but even folks in Army Intelligence (ie spies) can have desk jobs. I had an uncle who served in Army Intelligence. When he got out, I asked him what he did. Said he, "Mostly, I read newspapers." (He was good at languages, reading, but not speaking.)

FWIW.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

My husband is in the Navy, 2nd class, and he's basically at a desk job right now. He's an instructor.

* Waves * Yes, I had one when I was in the army. Anyone in Headquarters Platoon will have a desk job. They will probably be people filling in from the regular platoons -- in my unit, they were truck drivers doing admin, for the most part. Anyone with an official administrative job specialty worked at battalion, not at company level.

Orderly Room: This is where all the paperwork gets processed. They will do awards, create memos, process school paperwork (National Guard did anyway), do mail, etc. They also coordinated with the platoons for soldier readiness, dealt with child care packages, retirements, paperwork for promotions, you name it.

Training: This is what I did. We tracked training records for all the soldiers in the unit -- like when they had last done a physical training test (and gave it to them as well); their profiles (medical orders saying they couldn't do X); rifle qualification; local post qualifications (our post required semi-annual road marches and jumping into a pool in uniform with a rubber rifle); annual gas chamber. I also maintained the unit publications (probably electronic now). I created the training schedule, coordinated for training areas -- that almost always required coordinating with other units to make sure we didn't gassed or attacked with artillery. Also I prepared what was called the Quarterly Training Briefing which was metrics presentation. We had to get information from the orderly room, plus our information on how many had completed what requirement.

Re-enlistment NCO: This is the person who handles all the unit re-enlistments. Ours often did double duty as platoon sergeant.

Operations: This is more specific to a transportation unit. A person who works in operations maintains all the paperwork on the trucks, what missions they are going on, if any of them are down, key logs, etc.