Navy Recruiting Soars!
Go Navy!
Despite increased focus on recruiting and introducing several innovative programs to include increasing the maximum age of enlistment to 41 and easing restrictions on entrance exam scores, the Navy missed every recruitment goal in FY 23.
Big Navy fell short by nearly 7500 enlisted sailors, with only 30,236 enlistments of its 37,700 target. As a result, the Navy increased its goals for FY 24 aiming to cast a wider net in the potential recruit pool.
But how?
How low-scoring applicants ‘primed the pump’ for Navy recruiting boost
By Hope Hodge Seck
As recently as June, Navy officials were still predicting that the service would miss its recruiting target for a second consecutive year, even as other services waxed bullish about their strategies for recruiting success.
But in August, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman revealed the Navy is now expecting to exceed recruiting targets comfortably, refilling its drained delayed entry program pool and creating some breathing room for the next fiscal year. And among the ingredients of this “catastrophic success” was an unconventional decision to allow in a greater proportion of recruits who scored in the bottom 30% in testing, two recruiting-focused admirals said.
In a round table with reporters Aug. 28, Rear Adm. Jim Waters, head of Navy Recruiting Command, and Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, commander of Navy Education and Training Command, said “opening the aperture” to bottom-scoring recruits, while not ideal, has so far not resulted in higher training attrition rates or other personnel problems.
As of the end of August, with one month to go in fiscal 2024, the Navy had contracted some 36,776 active-component enlistees and shipped 30,314 to boot camp. With an average of 4,000 contracts secured per month over the last four months, officials are now confident the service will meet its target of 40,600 contracts, Waters said.
The “catastrophic success” Big Navy realized has been achieved by “opening the aperture” for the slow, stupid and lazy. An extrapolation on how many will actually complete their first tour while commanding the lion’s share of deck-plate discipline from the LPOs and Chiefs has not been disseminated.
BZ to ADMs Cheeseman, Waters and Czerewko for the Best. Euphemisms. Ever. Put yourselves in for another MSM laddies.
Category: Big Navy, The Stupid is Strong
Wait till more ships run aground or have other “accidents”.
Gangs forming on larger ships like back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Get the popcorn out.
Sail Ho, Anchors Aweigh,
It’s not my Navy anymore.
The recruits in the bottom 30% of ASVAB scoring WILL NOT fill the shortages in high-tech rates. We need quality over quantity.
“We need quality over quantity”
No, you need both.
Plus, don’t ships still have decks that need to be swabbed?
And ships need radar technicians, power plant crews, communications technicians, and aircraft maintenance personnel. The bottom dwellers won’t be filling any of those billets, and you can only swab the deck so many times.
Ahh, but aren’t there heads that need to be cleaned and garbage that needs to be dumped? What about cleaning pots and pans in the galley?
Evidently that all requires high ASVAB scores and extensive technical training. Lord knows that smart as I am I was evidently unable to properly clean pots & pans or clean heads without years of training and experience.
Project 100,000 again?
Biden’s Bozos? Austin’s Airheads?
Harris’ H’airheads?
Of course it has. They keep dropping ships from the arsenal, so they don’t need so many.
Yeah, lets hire people that cannot even flip burgers or pour piss out of their boots. What could go wrong?
I once had an O2 Platoon leader who fitted that description. He also had a Master’s degree from a very good school. I am pretty sure he scored rather well on the ASVAB.
Don’t know about the other branches, but back when Hack was still active, the only area that a Marine Corps Officer was required to have a minimum score was a 120 on the Electronics portion. The Corps must think that at some point in their career, all Officers will have at least one instance of talking on the radio.
Except for the 3.5 years I was in Special Forces groups, I constantly had to talk on FM radios. In SF we used encoded messages on single side band long rage radios in blind transmission broadcasts via a burst device. Although composed by me, they were sent by the commo sgt.
Heh. Couldn’t trust an officer to do that, eh?
Since I was the only officer in the field, I wasn’t about to upstage and interfere with my commo sgt. You obviously have no idea about what was involved in sending a coded blind transmission broadcast from Germany to England, using and AN/GRC-109 and a PRC-77. I knew just enough about his complex job to screw it up.
