U.S. Navy, Faced with Recruiting Nightmare, Begins Accepting High School Dropouts
Recruiting numbers are so bad, the Navy will no longer require high school diploma or GED to enlist
As we have covered numerous times, U.S. military recruiting has been in the tank for quite some time, with the various branches now routinely missing their recruitment goals:
- As Recruiting Numbers Shrink, U.S .Air Force Expands Body Fat Ranges in New Requirements
- Military Recruitment Crisis Underway as Biden Admin Continues Emphasis on Wokeness, Vaccine Mandates
- Air Force and Space Force Raise Their Maximum Enlistment Age to 42
- U.S. Coast Guard Making Drastic Cuts, Citing Recruiting Woes
- Woke Military Struggling to Reach Recruitment Goals
It has gotten so bad that the military has even resorted to using drag queens to boost recruiting, as we reported: Navy Drag Queen Recruiters – Definitive Evidence that the Military has Lost Its Way
The U.S. Army in particular “has [only] hit 40% of its recruiting goals this year [2022], with the struggle to fill the ranks seemingly so grim the Defense Department reduced its planned total force size because prior recruiting goals were out of reach.”
In fact, in our recent report, In Attempt to Boost Recruiting, U.S. Army Secretary Shuffles Deck Chairs on the Titanic, subtitled “The U.S. Army completely misdiagnoses what is causing its recruiting woes, and rearranges Army command reporting in an attempt to “fix” the “problem,” we explained how Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth had commissioned a grandiose study of the Army’s recruiting woes, which led to a rearrangement of reporting structures in the Army as a fix to the problem:
But what the Army Secretary can do, despite alienating the majority of the country with its woke, transgender hit parade, is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic:
But Wormuth, who announced sweeping recruiting reforms last week, is focused on what the Army can control.
Some of the organizational moves can occur almost immediately with a stroke of her pen:
- Recruiting Command, led by Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, will now directly report to Army headquarters, instead of Training and Doctrine Command.
- The Army Enterprise Marketing Office, headed by Brig. Gen. Antoinette Gant, will now directly report to Recruiting Command.
Other changes will take years, though Army headquarters will soon issue orders detailing how the effort will unfold, Wormuth said.
Some of those reforms include: focusing on recruiting Americans who have attended some college; creating experimental recruiting units to try new approaches without having to meet a quota; abolishing involuntary recruiting assignments in favor of a specialized recruiting MOS; or even bringing in those without prior service, but with relevant experience, to serve as recruiters.
Of course, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Schlichter was not impressed with the breathless Army Times piece describing Wormuth’s “great” plan:
This article represents total failure in a complete misunderstanding of why the Army is failing to recruit. The problem for the Army is it can’t admit the problem, which is the Army sucks. https://t.co/bw3OpYa5vB
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 3, 2023
So, the Navy has an egregiously bad recruiting problem as well, but, cutting to the chase quickly as is the Navy’s wont, and dispensing with complicated, man-hour intensive studies and/or Navy Command deck-chair shuffling, the Navy has decided it will simply begin accepting unqualified candidates.
From AP: No diploma? No problem! Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals:
The U.S. Navy is starting to enlist individuals who didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has opened the door to lower-performing recruits as it struggles to meet enlistment goals.
The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test. Both are fairly rare steps that the other military services largely avoid or limit, even though they are all finding it increasingly difficult to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military’s physical, mental and moral standards.
Under the new plan, Navy recruits without an education credential will be able to join as long as they score 50 or above on the qualification test, which is out of 99.
Of course, the AP, like the Army Times in its piece about the Army Secretary’s recruiting fix-it plan, completely misdiagnoses the Navy’s recruiting problem.
And, ominously, it glosses over the potential threat to military readiness that a move like this entails:
[Vice Adm. Rick] Cheeseman [Navy Chief of Personnel] said he believes the biggest risk is that they do fail boot camp at higher rates, but he said the difference hasn’t been significant so far for the low-scoring recruits brought in last year. Overall, 11.4% of those recruits didn’t finish boot camp, compared to less than 6.5% of the high-scoring sailors.
He said Navy leaders had been talking about opening up enlistment to those without high school credentials for a while in an effort to expand the pool of potential sailors.
“We just finally decided, okay, let’s go,” he said, adding that the service was looking for other ways to reach untapped talent. “My, argument for accepting that risk is that we have capacity of boot camp. We’re not filling the seats. So I’m willing to take a risk.”
The real threat to military readiness that a move like this entails can be challenging to articulate, but Reddit user Solo-Hobo has the best explanation I have seen:
[T]he Navy is overlooking its own data in an effort to shore up its lagging recruiting numbers.
The reason the Navy had restrictions on GED and non grad applicants in the first place had to do with these groups having very high training attrition rates and a statistically lower chance of completing their first enlistment.
I’m not saying this to be a dick this policy has been around for years based on data. This is throwing bodies at the problem and hoping they stick.
