Over a quarter million men have passed through my command during the past three and one-half years en route to the fleet, shore stations, and class “A” schools. These same men are now involved in a great many of today’s far-reaching and important problems in the Navy, such as enlistment rates, shortage of critical skills, and elimination of those inept for promotion to petty officer status. Some of these problems might be better understood and solved if all echelons in the Navy had a better understanding of that mysterious period in a bluejacket’s life known as “recruit training.”
“Every officer and man a recruiter” . . . “Enlistment and re-enlistment is an all hands evolution” . . . “The Navy is my career, ask me about it” . . . and many other slogans have made us all aware that the Navy needs men and that we need to keep them in increasing numbers. True, but how many officers in the Navy today, young or old, know very much about what initially happens to a civilian enlisted into the Navy? Who is he? What is he? What training is he given? Most importantly, what is his attitude and motivation when he graduates to apprenticeship?
What Is a Recruit?
A recruit, individually or collectively, is a many faceted naval element. To the personnel planner allocating manpower to fill billets, he is a necessary nonentity and does no useful work. Moreover he requires precious skilled manpower to instruct and lead him in this non-useful life. When there is a squeeze on manpower the planner in numbers always looks askance at the “unavailables” in training. The perfect personnel allocation plan would have no unavailables (i.e. recruits).
To the recruiter, a recruit is a quota met, with the hope that he will return home on recruit leave and assist him in making his quota in the months ahead.
To the parents, a recruit is a seventeen or eighteen year old boy struggling with a rifle and a seabag full of clothes to become a man under a rigorous and strenuous life of military discipline.
To the classifiers, a recruit, if he has the proper basic battery scores, is another candidate to process into the class “A” school program to meet the shortage of critical skills.
What is the recruit to the fleet? I would like to assure you first of all that the recruit today is the fine, eager, ambitious product of the American way of life that he has always been. In a great many respects he is a lot better now than in generations past. If as an individual he appears to be or becomes something else, we in the Navy have our own leadership to blame.
A recruit is trained in the Navy in a company. The company size may vary from 64 to 96 men, depending upon the availability of instructors, barracks berthing restrictions, or availability of recruits. To each company is assigned a chief or first class petty officer as a company commander. The curriculum of training is prescribed by the Chief of Naval Personnel. With but a few minor revisions it has been the same for the past six years. Instruction covers (a) military drill, (b) physical training, including first aid and swimming qualifications, (c) indoctrination into the Navy way of life (naval history, customs, traditions, courtesy, rates, UCMJ, etc.), (d) seamanship, (e) ordnance and gunnery, (f) damage control and ABC defense, (g) character guidance, (h) administrative areas for personnel, barracks, and locker inspections —morning quarters and reviews, etc., and (i) a ship’s work training week.
The curriculum is flexible to the extent that it can be compressed or expanded by the stroke of a pen in Washington. Basically, it is designed to be thirteen weeks long. In practice it has varied over the past three and one-half years from eleven to ten to nine weeks, including the important ship’s work training week. By comparison the Canadian Navy devotes eighteen to twenty weeks to their “pre-entry” training.
Translate the curriculum into lesson plans and a schedule based on an eight period day and a recruit company takes on life, meaning, hard work, challenge, and accomplishment. No two companies are ever alike, or respond to training or leadership alike. The abstract prescribed curriculum becomes an infinite number of individual personal actions and reactions. The quality of recruit training is a function of time, the personality, backgrounds, and capabilities of the recruits themselves, the experienced leadership of company commanders, and a recruit’s reaction to every person he sees and hears, whether it be in the areas of recruit training or that of the administrative command which feeds, outfits, and cares for his mental, medical, dental, legal, and spiritual needs.
A company lives, grows, and matures under a competitive system of achievement in military drill, barracks and locker excellence, personal cleanliness, athletics, academic accomplishment, and performance in areas contributing to esprit de corps of the command’s volunteer units (bands, drum and bugle corps, choirs, etc.) The standards are not contained in the curriculum but are handed down from the Navy’s long experience in basic training.