“You obviously have no idea about what was involved in…”
You are mostly correct. It was a joke. And, of course, you know what they say about people who can’t take a joke.
Officers! Sheeesh!
AN/PRC-70 or PRC-74 were the SF HF rigs from back in the day. The 77 was a VHF FM only radio that we often carried too. The 70 was a heavy beast, but it had HF plus VHF FM, so it was what we gravitated towards carrying. (The AN/GRC-109 “angry 109” was the crystal controlled WWII OSS tube radio that stayed in the inventory (through the early ’90s at least) because it was practically immune to EMP. ) The O on the team was supposed to both write and encrypt the messages so the commo sergeant couldn’t reveal their contents under interrogation, but in practice, watching the officer struggle with a trigraph and one-time pad generally led the commo sergeant to handle that part too.
Back in olden times (1969) requirements for Army OCS were
1) 18 1/2 years of age
2) High school diploma or GED
3) Good moral character
4) GT score (military version of IQ) of 110 or better.
I am pretty sure number 4 was often waived.
I’m thinking this was smack dab in the middle of ‘Nam, and the dropout rate for both draftees and volunteers was still pretty high?
Dropout rate?
Calley repeated a grade in school and was a 2x recycle at OBC at the time, so I’d concur.
Sometimes a Cat IV is more than that. A number of schools force their students to take the ASVAB as it may qualify as a “assessment test” and it is free. A 16 year old taking the test might not be interested in taking it seriously and will simply mark down all “Bs” or fill it in randomly. On the old test all Bs put you in the Cat IV (barely).
Hack’s High School had a lot of students take the test, and some of them just randomly filled in circles. But in this case, these are young men and women who want to enlist, so you would think that they would exert their best effort. But like Tom Petty used to say, sometimes your best just ain’t good enough.
Although, I’d advise kids do their best on it… you never know when a service or two might throw college scholarship money at them (the military does look at its results for that).
Future CMC’s that set up their own internets. Or burn down the boat when pierside. Cause the current system did so well weeding out the clueless.
How many illegals?
Hell of an honest path to citizenship.
Do your four and finish with an HD.
It would be a hell of a lot more than most illegals ever do for our country.
If they want in that bad, and want to work that hard, I am willing to consider them. Make it 6 successful years active and an Honorable or a reenlistment.
Doing so probably indicates that they are better than half the recent HS grads.
Word.
I signed three first line signature blocks for dudes that signed up.
All received CIBs and became permanent (families as well) citizens.
No issue here.
Join the Navy and ride the WAVES!….oops, showing my age.
Join the Navy and see the world through a porthole.
Porthole, eh? You, too, are showing your age.
Waters was boasting on LinkedIn not long ago about how they were exceeding recruiting goals.
Thanks for providing “the rest of the story”.
In my day, there was the draft but you still had large numbers joing the Navy so they wouldn’t possibly get drafted into another branch.
‘struth. The Navy & Air Force may not have directly inducted draftees but they still benefited from the draft.
I thought I served with draftees in the USAF. I could be wrong. I was in the Army also.
The Air Force did not draft. I
Just enlisted lots of dudes skeered of getting grabbed by (oh God, no) The Army.
That other branch was the Army. Few potential draftees wanted to end up in the infantry in the Viet of the Nam. But I picked it, contrary to my parents’ wishes.
I enlisted specifically for Infantry. Yeah, young & stupid. I was pretty gung-ho back then. The Army wanted to make me an MP for some reason.
In addition to scrapping the bottom out of the gene pool IQ barrel, how many of these stalwarts are also “stunning” and “brave”?
I just gave my DD 214 a hug.
Affirmative action for “intellectual disability,” you know. Having smart people join is “racist” or something.
Translated “…’opening the aperture’ to bottom-scoring recruits, while not ideal, has so far not resulted in higher training attrition rates or other personnel problems” actually means training attrition rates and other problems aren’t occurring because the standards in training and conduct have also been lowered.
It’s not the Admirals who have to deal with that nonsense.
“Opening the aperture”. Sounds a wee bit gay to me. Or does it mean they’re just pulling ideas out of their collective asses?
It ain’t gay when the Admirals say.
Once again I laugh at those who constantly declare that the shiny new all-volunteer military is better because enlistees are superior to draftees.
I see a lot of substandard discharges in the Navy’s future.
