The U.S. Navy will begin to enlist new sailors who didn’t graduate from high school or obtain a GED in place of a diploma as the Armed Services branch faces a recruiting shortfall.
The new plan will allow recruits who lack the education credentials to enlist if they can score 50 or more out of 99 on the qualification test, the first time that the bar has been lowered since 2000.
Vice Admiral Rick Cheeseman, the USN’s personnel chief told the Associated Press, “We get thousands of people into our recruiting stations every year that want to join the Navy but do not have an education credential. And we just turn them away.”
(Video: YouTube/WAVY)
Cheeseman said that over 2,400 potential recruits were rejected last year but that as many as 500 would be able to get a high enough score to be accepted now, telling the outlet that he’s already notified recruiters of the new lowered standards.
“I’m hoping all my recruiters have called all 2,442 of them in the last 72 hours, and we’ll see how it goes. … We’ll try to get some test takers this weekend,” he said.
The personnel chief said that he’s set this year’s recruitment goal at 40,600 despite the Navy falling far short of last year’s goal of 37,700 with only 31,834 signing up.
“I need these sailors. So it’s a stretch goal. We’re telling our recruiters to go get 40,600 people to join the Navy,” Cheeseman told AP. “We don’t fully expect to get that many. But we’re going for it.”
While other service branches have been reluctant to set the bar that much lower out of concerns that lower-quality recruits wouldn’t be able to make it through boot camp, Cheeseman feels that the potential reward outweighs the risks.
“We just finally decided, OK, let’s go,” he said. “My, argument for accepting that risk is that we have capacity of boot camp. We’re not filling the seats. So I’m willing to take a risk.”
He also said “that the service was looking for other ways to reach untapped talent,” according to the outlet.
Last year, the Navy came under fire for deploying a drag queen in social media ads to bolster recruiting efforts with a certain demographic that enjoys preferential social status in the civilian world.
The U.S. Navy hired this non-binary drag queen as a “digital ambassador” to try to recruit people pic.twitter.com/l3LIEtndVD — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 2, 2023
The Navy isn’t the only branch to be impacted by the recruiting crisis that has come as a result of the Biden regime’s “woke” overhaul of the military.
It was recently reported that the Army is having an increasingly difficult job of luring white recruits, not entirely surprising considering the shift toward “woke” ideology, especially the embracing of Critical Race Theory ideology, a virulently racist dogma that is overtly discriminatory against white people.
Here’s General Mark Milley, with just the right amount of righteous anger, telling the world how much he wants to understand “white rage.” Probably totally unrelated.pic.twitter.com/qO1ZIDZvFrhttps://t.co/amZwgUgXQb — Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 11, 2024
“The rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts, data experts and Army officials interviewed by Military.com noted,” Military.com recently reported. “They don’t see a single cause to the recruiting problem, but pointed to a confluence of issues for Army recruiting, including partisan scrutiny of the service, a growing obesity epidemic and an underfunded public education system.”
According to AP, “The Navy is the only service that enlists anyone considered a “category four” recruit, meaning they scored 30 or less on the qualification test. The service expanded the number of those category-four recruits arguing that a number of jobs — such as cook or boatswain mate — don’t require an overall high test score, as long as they meet the job standards.”