The head of the Navy personnel expects that gaps at sea will drop by 2,000 by the end of the fiscal year, he told a Senate Armed Services Committee subcommittee.
Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Richard Cheeseman, who will retire this summer, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee personnel subcommittee, along with his counterparts in the other services, discussing the successes in recruiting for the current fiscal year and ongoing challenges to meet a 100 percent fill rate.
The Navy met its recruiting goals in Fiscal Year 2024, after failing to do so the past two fiscal years, and is set to exceed its goals this year. The service anticipates it will send shy of 44,000 sailors to boot camp by the end of the fiscal year, more than its 40,600 goal, Cheeseman said.
Despite the success in recruiting in FY 2024, the Navy still has about 20,000 gaps at sea, all in the apprenticeship billets, Cheeseman told the SASC subcommittee. The Navy does not have any gaps among E5-E9 billets.
Cheeseman expects the number of at-sea gaps will drop to 18,000 by the end of the fiscal year and to 8,000 by the end of Fiscal Year 2026. The goal is to have 100 percent fill by Fiscal Year 2027.
The delay is partly due to the time it takes to get recruits through the pipeline and to a ship, Cheeseman said, adding that it takes approximately nine months, with the recruits from FY 2024 expected to be on ships by the end of 2025.
“Those new sailors are coming,” he said.
Cheeseman attributed the success to changes at Navy Recruiting Command, including changing the commander to a two-star position. Rear Adm. James Waters, commander of Navy Recruiting Command, previously attributed recruiting success to finding obstacles that made it hard for potential recruits to enlist, like a long medical waiver process, USNI News reported.
Recruiting Command also now has a recruiting operations center to increase data and analytics, Cheeseman said. One statistic shared by Cheeseman is that the average age of a Navy recruit is 22.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, recruiters waited for people to come to recruiting stations. After the pandemic, and with the decreased propensity, recruiters now need to go to people.
“We really had to learn how to recruit,” Cheeseman said.