Substandard for being over standard…one of the few things one should not excel at, is being over weight.
Yeah.
I wonder if they even still tape?
$200K to sit the panel on the boat at my age and beat on the nonquals?
I’ll pass.
I knew that old Village People song would do the trick.
The False Commander “Phony” Phil Monkress (CEO of All-Points Logistics) checks a few of these blocks.
A friend has a grandson at Parris Island, halfway through. He said a third of the boots washed out right away- could not do a single sit-up or pushup. Maybe the services are taking duds just to beef up recruit numbers, knowing they’ll never make it through.
10 push ups in a minute for 10 minutes. Then add additional minutes. Easy way to get use to push ups. But not being able to do a single push-up… Maybe they had strong fingers from playing on their phones all day. The Navy needs to change!
Hack cannot see how bringing more minimally qualified people into the Navy is going to fill those essential billets that require Sailors with more than two functioning brain cells. A ship is not going to be sailing straight and true when 90% of the crew is only capable of scrubbing barnacles from the hull, and no one is qualified to run the engine room or work the navigation system.
Cat IV folk use up 25% more resouces (money, fuel, broken/wasted ordnance, vehicles, urinalysis bottles, you name it) to accomplish stuff than Cat I folk do.
Hiring minimally qualified people does not mean you cannot hire well qualified people.
“They’ll take muh job!” beats “We can’t have retards do this!” much too often.
But the qualified people will be spending their time cleaning up what the unqualified people fucked up. The Cat IV crew contribute zero results to the mission, so the others get to pick up the their slack. And let’s not forget the Transgender troops who will be spending all of their time with medical and psychological appointments as they transition to their true selves. Who is going to do their work?
The problem is not that they are minimally qualified, it is that they are unqualified. The US Military set minimum standards regarding mental (intelligence), moral (criminal and drug activity), and physical (height, weight, and disqualifying medical history) standards. They did extensive research and set a baseline, determine that these parameters were the minimum standards to successfully complete basic training, technical school, and complete an enlistment successfully. So what occupational field does Big Navy plan on assigning these “Sailors” to? As Hack previously said, you cannot deploy a ship where 90% of the crew is only capable of scraping barnacles and swabbing decks. They need capable people to fil critical jobs. More numbers (enlistments) does not mean that the critical billets are being filled. Not a problem for whoever made this decision, they will never have to serve with these “Sailors”, they are going to ride that desk at the Pentagon until retirement.
“ride that desk at the Pentagon until retirement”
I believe the proper term would be “sail that desk”
Just do like the Army and significantly lower the number needed then brag about hitting the target.
That’s about the only option if you want a volunteer military and not enough people volunteer.
“More numbers (enlistments) does not mean that the critical billets are being filled.”
Didn’t say it did. It does mean that you can fill critical billets with qualified people instead of having to use them to fill non-critical billets. How “qualified” do you have to be to be a cook, etc?
And where does “…90% of the crew…” come from?
Cat IV kid comes home on boot leave, marries his 13 year old girlfriend, and brings her along as he attends his MOS School. They live in the E-1 Estates off base, everything they have is financed through Devon Home Furniture, and his bride is pumping out babies left and right. He misses class because the car he financed got repossessed, and the cops are always showing up because of their disputes. The night he has duty, his “best friend” stops by, and the next morning his shit is in the driveway and his buddy has moved in. Chief Petty Officer is spending 99% of his team dealing with the headaches of these problem children. There is no upside to this story, it is a net drain on training and money. We’ve all seen this movie.
Left/libtards (e.g., anti-war artist Tom Minor) love to believe the opposite:
Robert Minor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Minor
And he had a point, unless you think the deaths of millions of soldiers in WWI was beneficial and unavoidable. As the French troops said on their way to Verdun; Baah! (That was the year before they mutinied, incidentally)
[…] Opening the floodgates to bottom-scoring recruits will do nothing to alleviate these critical issues, as most will not qualify for an “A” School in the first place. That Big Navy is failing in providing relevant initial training at the schoolhouse in indefensible. The Navy needs skilled mechanics and technicians to operate and maintain its vessels, not half trained “A” School grads and more Deck Division non-rates to chip paint. Navy Recruiting Soars! […]