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Unhealthy.

I know you wouldn’t guess it by the cover pictured above. If you didn’t see “NAVY” plastered in the center, you could be forgiven for thinking this was referring to firefighters or some other group of people. More on that point later…

The Navy conducted a survey called the “Health of the Force” to gauge how well it was doing in the areas of Sailor retention, healthy behaviors, and other longevity areas that concern the “people” side of things. You can read the survey here. Full disclosure, I took this survey. If you’ve been following this blog for sometime, you can guess that the results of the survey reveal a Navy in trouble, especially in terms of recruiting, and well, the first major graphic of the survey sure seems to indicate just that.

Sailors increasingly think that the Navy isn’t committed to them? Even the surveyors agreed that “The negative trend for all four of these protective factors is statistically significant.” But wait, it gets worse. When Sailors were directly asked if they would stay in or get out of the Navy, we get these numbers…

Ouch.

In the course of five years, we went from over 60% of young men intending to stay to retirement to just under 40%. This is really bad considering that men make up about 80% of the Navy. Female retention is always difficult, because the Navy is not family friendly (no matter how often they lie to themselves about it), so women are often stuck between “Have a family” and “Have a Navy career.” Seems like many are increasingly picking the former.

So I wonder what happened in 2018 that caused this dip? The top reason people cited for staying in was “benefits.” Hmmm…didn’t we change the retirement in 2018? Didn’t someone blog about that and said it was a bad idea? Who could have seen that coming?

Nahh, I bet cutting retirement benefits had nothing to do with the young people deciding that the military wasn’t a good long term fit for them.

But at least we’re doing well in the DEI arena, with all our mandatory training, right?

Ouch. Now, these graphs look bad, but I noticed an interesting paragraph above them:

I’m wondering how much of the high number in the graph an aggregate of many smaller numbers. Like, if sexism is a “problem” in the Navy, is it a big or small problem? Is it better now than before? The survey text and the graphs shows very different results, so I think too much is aggregated to get the finer details. The reality is though that for all the focus on racism and sexism training, we don’t seem to be getting better, or at least we aren’t perceived as any better.

Same goes for suicide. For all the money spent on prevention, its not making a difference. Normally people are fired for this, but instead we’ll keep pouring money down a drain while young people continue to kill themselves.

Apparently Navy Sailors like using drugs that aren’t just alcohol…who knew! The rise in cannabis use will impact recruiting in two ways. First, you’ll have to issue more marijuana waivers to get otherwise qualified people to join. Second, if anyone wants an easy ticket out of the Navy, they can just smoke a few joints and pop positive on a drug test.

Long time readers will remember when I predicted that to make numbers, Navy would turn off all the “early out” taps, extend contracts, lower standards and throw money at the problem? Well, this survey confirmed all of that. Here’s a section from the “enlisted retention” portion:

Remember when the Navy made headlines saying they “made their recruitment numbers!” this past year, and I said that was a prop to hide a big problem? Well, I was right. The Navy drained its DEP numbers (essentially a reserve of Sailors signed up but waiting for boot camp) to make that short term goal. Now future Sailors “are shipped to boot camp withing weeks or even days of contracting to serve.” See below.

The officers are no better. Here’s a few snippets from various fields:

The last graphic sums it up the best.

If you can’t fully man, or overman, the billets that we have at sea, then you’re not doing your job. Has anyone been held accountable for this mess? It’s obviously been going on for a long time. Why was nobody fired?

Here’s the sad truth: Health of the Force told us that despite all the efforts of our “manpower heroes,” we still perceive ourselves as racist and sexist (and remember that perception doesn’t have to match reality), we emptied our coffers to keep people in, nobody wants to stay to retirement age, and we can’t man the most critical jobs we have.

It’s going to be a bad few years for the Navy until they figure themselves out.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this post, why not donate to DaTechGuy or purchase one of my books on Amazon?

Update (DTG) Instalanche: Thanks Glenn. Take a look around. If you like this piece you can find Ryan here and at Datechguyblog.org every Saturday. Catch you then