Report: U.S. Navy Exceeded Limits for Underperforming Recruits

In its rush to meet recruitment targets, the U.S. Navy exceeded the allowable legal limit for recruits who underperform on standard armed forces capability testing, according to the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General.

The Navy has a serious need for more enlisted personnel out in the fleet, and is running some of its warships short-handed. In FY2023, it missed its recruitment target by 20 percent, hampered by multiple factors: a shortage of qualified youths in the general population; a new medical-records system that discovered disqualifying conditions at a higher rate; and a strong jobs market, which made military service less economically competitive with civilian employment.

In response, the Navy made an all-out push to make it easier and faster to sign up and enlist. The service tripled the number of office staff assigned to perform medical waiver reviews, and it sped up operations at regional testing stations. It reduced its minimum acceptable score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) to the lowest level allowable by law, and increased the maximum recruit age to 41, the oldest it can accept without permission from Congress. It also opened a remedial program for applicants who do not meet minimum requirements at the time of first contact with a recruiter.

The pre-boot camp program for underperforming recruits is called the Future Sailor Preparatory Course. The program has two tracks - one for personnel who need help passing the AFQT entrance exam, and one for those who need to improve their physical fitness. Together, the two tracks have a 90 percent pass rate, according to the service.

In a review released earlier this month, the Pentagon's Inspector General found that through the enlistment of program participants, the Navy had accepted more than 2,700 people who scored in the 30th percentile or below on the AFQT (lower than the top 70 percent of all test takers) in the first half of the fiscal year. This amounted to about 11 percent of the recruits amassed to date at that point in the year - well in excess of the four percent limit that would trigger notification to the Secretary of Defense and Congress.

The Navy disagreed with this finding, and it put the low-performer accession count at seven percent - still in excess of the congressional limit, but not as much. The Navy counted test scores posted after its remedial program, while the OIG reviewers counted applicants' initial test scores posted before the program. A Navy official informed OIG that the purpose of the remedial program was to improve the test scores and open up more opportunities for recruits, and counting their pre-remedial test scores would undermine the program's objective.

This might be a procedural disagreement on paper, but the OIG warned that it could have practical consequences.

"Exceeding enlistments of [low-scoring] recruits, who . . . tend to exhibit below-average trainability and on-the-job performance, without the awareness and approval of the Department's leadership, could create unanticipated quality gaps in the fleet, degrading the Navy's overall readiness and lethality," the OIG wrote.