I’m all for giving people a chance but there can be a lot of second and third order negatives coming from bandaid policies. Lots of wasted time and money are about to just make things worse for people out in the fleet.
Drafts and lowering standards leads to people entering (not all people in this group) that shouldn’t be in and we all hear about it on here about bad people staying and promoting because good sailors leave, this will be a source of that problem in a couple years and even before lowers our standards we have[n’t] exactly been killing it when it comes to senior leadership.
This might help in the immediate but it’s going to create a long term talent problem and tie up resources and time that likely will make things worse long term.
[emphasis added]
Just so.
I’m no recruiting expert but I spent my career around very highly qualified nuclear-trained enlistees, many of whom had college degrees, and they were by-and-large excellent sailors who performed superbly under very challenging conditions. I also served with many lesser-qualified sailors in various non-submarine/nuclear related tours of duty, and the difference was often noticeable. Most did a great job, but there is no question that lowering standards for enlistment in such a dramatic way should be a huge red flag for anyone concerned with national security. Ships with lesser qualified individuals simply will not perform as well in the long-term, and we should not be compromising our military service standards this way.
The military lowers the recruitment requirements because it's struggling to meet recruitment goals.
But if they stationed our military to protect our border, recruiting would shoot through the roof. Guaranteed. https://t.co/F1fj5Fh211
— Roboto (@NoeF71462336) January 28, 2024
Navy Removes Diploma Requirement, Allowing High School Drop outs to Enlist, as it Fails to Meet Recruitment Goals
Absolutely no one wants to serve under this administration! pic.twitter.com/noYcmxmj4z
— TheTexasOne (@TexasRepublic71) January 28, 2024
Roaming RN sums up:
God help us🙏
No Diploma? No problem! Navy Again Lowers Requirements as it Struggles to Meet Recruitment Goals https://t.co/OjRwjKIE5d— RoamingRN (@roaming_rn) January 28, 2024
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Comments
I feel sorry for americans forced to serve in bidens woke military.
Daughter and SIL are active Army. They are counting the days till their 20 and are far enough in to make is unwise to leave.
My original career goal was to go to the Naval Academy, and be a Navy officer. For various reasons, that fell through. My eventual career was as a Commissioned Peace Officer, but I had a sideline as a writer for various defense journals in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Sitting next to my keyboard right now is my 40 year old US Naval Institute coffee mug which I still use. In my heart, for most of my life I have been Navy Blue through and through.
My children are beyond military age, and my grandchildren are not yet of military age. But you can absolutely bet that I will be arguing [if I am still alive] for them NOT to enlist when they get old enough. First, because with our country the way it is, it is likely that they will be sent overseas to risk getting killed for no good reason. Second, there is a very strong risk that they would be ordered to kill Americans who are defending our constitutional republic.
Subotai Bahadur
I did go to the Naval Academy.
It’s actually disgusting what they are doing there now.
I wouldn’t recommend ANYBODY go to the Academy or join the military at this point. A truly massive overhaul and firing of probably 90% of the officer corps would be required to change anything.
That and we have created a military establishmen that is going to be beaten in its next major conflict.
Well, that would negate the need for firing 99% of the officer staff. That would be handled through wartime attrition.
The simple fact is that the military has gotten away with horrible living conditions, substandard pay, and absolutely horrific healthcare. About the only real good, concrete benefit was retirement on half pay after 20 years, something that simply doesn’t exist in civilian jobs anymore, but only a tiny fraction ever go to 20 years.
The military was staffed predominantly with conservatives who put up with all of the abuse because of patriotism and because they stupidly believed that the military was apolitical.
Liberals, by and large, HAVE no patriotism. They were never going to put up with the military’s crap in the numbers necessary to sustain the force.
So when the woke losers went full speed on the insane lunatic woke crap, it drove off all the conservatives, and there are NEVER going to be enough liberals to meet the recruitment.
And the woke jackasses in charge are categorically REFUSING to admit that there is a problem.
It’s going to get 10x worse.
And the retirement at half pay at 20 years is now gone. When that occurred, there was a sudden drop in retention of sailors in the 8-10 year active duty range.
Says who??
Actually, the army, and the rest of the military, have achieved their recruiting goals. Traitor Joe and his junta, and all the treasonous slime running the military, now, have a goal of destroying the American military. They are moving apace on that and have hit their goals square on. They only publish those numbers – numbers that someone who actually loves America might be interested in, which means that Traitor Joe and all of the stooges around him are exactly interested in NOT achieving them – to fool the rubes.
Traitor Joe wants the American military to be brought to its knees. He wants America invaded by the third world. They are hitting their goals on the nose – even better than any of them could have expected just a few years ago. They are killing America and making a mockery of our institutions and they are quite successful in that. It’s lucky for them, as it was for barky who started it, that destruction is easy (given the power). A five year old can run a nuclear aircraft carrier aground if you are stupid enough to let him play captain.
It’s the late 1970s in so many ways.
