The Navy says that, starting next month, it will shorten the length of its Basic Military Training program -- commonly known as boot camp -- from 10 to nine weeks.
Navy officials said in a news release issued Wednesday that the shorter training program is the result of trimming inefficiencies out of the schedule and restructuring the curriculum rather than removing any one topic or concept. The new schedule takes effect after the new year.
The reduction in the length of the training program comes as the sea service tries to move more recruits through its boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois, as recruiting has improved, and officials say that it will help keep the senior sailors who actually conduct the training more effective and less overworked.
Read Next: Army Secretary Fires 4-Star General Who Meddled in Promotion of Unfit Subordinate
Lt. Cmdr. Mack Jamieson, the spokesman for the Naval Service Training Command, told Military.com in an interview Tuesday that the schedule compression largely relies on removing "redundancies" -- formally teaching a topic or concept several times over -- and instead uses less formal repetition throughout the rest of a recruit's time at Great Lakes.
"We figured we could do some applied training throughout that might provide similar or better benefit where we didn't have it before," Jamieson said.
Some of the topics that will have less dedicated time in boot camp itself included the Navy's Warrior Toughness program, physical fitness concepts, and professional development concepts.
The current 10-week training program has been in place for nearly three years. It grew from eight weeks in early 2022 as the Navy added an extra two weeks post-graduation to offer sailors some coaching and life skills instruction.
"When we went to that 10-week model, it was based on some unknowns," Jamieson explained, and so "they built in some extra time there to make sure we were getting that across."
Now, Jamieson says the feedback from staff and trainers is "we're getting this across to them in this amount of time -- we don't need this extra period."
The decreased training time also means that recruit division commanders (RDCs), the senior sailors who train recruits and are often with them the entire time they are awake, are going to have more free time and a better work-life balance, especially as the number of recruits moving through Great Lakes increases.
A newly assigned RDC in their first year will typically train two to five recruit divisions, Navy officials said. During that time, they will keep a fairly grueling schedule that usually starts at 6 a.m. and runs through 10 p.m. most days of the week.
A decrease in the training time for a division by a week means a new RDC should recover around one month per year of a far more normal work schedule in which they are supporting recruit training without being hands on.
In August, Navy officials triumphantly announced that they were going to meet their recruiting goals for the first time in several years of missing targets. However, within that good news lay a challenge in that far more recruits were set to move through Great Lakes than RDCs had seen during several lean recruiting years.
At the time, officials acknowledged that this was an issue and dealt with the problem by holding off shipping some recruits immediately, instead opting to rebuild the Navy's pool of "delayed entry" recruits while staffing up at Great Lakes.
Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, head of the Navy's Training and Education Command, told reporters at the time that he was also on a path to get the Great Lakes 90% manned over the next year.
"We weren't going to break humans to make sailors," Czerewko said.
Jamieson says the cut in boot camp length is meant to permanently put Great Lakes on better footing to handle training.
"We're seeing steady numbers come through boot camp," Jamieson said, before adding that Navy leaders "don't expect that to drop anytime soon."
Related: Navy's Innovative Programs Pay Off as It Meets Recruiting Goal for First Time in Years
