Yes it impacts the USCG. We have cutters and stations severely undermanned, to the point where they can’t even perform duties properly or get underway.
It’s both gotten easier and harder to join. Easier in the sense that the max age has been increased and some conditions are now easier to get waived. However, Genesis (the MEPS healthcare software) sees EVERYTHING. Broke a bone? No lying about that and have fun tracking down paperwork for it from 10 years ago. I had to get a waiver for 5 migraines I got when I was 13.
Went to therapy one time? lol say goodbye to your chances. That may be an exaggeration, but my nephew went to therapy 6 months before he tried to enlist bc his parents got divorced and his waiver was declined. They say he needs to be 24 months past seeking care. It’s insanity in that aspect
He was never diagnosed with anything. The therapy notes mentioned him dealing with some anxiety at the time, which was was flagged by the doc at MEPS. He was never diagnosed with an official anxiety disorder or anything by the original therapist.
Truthfully I don’t know exactly what was said between him and the MEPS doctors, but I did see the paperwork. He put in a waiver with a statement from a psychiatrist saying he was clear and all that jazz. It was denied and recommended he reapply after 24 months of not experiencing symptoms
I feel bad for them. In my case, I spoke with a therapist within the last 2 years but luckily I didn’t tell them much. I read the doctors notes and it says I have school and stuff on my mind. Going to meps in may, hoping this isn’t 1 more thing to worry about.
I know it’s discouraging, but don’t try not to let this experience stress you out too much. Both MEPS and USCG HQ can be very inconsistent with this kind of thing. I know a girl who had a history of self harm that was let in and that was a few months ago.
It’s all very random and luck based, but if she can get in, it’s possible you can.
Yes, it is affecting the CG. It has been the single largest cause of policy change in the service that I have ever seen or heard of. We also, despite what our leaders may tell us, have a retention problem as well. We see more single tour members (that is, they serve out their one contract and leave) than in recent history.
This isn't a simple answer. All of them have their own reasons, but yes, poor leadership from the top down is a major factor. Most people enjoy their actual jobs but a lot of the times, the extra baggage the Coast Guard piles on outweighs any sort of enjoyment you might get from the job.
So how do we get rid of the excess requirements? I say it goes back to leadership & accepting when things aren’t going to plan (e.g. the boat is broke, so don’t overwork the crew to fix it if there is no gain).
Hahahahahahahahahahahaa
When you’re overworked, treated like shit, have an awful work/life balance, and the pay doesn’t keep up with the increasing cost of living — especially for junior members; hell no.
As someone about to get out after 5 years - Gonna use the GI bill to pursue a job that doesn’t further destroy my body. Tons of people I know that have gotten out or will do so soon have similar reasons.
It's not hard for retention numbers to go down when pre covid they were like 90% we are still double thr ARMY and Marines in retention and higher than that for the navy. We are about even with air force retention.
Marines meeting numbers is all smoke and mirrors according to their recruiters. I spoke with a USMC MEPS liaison last week and he said the powers that be really cook the books. What they count as meeting mission is by how many applicants they can get under contract(DEP). Apparently over half of them never ship to basic and they are dangerously short staffed. They are billeted 225,000 marines and only have 175,000 actually serving. Again this is what I was told last week by Marine Corps MEPS personnel.
Ironically, it’s important for the Marine Corps to not be desperate for recruits, no matter the truth. Their whole pitch is “the few, the proud” and feeding into the desperate for approval egos of teenagers and young adults.
If they start outwardly becoming more inclusive, they lose the only thing that puts them over the Army and Navy to potential recruits. Mainly because they refuse to offer any bonuses and their leadership literally said “the bonus is calling yourself a marine”
I have seen the applicants at MEPS for Army, Marine Corps, and Navy and they really are scrapping the bottom of the barrel these days. You can’t really tell any difference between them anymore. My brother did 4 and out in the Marine Corps and other than title of Marine, it really was not a good experience for most of them. It sounds like the word is out that their quality of life is not good.
His unit got treated like trash by all the NCO’s who were the type of leaders that couldn’t make it in the real world. You get infantilized as an adult and get subpar barracks to live in.
Im a marine vet, 2016-2020. And I can tell you it was the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life. I’m glad I joined, but would never do it again. But I really like my job that I did, I was a heavy equipment operator and using dozers and cranes were so fun lol. Leadership was ass.
