The Navy said Thursday it will meet its annual recruiting goals after struggling for years to get enough people to join the ranks.
Rear Adm. Jim Waters, who oversees the Navy’s recruiting command, told reporters that the service projects it will have 40,600 recruits by the end of September. Waters attributed the success to the hard work of recruiters but as well as changes behind the scenes that made the process smoother for recruits and gave leaders greater insight into how the Navy’s recruiting efforts are going.
“I am very proud to announce that the Navy has had its best stretch of recruiting results since 2020,” Waters told reporters.
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At the moment, the sea service has contracted 36,776 future active-duty sailors and shipped 30,314 to boot camp. Waters said that his recruiters were averaging more than 4,000 contracts per month.
He chalked up a large portion of that success to changes within the recruiter community that included staffing the command close to 100% and adding goals that incentivize overproduction of recruits.
Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, head of the Navy’s Training and Education Command, also noted that improving and strengthening the service’s ability to track and monitor its recruiting efforts have also been key to the service’s success.
Czerewko said that, as late as last summer, “we never knew if we were winning…