To the officers, instructors, and company commanders of the Recruit Training Command a company is most readily identified in terms of its age on schedule. To an experienced eye, the week and day are most apparent. As many as 96 eighteen-year-old men, completely strangers to each other, start off on schedule together. Their own company recruit petty officers are chosen by their company commander. The company’s success competitively is determined by the recruit leadership in its recruit chief petty officer, its educational petty officer who tutors those weak in academics, its athletic petty officer, its master at arms, and the teamwork self-generated by a desire to excel. The attitude and motivation of a recruit joining the fleet is influenced far more by the atmosphere and moral climate under which his company lives than by individual exposure to an abstract curriculum of instruction.
The average recruit company as it graduates is an inspiring sight to see. Over a million proud parents have marvelled at what their sons and daughters have accomplished in so short a time. Fourteen days later, on an individual basis, the ex-recruit reports to a new commanding officer. He joins a ship or a station as a stranger, misses his company, his newly won friends, and has but a part of his company’s confidence, motivation, or aptitude. His performance of duty in the Navy then becomes the responsibility of his new commanding officer and reflects the standards he sets for the new apprentice.
Recruit training is a challenge and an opportunity for a recruit to grow in all three important areas, physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually. Our best recruits plead for more time just to live as a company on schedule before they take up apprenticeship. Time in terms of exposure to daily routine, of formal and most importantly informal instruction and discussion. Time for gums to heal and new dentures to be fit (8% of all recruits). Time to absorb all the facts and features of a new way of life. Time for voluntary religious instruction necessary for baptism or confirmation. Time is the most important function of a recruit’s proper indoctrination and transition to military life.
Those recruits joining the fleet directly from recruit leave are all in the two lower mental groups, with the exception of some of the reservists. The percentage of lower mental groups graduating over the past three years has varied. At one point it was almost fifty per cent. Since March, 1956, the minimum mental qualifications have been raised and the quota of the lowest mental group limited to eighteen per cent.
Over the past three years a large percentage of the men in the lowest mental group has had not only eleven weeks of basic training but an additional seven to thirteen weeks of preparatory training in reading. The objective of this training is to bring a recruit to a reading level of the fifth grade with the self-confidence and motivation to further his own reading development in the fleet. As men of this mental group, whose General Classification Tests are 36 or less, are the subject of so much concern to the Navy today, it might be well to explain in some detail how they happen to be in the fleet. Along with the basic battery tests given before a recruit company is placed on schedule, all those with General Classification Tests of 36 and below are tested as to reading ability. Those falling below fourth grade level are placed in a special remedial reading school.1
Since October, 1951, at Bainbridge 8,815 have entered such training, 7,349 have graduated to regular recruit training, the majority of whom are in the fleet today. Many in the fleet may be amazed that the Navy accepts such material and wonder why. The answer lies in the policy of carving up military manpower and allocating it by mental group percentages. We will have remedial reading problems among high school graduates for years to come. In my opinion, we stand to have more of them in the future than in the past. We are already finding that one of ten in the General Classification Test range 36-40 require remedial reading help. The success of recruit preparatory training is due to the assignment of career first class and chief petty officers to the unit as instructors. Motivation to learn to read is as important as the mechanics of word structure and meaning. Leadership plays a most important part in building self-confidence and faith in the Navy. If this could be furthered to some degree by understanding help and leadership in the fleet, many of the ambitious youngsters in the lower mental group would go on to become excellent career bluejackets.
Recruit graduates arrive in the fleet via two other sources. Many shore station seamen and firemen billets are filled directly from recruit training. After a year or two years of shore duty, they turn up for general detail. What their attitude and motivation for a Navy career may be is anybody’s guess.
Practically all of the higher mental groups qualify for a class “A” service school and eventually arrive in the fleet. At the present time, over fifty per-cent of all recruits qualify for such training. For the past five years we have seen the results of such training policy in terms of reenlistment rates of the critical skills. With the gap between requirements and availables ever widening in the critical skill areas, let us examine the class “A” school avenue to a career motivated bluejacket in the fleet.
