The Navy recruited just over 14,000 people in the first four months of Fiscal Year 2025, the service announced.
Since Oct. 1, the service has brought in 14,111 new recruits and sent 12,751 to boot camp in the first four months of the fiscal year, Cmdr. Stephanie Turo, director of public affairs for the Navy Recruiting Command, told USNI News in an email.
The sea service is on track to meet recruiting goals for the second year in a row following two years of missing recruiting targets. Rear Adm. James Water, commander of Navy Recruiting Command, thanked the recruiters for an “incredible four months.”
In a post on X, the Navy called the FY 2025 goal the highest recruiting goal in at least 20 years. The Navy set the goal for the current fiscal year at 40,600, the same as Fiscal Year 2024, to support a 332,300 end strength.
Around this time last year, the Navy warned it would likely miss recruiting goals for the third year in a row. However, the sea service met its goals, which Waters previously attributed to finding fixes to roadblocks, including a slow medical waiver process and an issue with cursive, as well as fully staffing recruiting billets, USNI News previously reported. The service’s Future Sailor Preparatory Course also helped bring in enough qualified recruits to become sailors.
Waters told USNI News in a Thursday interview that the Navy came into FY 2025 with momentum from meeting the goal and having the delayed entry program pool at 25 percent. The DEP gives the Navy and recruits some breathing space, allowing people to have a bit of time before shipping out to boot camp, Waters said. As of Jan. 31, there were approximately 11,424 future sailors in the DEP, Turo said in her email.
Many of the procedural changes established in FY 2024 will remain, Waters said, including the measures put in place to speed up the medical waiver process. Those are now processed with a median time of one day, instead of delayed timeline of days or weeks that resulted in backlogs.
Approximately 6,800 recruits came in on a medical waiver in the first semester, Turo said.
The increased number of mental health diagnoses and medical treatment, as well as detailed medical histories provided by the Genesis platform, means more potential sailors come in with a reason for a medical waiver. It took time for the Navy to figure out how to adjust to the excessive information provided by the new platform.
“But that ability to make those quick and informed decisions continues into [FY] 25 and is a key enabler of our recruiting process,” Waters said.
Waters cannot say for sure if the procedural changes, such as the medical waivers or adjusting policies around signing in cursive, were the reason the Navy met its goal in FY 2024 because “it’s hard to prove a negative.” But the changes are here to stay for now.
Being proactive about medical waivers helped the Navy in FY 2024, Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher at RAND told USNI News. It is a way to manage medical histories, including mental health, instead of outright dismissing people.
That said, there are still medical reasons that cannot be given a waiver, Waters said, adding it depends on severity and, in the case of medication, how it is administered, among other reasons.
Those changes are a sign of the Navy adapting to the changing recruiting environment, Waters said. Those environmental changes include the low unemployment rate and a job market where companies offer education benefits that used to be unique to the military.
“My hypothesis is that those changes that match the environment are putting us in a position for sustained success,” he said.
The Navy has done a good job at showing how it can be an alternative career option for young Americans, Martin said. The sea service is managing standards while also showing people that it is a way to learn technical skills and be a gateway into the workforce.
The Future Sailor Preparatory Course is an example of managing standards. Waters previously said that the program helped make the FY 2024 numbers. It remains active for FY 2025.
Programs like the Future Sailor Preparatory Course can help meet recruiting goals, Martin said.
“I think that that’s exactly the kind of thing that you want to have, where people who are interested in [enlisting] may have something that, at the moment, is keeping them out of the Navy,” he said.
Propensity, the military’s term for willingness or interest in service, does remain low, Waters said, but he sees it as how hard recruiters need to work instead of a reason for why people are not enlisting.
“The key element here is our recruiting force out there on the front lines, working diligently each and every day,” Waters said. “It should never be lost that recruiting is always hard, no matter what the environment.”
While the Navy is making headway toward its FY 2025 recruiting goal, the sea service still has problems due to the past years of not making mission. It will take three years of meeting recruiting goals for the service to fill its gaps at-sea, USNI News previously reported.
