Navy bounces back, surpasses recruiting goals for Fiscal Year 2024 

The Navy surpassed its recruiting goals for fiscal year 2024 after failing to hit its accession targets for the first time ever last year.

The Navy has lagged behind the other services in attracting new recruits, and at one point projected it would miss its recruiting targets by roughly 6,700 for fiscal 2024, which ended Monday.

But the service reported this week that it brought in a total of 40,978 new recruits in FY24 – up from its goal of 40,600 new sailors.

The feat comes with a caveat, as a crush of last-minute enlistments meant the Navy couldn’t get about 5,000 of its new recruits into basic training by the end of fiscal 2024.

“I’m excited that even though we can’t get everybody that we’ve signed up right now through boot camp by the end of this month, we now have a delayed entry pool for the beginning of next year, which will really prime the pump,” Chief of Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti told The Associated Press in an interview last week.

The Navy attributes this year’s success to “data-driven decision-making,” cutting down the time to process medical waivers and “expanding opportunities.”

These changes include appointing a two-star admiral to lead recruiting stations and centers, shifting recruiting goals from monthly to annual, and launching a Recruiting Operations Center in October 2023 to troubleshoot recruiter issues and streamline the entire recruiting process.

Personnel from Navy Recruiting Command headquarters man the Recruiting Operations Center and take on administrative work, freeing up recruiters in the field to focus on making the mission.

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“The Navy is focused on thoughtfully increasing recruiting numbers while maintaining historically high retention rates,” Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in a statement Tuesday. “We are doing this by improving the efficiency of our recruiting enterprise and expanding the pool of applicants who can join our team.”

Over the past several years, the Navy has ushered in a series of reforms to rectify recruiting challenges. For example, the service announced in January that those without a high school diploma or General Educational Development credential could enlist, if they score a 50 or higher on the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

These applicants were last permitted to enlist more than 20 years ago, and projections suggest the change could bring in up to 2,000 more sailors annually. The Navy is currently the only service to allow those without a high school diploma to enlist.

The service also kicked off a pilot program in December 2022 permitting sailors who scored lower on the Armed Forces Qualification Test to still enlist in the Navy. The change allows prospective sailors who score between the 10th and 30th percentile on the AFQT to join, as long as their ASVAB individual line scores qualify for a Navy rating.