Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals

My understanding is that the Coast Guard is pretty selective and it's not easy to get into. Something like 15% acceptance rate. I don't think they're having the same recruiting difficulties as the larger branches.

Is this was caused the epidemic of fragging [1] too?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

You don't have to go back that far. The Army, at least, lowered the bar in all kinds of ways circa 2006-2010. It went badly enough that senior Army leaders, in the midst of the current recruiting crisis, have been adamant that they won't do it again. The result is that the Army is rapidly shrinking below the end-strength that the Army and Congress thinks is necessary. It remains to be seen how this will end.

Interesting, that parallels what I've heard about Affirmative Action in college admissions too; the student who get in from the lowered bar struggle and fail.

No, I was a nuke coming into the navy, the hardest to recruit supposedly, and I was treated perhaps worse for it, but definitely no better. Boot camp is the same for all.

You could have a cs degree working in cyber security and they still make you do the same bootcamp. If you get in through college programs you do the same playing soldier in the woods at your local base once a month thing too. If you join the marines the hazing/bs you put up with is certainly worse both in bootcamp and in terms of the routine monthly drill.

I can't speak specifically for the Navy, but as an Army officer I've been part of the pipeline that turns recruits into air traffic controllers, which is a pretty in-demand role. [I've also been part of the pipeline that turns college students into officers and pilots, but they don't go through "boot camp" in the same sense that enlisted members do.]

Your intuition is sort of correct, but sort of backwards. First, someone who qualifies for an in-demand role is less likely than most recruits to wash out because they are more qualified than the average recruit to begin with. Second, if someone fails along the way to becoming an air traffic controller or linguist or some other difficult job, there are a lot of other jobs that they can step down to and handle with ease. So we'd say, "Hey, you didn't make it, but this is a tough program so there's no shame in that, and here's another program that we can send you to do instead, if you want." On the other hand, if someone signs up to be a shower and laundry specialist (yes, that's a real job) and they fail in that program, we probably don't have much else that they'd qualify for, so they might be out of luck no matter how much they want to stay in uniform.

Edited to add: Of course, "boot camp" is "boot camp" for everyone, (mostly) regardless of the specialty that they signed up for. I'm mostly speaking above about the second stage of training.

These numbers are for enlisted recruits. To wash out of basic training/boot camp and be enlisted there has to be serious problems. Bed wetting, serious violence, egregious disciplinary problems or major integrity violations, Maybe being overweight or failing physical standards at the very beginning / end of training. With most of these things you just get rolled back and stay longer in training. The most common drops are early, often for integrity problems like lying to a recruiter about a criminal past or failing the initial drug test. After that if a person is kicked out of recruit training it's for the issues mentioned above and there doesn't seem to be any "fixing it"

These decisions are made by training commanders pretty much on a case by case basis, often with the armed service's needs in mind. Everyone who's at enlisted basic training is needed, because it's about volume.

It is hearsay (i heard it from a French army officer a year ago), but it seems the only army corp in the western world who has improved in the last 15 years in an organizational point of view was the US army (and he said (translated, from a 1-year old memory) "The army in particular, not the airforce").

He was extremely critical of the French army culture, and high level officers especially (like you it seems) and said something like "but at least we aren't Spain or Italy", so i guess they're worse. He also said that one of the lesson from ukraine is that it showed how trash and susceptible to corruption "legacy officers" were, and hopefully officers families (some of which date back from Napoleon in the French army) will now be met with some suspicions.

While this might well be correct, the argument is missing that academic qualifications conditional on growing up in the US (as supposed to in Afghanistan) are still a proxy for potentially useful skills. In other words, some of the enemies might have had comparable academic qualifications had they grown up in the US.

I disagree, as does the DOD. Smarter troops do their jobs better, such as better accuracy and faster trainability, and making better inferences. This is what the AFQT , ASVB shows based on decades of data among hundreds of thousands of recruits. Less intelligent recruits are a burden, which is why they are not recruited except during shortages during war time, and only sparingly.

Even if no GED/diploma req., they still must pass the AFQT and related tests

Have they tried higher pay?