To the Fleet via the Class A School
During full mobilization or an expanding fleet, there is no argument against the early forced selection and training in. schools to meet requirement numbers. It is true that transportation costs are minimal and that school graduates are rushed into petty officer pay grades in the shortest possible time. But the system—classification of the young seventeen-eighteen year old into a career straitjacket at his third week of training, class “A” school assignment by Bureau quota, and distribution to the fleet—has some terrific disadvantages and consequences, if you are interested in more than ten per cent of them making the Navy a career. The time honored period of apprenticeship at sea in shipboard divisions has been by-passed for the top fifty per cent of all first enlistments. It can easily be seen that the higher mental groups, the very men we are anxious to motivate for a career, are being shepherded through the streamlined classification and class “A” school techniques and made eligible to participate in the service-wide competitive examinations by the time they report to their first ship. Arriving aboard ship as a designated striker and ready to take the examination for third class, they rapidly become accustomed to having things done for them. They are scarcely available for the normal housekeeping chores such as messmen and compartment cleaner. His division officer is so completely impressed by the striker designation that he is easily convinced that it would be a misuse of talent to assign him as a messman. The division officer, the communicator for example, wouldn’t dare assign an RMSN as messman. He is two men short of the required twelve in his radio gang now! The recruit does nothing to earn a school assignment, in the sense that he has worked up through seaman-fireman-airman apprenticeship through a division training program and earned the school and striker assignment by hard work, desire, and aptitude. In some cases he would (secretly) rather go to sea and make his career choice after he knew something more about the Navy.
The graduating recruit lists “first shipboard duty” as the most influential factor governing his determination to make the Navy a career, all other fringe benefits, incentive programs to the contrary notwithstanding. What happens to this attitude in the ensuing three years and nine months?
In all the graduates of recruit training the seeds of a Navy career are planted. Those planted on the most fertile ground pass on to the class “A” school system, those planted on least fertile ground pass on to the fleet directly or indirectly via shore duty. Thus the career motivating capabilities of ship’s commanding officers, division officers, and petty officers are relegated automatically to the least fit.
Recruit Training, a Poor Relation?
One might imagine that any institution devoted to replacing one-fourth to one-sixth of the Navy’s total manpower each year would have the finest officers, instructors, and plant equipment in the Navy. Annapolis, Pensacola, and other initial contact points of training do have such facilities. The officers trained therein perhaps assume that the same climate and atmosphere exist in a recruit training facility. Such is far from fact in two important aspects—officers and plant facilities. The fleet alone controls the initial quality of recruit instructors.
Because a recruit’s faith in the Navy and himself is governed so much by first impressions, contact, and leadership, an examination of the training center officers and plant facilities is in order. Especially if we look forward to the replacement training of the 50,000 officers and 50,000 chief petty officers of the atomic age Navy over the next twelve years.
Without any disparagement of individual senior captains assigned as center commanders, their opposite numbers throughout the military establishment are two and three star general officers. The civilian community about a training center and the thousands of recruit parents wonder why the Navy awards such a secondary importance to the command assignment of its most important training function.
The officers assigned to the Recruit Training Command at Bainbridge have over the past three years contained no Naval Academy graduates and few career regular officers. The parents of recruits who went through training themselves in 1943-1944 see the same temporary barracks, scrub houses, crowded classrooms, and substandard living and berthing conditions they experienced under wartime mobilization conditions. And they wonder? How long are the buildings going to stand? Is this the place to inspire a youngster to join the atomic age Navy and make it a career?2
The recruit training commands, although they have a priority of mission and outnumber by population the other commands on the training center by a ratio of five to one are generally the junior command and always junior to the logistic support command. The command relationship under which thousands of recruits are outfitted, trained, classified, schooled, and assigned to the fleet is without parallel in the fleet or other service. A comparable fleet situation would be the assignment of Commander Sixth Fleet junior to the Commander Service Squadron assigned him for logistic support.
Confronted with a constant turnover in junior officers (OCS, NROTC), plant improvements relegated to long range shore station development programs, a static basic curriculum of training, the command position is apt to appear a prosaic stereotype function of detail, uninteresting, unrewarding, just one of the many necessary logistic chores to be done in the Navy.
Such is not actually the case! The recruit training command commander does have thousands of worries (thirty thousand mothers and fathers, a thousand instructors and their families, fifteen thousand recruits, male and female). But there is ample room for imagination, mature constructive thought, and action, if one has the courage, the patience, and the fortitude to lead.
