Ehh. USA MEDCOM is worse in a lot of ways, but as I've said before, the idea that one service is categorically worse or better than the others is bunk.
As much as some of the idiosyncrasies of Army Medicine piss me off and sometimes make me dream about life as a zoomie or a squid, when I talk to my Navy colleagues (from my joint Army-Navy residency) who are 3 quarters through their Navy career there are 2 major issues that I can't countenance and make me glad that I'm not Navy--scope of practice away from the big MEDCENS and promotion rate.
The Navy just does not have medium sized MEDCENS away from Balboa, Portsmouth, or Walter Reed that support a robust scope of practice for my specialty. I talk to my colleagues at Jax, Bremerton, Oki, Yokosuka, and the like; the skill atrophy for them is very real. Not the case in the Army where we have medium sized MEDCENS away from our big 3 that support a relatively robust scope of practice (Fort Bliss, Fort Bragg, Schofield Barracks) that reduce the skill atrophy to an ooze instead of a pulsatile arterial bleed. When I talk to my Navy colleagues who are out and away from the big 3 and hear about their case volume and complexity, I definitely feel better about my scope of practice at an Army MEDCEN. And this issue dovetails with the other issue nicely...
Most of my old residency mates who have gone to Oki, Yoko, Jax whatever, went there to get the administrative title and geographic change on their FitRep or OPR (I've been joint for so long now I can't even remember what the different services call their evals). In the past year I've been talking to most of them and listening to how a significant number of individuals (that were good solid doctors and people from my assessment of them in residency) were passed over for O-5. Now granted, I don't know how they've performed as attendings, but these are guys and gals that checked all the boxes (Marine GMO, good performance during residency, board certified, etc.) and I find it hard to believe that some of these individuals weren't deserving of being picked up for Commander on the first go-round. Again, it makes me a little less upset with the Army when I talk to these individuals who volunteered to go to a place where they knew their skills would atrophy specifically to make rank, and then have Lucy pull back the football at the last moment.
AAUUGGHH!