The U.S. Navy is once again unsat in meeting its recruiting goals, and Secretary of the Navy Del Toro was tasked with answering before Congress why the sea service is struggling to fill billets.

Diana Stancy reports for the Navy Times:

A lawmaker from the House Armed Services Committee grilled Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro Wednesday about how the Navy plans to rectify its challenges recruiting new sailors, after the service missed its recruitment goals for the first time ever in fiscal year 2023.

Difficulties attracting new recruits have persisted, and the Navy is expected to miss its accessions goal of 40,600 new sailors by roughly 6,700 this fiscal year. And while the other services hit at least 90 percent of their recruiting targets the first half of fiscal year 2024, the Navy obtained less than 70 percent of its recruiting goals in that span of time.

To put the deficit in perspective, 6,700 sailors is an aircraft carrier with an airwing embarked (5,200 men) and four destroyers (350 men per). We talk often about the Navy not having enough ships (and its inability to expedite their creation), but the Navy is set to fall short an entire carrier strike group worth of manning if something doesn’t change by year’s end.

It’s unacceptable, all the more so because the other branches have, at least in the short term, recovered from their recruiting troubles. The Air Force and Marines are topped up, while the Army managed to get 94 percent of the way there. The Navy is at 66.5 percent.

I’ve written in the past about how medical-records reporting has almost certainly undermined recruitment efforts in the past few years, but the Navy’s unique failure this year is difficult to account for, and Del Toro wasn’t offering the answer if it exists.

Del Toro said, “We’re striving to meet our goals. I think that’s an admirable challenge, right? We’re trying to make up for the shortages that we had in previous years, because it’s all about filling billets at sea, is what it’s all about.”

Jim Banks put the screws to him, responding:

“I would love to have a Secretary of the Navy come before us and talk about how you’re disappointed that you’re not reaching your goals and what you’re going to do to reach them,” Banks said.

The hard reality for our Navy is that the operational tempo we’ve demanded of her is simply too much. We have neither the ships nor recruiting levels to sustain the deployments that Congress demands of the Navy. Pushing the men and women we do have to fill in the gaps for ships and manpower that don’t exist will only decrease the readiness of man and machine.