As an officer gets advanced, this can give pause (5)
I believe the answer is:
colon
'pause' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'as an officer gets advanced this can' is the wordplay.
I cannot quite see how this works, but
'officer' could be 'col' (short for colonel) and 'col' is found in the answer.
The remaining letters 'on' is a valid word which might be clued in a way I don't understand.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
'give' is the link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for colon that I've seen before include "cut short dependency?" , "that may cut sentence" , "Stop (on the inside!)" , "City at the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal" , "Part of the intestine - punctuation mark" .)