I think reducing qualifications is bad move.

Sure, we've seen some pretty funny videos of how idiotic the enemies can be, that isn't a good argument for saying our soldiers can be just as idiotic.

To win we should be better. Smarter.

Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-resist countries the US was reluctant (but not always wholly unwilling) to engage.

Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return.

If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.

You arent comparing like for like you are comparing a guerrilla soldier to a trained professional. I’d imagine if the US switched to that sort of doctrine we wouldn’t have the totally lopsided casualty counts we’ve had in recent conflicts.

Most people in the navy dont perform combat roles, most people are processing radar contacts, doing maintenance on highly sophisticated fighter jets, reprogramming radios, managing extremely dangerous fluid systems, operating an extremely high performance nuclear reactor. The doctrine the navy operates under necessitates a highly technically adept and well coordinated crews on several ships, anyone aboard that isnt qualified to be there is a threat to themselves and everyone around them.

Were this a hypothetical matter we could speculate what might happen if we lowered the standards; however, I will point out that the state of todays navy is that sometimes young airmen get cut in half by aircraft arresting cables, sometimes navy ships crash into cargo vessels, most maintenance hasnt been done to standard sometimes for over a decade, sometimes people fry the reactor plant control console. It would be difficult to argue in that light that we should lower the standards, I would instead propose some combination of the following -raise the pay to attract qualified candidates -shrink the responsibility of the navy, congress sets the op-tempo -increased use of drones specifically, the navy has a proven track record of not keeping up with industrial automation and it is unreasonable to expect that to change given command structural doctrine, but drones can be fully self contained weapon systems that are installed onboard simply

While I agree with you in spirit, the United State’s hegemony relies on its ability to project power across the globe.

It’s just been getting really expensive to do it the way we’ve been doing it.

Because there are no enemies with access to the north Atlantic or the Sea of Japan.

The real question isn't whether withdrawing from the North Atlantic, Japan, and similar locations will save money. Instead, it's about whether remaining there is more cost-effective than having to reclaim these areas in 20 years from adversaries who will certainly try to exploit the power vacuum.

There is still very much a need to patrol the north atlantic and defend Japan today.

Part of the shift to a large standing army is probably the MIC milking the taxpayer, as many suppose.

Another part, however, is that the pace of war is so high and the minimum required level of training and military organizational capability to be able to go toe to toe with a top-tier foreign power is so great that it's not been clear, since the end of WWII, that the US would again be able to take so very long to get rolling as it did in that war, if it wants to be able to project power abroad at all in a meaningful way against strong enemies.

IOW scaling back our military too much might well be the equivalent of bowing out of the first stage or two of the next great conflict, even more so than it was in WWII, and it's less clear all the time that our historical gigantic advantage of the two-ocean moat will give us so much leisure to prepare, or that we'd quite so easily be able to wrest back control of vital supply lines if another world war breaks out, having allowed the enemy to take them in the first place (even if it stays non-nuclear—if it goes that way, of course, we're in totally uncharted and very bad territory, for all concerned)

Then there's the domestic concerns: the military is the only jobs program with bipartisan support. College, free housing (including for a family!), free healthcare (ditto!), good education for your kids. Retirement! Why, it's practically a way for a blue collar American kid to opt into European-level social support (though with some, ah, significant costs). There are social-stability interests in keeping recruitment levels high.

> Maybe the US is better without so many people in the military. Do we really need to be everywhere?

Where do you not want to be? Europe as part of NATO? The Pacific to counter-balance China? The Middle East (to help protect shipping through the Suez Canal)?

> They're doing their part. Are you? Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship. — EN

That’s already been a thing for several decades: https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...

> citizenship to non-citizen enlistees

This is a great proposal that could break the logjam on immigration reform.

most people would continue coming in illegally

"Research has consistently found lower cognitive ability to be related to increased risk for violent and other antisocial behaviour" [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/

Deck division does that work, and also runs the majority of special ops (not specops like the seals, just non-regular stuff) at sea so you don’t want the dumbest guys to flood the division, though that’s quite common.