Precisely. I joined the Navy in 1978 and this story brings back some bad memories, both as a sailor dealing with idiots and jailbirds and as a Leading Petty Officer having to somehow get an honest day’s work out of them. I had good sailors in my division but it was a constant struggle keeping them from being spoiled by the rotten apples.
People with no military experience from that time period really have no frame of reference for the decay and malaise that had fallen over the military in the 1970s. It wasn’t until Reagan came into office, raised enlistment standards and instituted randomized drug screening and began to aggressively recruit in the suburbs did things begin to improve in an appreciable way. They also had to adopt reasonably robust enlistment enticements, either shorter contracts, preferential MOS slots or signing bonuses…or all of the above.
I’m not sure what the pathway out of this mess is because unlike the early 1980s when there was a very deep well of talent that could be tapped, kids today are increasingly illiterate, saddled with drug problems or simply too obese to serve. We’re in a real pickle.
I served (Army) 1974-78. The experience ruined my plan to make the military a career. I still have nightmares about it.
My favorite quote about this situation comes from 1979 anthology, fittingly.
“A nation which despises its soldiers will all too soon have a despicable army.” – Jerry Pournelle.
Maybe we’ll soon see active recruitment of illegal aliens. They probably have more loyalty to the U.S. than woke Dems.
The tranny ‘admiral’ isn’t inspiring people to join?
No one wants to follow someone who is confused about what the thing between their legs is used for. If they can’t figure out what that’s for, how can we believe that can figure out the important stuff?
If you don’t get people to understand instructions or pay attention to details it won’t work. And there are reasons tose didn’t finish HS and the US Navy isn’t thee place to find out why.
But then destruction of the US Military is the Marxists goal so this isn’t unexpected.
Don’t need a GED — just a DEI.
Can I get one of those DEI from an accredited institution?
😏
All those military aged migrant men coming across the southern border is a huge pool of potential recruits.
Not my Navy any longer.
Starting drafting!,..problem solved
Let’s start by drafting from the pool of folks under 60 who have so far chosen to avoid military service. Heck raise it to 70 for what are considered non deployable assignments. Plenty of open slots for experienced professionals from the private sector to fill in their field of expertise.
Of course if we do go back to a draft then we gonna have to require women to register for selective service. Plenty of non combat arms jobs they can fill.
A 3-hour tour
As someone who served in the Navy (corpsman) and assigned to the Marine Corps, it’s sad to see this happen. There is a reason we are at this point. Obama cashiered a large portion of the Majors, Lt Colonels and Colonels across the services. That would include Lt Commanders, Commanders and Captains for the Navy/Coast Guard. As well as senior enlisted men. These tanks are the ones that teach the ethos of the American military. They were also the backbone of the officer corps that would say “no” to illegal orders. It’s how they were trained coming up. No more. You now have the Vindemen types running things. They wouldn’t even think twice if told to attack American citizens. In fact they are probably itching to do it. FJB
Straight, white men have noticed that their government hates them.
I’m SURE the use of a “tranny” (mentally ill) Recruiter has DIMINISHED the desire to enlist! DECENT Americans are NOT STUPID! When people tell you to your FACE that your WHITE SKIN is something to be ashamed of and will hinder any chances for a job or promotion then why bother? Also, with the Turnip CIC making “decisions”, why bother?? Just ANOTHER step DOWN to “fundamentally changing Our Nation”! It needs to end! The CLEANUP will be horrendous in terms of Lives Lost and Money! I do hope that PRESIDENT TRUMP puts all the “trannies” in charge of PHYSICALLY REMOVING the MILLIONS of ABLE BODIED MEN who have INVADED the US! The videos should be hilarious!
Calling all Cat-4’s, calling all Cat-4’s – your table is ready.
The argument for not accepting non-high school graduates was that they weren’t qualified to operate the highly technical equipment and platforms the military used because it required a minimum skill set. The ASVAB usually foretold who didn’t have these basic skills, and Category 4 recruits couldn’t meet the minimum score.
It is true that these recruits could qualify for basic infantry, but the Air Force and the Navy don’t need those.
I guess we can bring back cooks instead of using local civilian employees in.dining facilities. How many of those do we need?
So, bring back the draft, require women to register (equality doncha know), and mandate anyone receiving federal college loans to join. This would also include those who refuse to pay their student loans.
90 days past due on payment? Instant draft I to the branch of service needed.
The lack of diploma/GED may not make much difference. If you consider what “achievement” level a diploma from places like Baltimore means….
I’m sure there are some dropouts who are better equipped to serve in the modern military than a lot of folks with those diplomas.
I graduated from the Baltimore School system when they actually taught people, instead of indoctrinating.
I was thinking the same thing, especially regarding the diploma. I am guessing that someone obtaining a GED might actually have to demonstrate more knowledge. Here in Fairfax County Public Schools, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, we have high school students — and presumably graduates— who cannot read. Younger students are reading below grade level. But we couldn’t get a single conservative elected to the school board this past November.
2026: “We’re recruiting rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs…”