As the Navy continues its push toward a 355-ship fleet, the perennial issue of manning that fleet is more important now than at any point since the end of the Cold War. To properly man, train, and equip the sailors of today is to ensure a force that is prepared to face the future challenges of great power competition, and the first step toward preparing for that future is effective recruiting.
Up through 2019, the Navy has, for the most part, been able to meet its recruiting goals. However, the future is unpredictable, and the Navy’s top leaders anticipate a tough competition for the commitment of America’s youth. Then-Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO) Vice Admiral Robert Burke, stated as much before Congress in 2018 when he declared that the fleet is “clearly in a war for talent,” explaining the current and future manpower challenge in economic terms and arguing that “current forecasts based on leading economic indicators suggest difficult times ahead.” He then elaborated on labor market factors that are drawing Sailors with critical skills out of the Navy, and observed that the propensity to serve is declining in each of the services as the civilian sector vies for the same limited talent pool, oftentimes with better financial propositions.
While this focus on economics, as explained by the VCNO, is a tried and true approach that should be embraced, it misses a more fundamental cultural element at play that dovetails with economic push factors driving young people away from military service: a familiarity gap. Best described as the unbridged distance between the military’s actual culture and a prospective recruit’s understanding of that same culture, this gap opens up a prime opportunity for the Navy to expand its footprint nationwide and potentially draw in a new, larger cohort of Millennial and Generation Z recruits through education and outreach programs.
Research and reporting by various outlets have found that a majority of military volunteers today come from military families in which one or more close relatives have served. In those families the familiarity gap is small because those future recruits witness firsthand the benefits and challenges of a military lifestyle, and are therefore able to make an informed decision about whether or not that lifestyle matches their interests. Considering only about 7.6 percent of the current U.S. population has ever served in the military, however, that leaves a very small pool of informed candidates for the services to draw from. As well, a majority of those military families are co-located in a handful of communities that lie proximate to military installations, meaning a minority of American neighborhoods produce a disproportionate number of U.S. military volunteers, further reducing the cultural influence of the military to pockets dotted in oftentimes remote locations around the country.
For those not from a military family, an informed decision to volunteer is much harder to make. Such a decision is complicated still further in communities where a tradition of military service, or of respect for it, is not widespread. Veterans could offer a potential solution to this information gap in nonmilitary communities; however, the demographic trends for veterans align closely with those of active duty service members: they are more likely, for a variety of reasons, to live in communities that are proximate to military bases. In only 7 of the 500 largest metro areas in the United States do veterans make up at least 20 percent of the adult population, and almost all those metro areas are near military facilities. In some of the largest metro areas with few military installations nearby, veterans make up a very small percentage of the adult population. In New York City the veteran population sits at roughly 3.8 percent. Los Angeles is 4.6 percent veteran, and Miami is 3.2 percent. If one were to look at military recruitment by region, the numbers would show those same high-density communities produce fewer recruits as a percentage of their overall population than do smaller cities and suburbs in the U.S. South and West, where many military bases are located, and fewer still by far than communities in the immediate vicinity of military installations such as Virginia Beach, VA and Colorado Springs, CO.
In short, this means that the areas where the most Americans live, both cities and suburbs, have the smallest share of resident veterans, and thus fewer opportunities for local youth to be exposed to the military as a viable career path. Children in much of America grow up with inaccurate or outdated ideas of what military service and military life is like today, and parents, oftentimes with the best of intentions, steer their children away from the military for those same reasons. These are communities in desperate need of outreach.
What could such outreach look like for the Navy? The answers are varied and flexible. It could take the form of already extant recruiters, who know and are known in a community, holding town hall meetings, or informational question-and-answer sessions, and visiting not just high schools but middle schools, churches, community centers and other large gatherings to talk about their lives, their career choices, and their families. Or, it could take the form of other active duty service members doing the same thing, coming off ships and out of squadrons to talk not about ratings and pay scales but about quality of life, family opportunities, camaraderie, mission, adventure, and financial stability. Another option still would be to involve reservists, men and women who are already established in their civilian communities, talking about their active duty time, deployments, mobilizations, and the flexibility the military provides.
These would not be recruiting events in the traditional sense, and they would not be geared toward getting folks to sign on the dotted line. That may turn some off to the message being broadcast. Rather, they would be informational opportunities only, designed to correct the record and present curious attendees with someone they likely have never actually met in person: a U.S. Navy sailor. If middle-class parents are presented with an image of the Navy that is professional, courteous, competent, and full of good paying opportunities, then their children may be more likely to consider it as a viable career choice in the future. If they are also presented with the myriad skills that can be learned and mastered while in uniform, such as cybersecurity, electronics repair, and flight training, all the better still to erase rampant misconceptions and recalibrate the Navy’s place in the hearts and minds of the public which it serves.
This outreach proposal is not a short-term fix. Rather, it is a long game designed to meet the needs of America’s future fleet in its new decades-long balancing act with rising and reinvigorated global competitors. The benefits would be hard to quantify, but the cultural shift could be momentous. America’s Navy today faces many challenges both at home and abroad, but one of the most insidious is a gross misunderstanding of who joins and what they do that is rooted in hearsay and inaccurate portrayals on film, television, and the internet. Only a real human conversation can truly begin to change those false narratives, and that starts by reintroducing the nation to its sailors.