Enlisting Public Support
In a short twelve years as the Navy rolls on into the atomic missile revolution in ships and armament all of the present chief petty officers and a large percentage of the line officers will have retired. Addressing himself to these replacement training functions in terms of long range requirements, the recruit training command commander can do much to ease the personnel problems of the future, lie is in a most important position. In terms of a recruit, he can look through the recruiting service into the families and communities from where our recruits of tomorrow will come. He can look about him in the training center atmosphere under which a recruit’s formative impressions are conditioned. He can look forward into a recruit’s life in terms of his career opportunities, the constantly changing rate requirements, and horizontal conversions present and to be. A little vision and imagination can inspire efforts and accomplishments that can serve many purposes.
Looking toward the communities of the recruiting areas of the eastern United States, the command has in the past three years established a direct letter system by which the parents are kept constantly informed of their recruit’s arrival, progress in training, reasons for setbacks or delays, and graduation. The recruiting station receives a steady flow of pictures and motion picture film of all their newsworthy companies or outstanding recruits and a graduation picture of all recruits when they are home on leave. Average monthly output is 3,000 feet of 16 mm. motion picture film and 5,000 4X5 and 8X10 pictures, all accomplished by photographic amateurs with their own equipment. The recruits themselves buy an outstanding company history book of their training and send it into their homes and communities. For the three outstanding recruits of each company, a copy of the Compass is sent to their high school or college library. The families of recruits are encouraged to visit the command at a recruit’s fourth week of training (when uniforms fit) and at his graduation. The Boy Scout-Explorer encampments, civic groups behind a local recruiter, high school guidance counselors, are all encouraged to visit the command. All of them do so at their own expense. The program is an ever expanding one. Seventy per cent of all recruits have younger brothers. The more faith parents and high school guidance counselors have in the opportunity for a young seventeen year old to grow and develop into a fine citizen and bluejacket, the easier it will be for the recruiting service to make its quotas in the hard years ahead. The closer parents feel to the command, the more faith they have in the Navy. The more a parent shares in the pride of accomplishment a recruit makes, the easier it is for a company commander to exercise his leadership responsibility.
The Role of the Company Commander
The company commander is the keystone of the recruit training standard structure. He is recommended by a commanding officer at sea, is privileged in some cases for shore duty early and for three years instead of two. He gets no other privileges, and few people in the Navy understand or appreciate his duties, authority, responsibilities, or accomplishments, including his wife. I recently recommended a first class boatswain’s mate for a new construction destroyer as a special privilege, who had successfully led over 4,200 recruits through basic training. Only two of his men ever appeared at mast. His salvage rate of the immature inepts was over ninety-five per cent. The Navy has no extra pay for such leadership. He has the satisfaction, a most peculiar satisfaction of a job well done. He lives and serves in the Navy with 4,200 men, somewhere, who would gladly volunteer for his ship just to be shipmates with him. Not all company commanders have this one’s capacity or capability, but many of them do. Company commander school, leadership school, invitational school for company commanders’ wives can have the personal attention of the recruit training command commander. Each hour devoted thereto can pay amazing dividends in leadership in action at all levels of command.
Career Counseling
Looking forward into a recruit’s future life, the command has taken a venturesome step forward in developing and operating a career counseling task force that has placed new atmosphere and images about a recruit’s entire life and experience during training.
One should expect any seventeen or eighteen year old to be confused about a career— naval or otherwise. For him to think intelligently about a future trade in his third week of training when he is far more worried about whether he can wash and fold his clothes properly is almost asking the impossible. Yet in his third week at a classification interview the eighty-seven rates and all the officer career opportunities are explained to his company in about forty minutes.
To supplement, expand, and develop career counseling into a meaningful force in a recruit’s young life, the command has assembled a career counseling task force of twelve experienced chief petty officers and three officers. Carefully selected for career motivation, proven leadership qualifications, and thoroughly trained, they function in the following manner.
A few moments after a company is formed, a counselor introduces himself to the company, explains the importance and the nature of the basic battery classification tests, and outlines the service the career counseling task force affords each recruit during his brief period in recruit training command.
Before each company is given its classification interview (third week of training), a two hour presentation is made on all aspects of a naval career. The Navy pay and pension plans are carefully explained and compared with comparable civilian employment and pension systems. All the career incentive and survivor benefits are explained. All of the officer programs together with their qualifications are outlined. This is probably the most important and interesting lecture in a recruit’s training.
After classification, the counselors sit down with each recruit and explain the entire career field for which he has been selected and classified. Answers to career questions are given by the counselors all during the remaining period of recruit training.
All recruits who meet the academic qualifications are given a two hour presentation on the opportunities of a career in naval aviation as a pilot. This lecture is conducted by an experienced naval aviator member of the task force. Those who volunteer are further examined physically at a naval air station and their applications for Naval Aviation Cadet or Aviation Officer Candidate training are submitted to the Bureau of Naval Personnel for action.
All candidates for the Naval Academy, Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, and Officer Candidate School are interviewed by a board of naval officers and the commanding officer and their applications are prepared for consideration by the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
Finally, in the latter part of recruit training, a counselor presents to each company the latest material available on the personnel and career aspects of the revolutionary new naval developments in the fields of electronics, guided missiles, nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The Navy Enlisted Advanced School Program involving four years of college level engineering and the nuclear field training programs are carefully and thoroughly explained in terms of qualifications. U. S. Armed Forces Institute educational courses are suggested to materially assist the individual in qualifying for either of these advanced engineering fields before the opportunities for application pass.
In its first year of operation the career counseling task force3 recommended 233 candidates for competitive qualifying examinations to the Naval Academy, 311 candidates for qualifying examinations in the Naval Reserve Officer Training programs, 231 candidates for Officer Candidate School, 157 Naval Aviation Cadet and Aviation Officer Candidate candidates for flight training to become naval aviators and has reenlisted some 700 reserve and selective service enlisted men into the regular Navy for career training.
Thus, in some degree the old-fashioned influence of the division officer and the senior petty officers is brought to bear on a recruit’s most important decisions. Granted it is a poor substitute, but the system is multiplying by a factor of five the candidates for Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps and the Naval Academy and, it is hoped, the candidates for nuclear field training and the navy enlisted college engineering programs three years hence.
Conclusions
The minds and the potential skills of our youth are considered to be our country’s most precious asset and possession. Their ambition, attitude, and motivation to serve in the new Navy will largely determine whether the billions this Navy is going to cost have been spent effectively. In comparison with the research time and effort spent in many technical fields, is it presumptuous to propose an operational research project in the basic leadership-career motivation field of personnel training?
As I visualize the project, it would consist of training a thousand recruits on an optimum syllabus to be developed jointly by the fleet, the experts in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and the recruit training command. The recruits so trained would all be ordered directly to specially selected ships at sea, their choices and qualifications for a naval career stimulated and processed in apprenticeship billets by shipboard commanding officers, department heads, division officers, and petty officers. Those guaranteed a class “A” school would receive it, when they earned it and knew enough about the rate to be sure it was in a field really wanted. A system of recording motivation for a naval career throughout the first enlistment against all kinds of leadership and environmental factors would have to lie established. It may sound complicated, but it appears to be a relatively inexpensive way of finding out how to (a) solve the critical skill re-enlistment problem, (b) improve the basic recruit training curriculum, and (c) measure the impact career-leadership plays in the retention of career personnel.
Needless to say such a project has been proposed to the Chief of Naval Personnel. I have an abiding faith in the first class and chief petty officers, given this opportunity. They can help solve many of our present and future training problems. Surely we would find that an optimum thirteen-week basic recruit training program administered by officers, at least fifty per cent of whom were regulars, would make the difference between a ten per cent and twenty-five per cent reenlistment rate.
There are no greater opportunities for individual achievement than are presently offered the youth of America in the Navy today, and there are just as many opportunities for leadership. They start at recruit training.
1. As of September 1, 1957, all recruits requiring such remedial reading training are being discharged and the remedial reading schools are being closed.
2. In making adjustments necessitated by budgetary limitations, the Navy will discontinue the use of Bainbridge as a Recruit Training center after the last graduation review early this month.
3. In 1957 the Career Counseling Task Force has to date recommended 322 candidates for the Naval Academy, a third of whom are under orders to the Naval Academy Preparatory School.