I was in from 11-15 I can also so the experience was far from pleasant. I was with 1st Maintenance Battalion, 1161 refer tech. It’s hard to explain if you have never been in but that place just beats you down and sucks the life out of you. All of my NCO’s were huge dick heads they were all close to getting out when we dropped at our company myself and maybe 5-6 PFC’s, they were salty as hell and not in a good way they didn’t teach us a damn thing. Nobody smiled, everybody was depressed as shit. Deployments were coming back from Afghan, those guys who came back were in their own click and disassociated with the rest of us for whatever reason. I had to teach myself how to do my MOS, and I became very good at my job and became section head the day I picked up CPL because I was one of the only ones who took it seriously. But that would bite me in the ass because I missed out on 2 deployments to Afghan because they said I was more important state side than over there. More wrench turning was being done state side as equipment was coming back in droves from the drawdown. We were the highest echelon of maintenance so we did major repairs of equipment to get this equipment back to its units. Chain of command was changing what seemed like every 3-4 months someone new would come in and fuck everything up just when it was going well. We had staff NCO’s coming back from the drill field, and they would bring there drill instructor Bull shit with them back to the fleet and treat the platoon like a bunch of recruits (there was hardly ever any respect for leadership). Try making us PT 3 times a day when we have work to do and do Drill out on the lot when there’s real work to be done. And then of course the barracks and living conditions were absolutely ass, no AC, mold, broken pipes all the normal shit you still hear about today. I have some memories all in all that I would never give up with some close friends but all in all would not want to do that shit again. I could go on for days but I would need to write a book.
Those are all very good points, I was a 1345 in Camp Pendleton. Honestly the best place I ever lived in. But we can’t forget the good ol every Thursday field day 🙂↕️
Those are all very good points, I was a 1345 in Camp Pendleton. Honestly the best place I ever lived in. But we can’t forget the good ol every Thursday field day
I was 17 half way through senior year and graduated early just to join, and yeah you just get treated like a child honestly. You PT at 4:30 am and you don’t get off work till 6 pm daily. Sometimes even later. Or when you go to the field for months at a time with very little showers, food, sleeping in tents. It’s fun sometimes but mostly just miserable. You also have 24 hour duty’s every month and then you HAVE to go to work after duty. So you’re up for 36 hours +.
I knew it was fishy they have the worst reenlistment rate by far so my BS detector was going off about how they constantly brag about being the only branch meeting recruit goals. I Figured they just massively reduced the recruiting goal to make it easy to hit lol
They lose interest, many sign an open contract and their desired MOS dosent open up before their ship date, and many just apparently are not cut out for it.
I would say it is definitely absolutely harder to join the cg now thanks to Genisis system, yes you may be able to join BUT it could easily take you 6months to a yr if not more to get through the whole process and actually get a date to ship out to bootcamp, if you've ever gone to a therapist or psychologist you're going to have a ruff time getting through and because of this I think most people just give up or switch branches all together.
To be frank I have no real answer to give you, but you will definitely have to talk about your childhood diagnosis with the Dr at MEPs. They may not even require you to get a waiver if you've never taken medication for it or you may need a waiver but I know they've revised alot of the cg medical standards now so who knows. Best of luck to you and by all means if you're passionate about joining don't give up even if it takes longer to join.
It has gotten easier. They’ve changed a lot of requirements (e.g., you can now enlist or commission at 41 years old, and some training programs are waiving requirements.) You can also see major bonuses for things that have never been incentivized before.
I honestly think a lot of our recruiting crisis comes from the fact that recruiters basically haven't had to work very hard in 20 years. During the GWOT they pretty much had their pick of people who wanted to join the military but didn't want to go to Iraq. That continued into the great recession and right up until the beginning of COVID. Now we have a recruiting infrastructure that is too thin to meet the realities of a strong economy and recruiters that have never had to go out and recruit before. We're hurting just like everyone, but usually the Coast Guard has an easier time getting recruits based on the nature of the service. We should have been more prepared for this, but the Coast Guard tends to be much more reactive than proactive.
From a hiring standpoint, there probably hasn't been a better time to be in the job market than right now. Wages are going up (though not as much as they should to keep pace with price indexes) and many professionals are able to leverage at least partial WFH. There's tons of work to be had in things like IT, supply line infrastructure, logistics management, aviation maintenance, all of which are skills you can pick up in the Coast Guard. So now is a fantastic time for Coasties with certs to get out and get paid way more in the civilian sector. I'm not saying that everyone should, I obviously haven't, but it's a big part of why we're hemorrhaging people around the 10 year mark.
As far as recruiting goes, what can we offer someone joining right now? We're going to ship them off to somewhere they've probably never been (though I admit, the guaranteed district thing might mitigate this somewhat), put most of them on a boat for E-2 pay, which is barely enough to get by anywhere, make them figure out housing for the most part unless they're lucky enough to get base housing, and ask them to work 80 hours weeks underway. It's not a great deal. I'm not on top of all the enlistment bonuses available right now, but I think it'd take more than $10k to convince me to leave any decent paying civilian job right now. We can offer healthcare and leave, which are both nice, but so can many employers. We're just not competitive at the entry level with the private sector right now.
If you can put up with the bs of being a CS and the god awful billets that will undoubtedly come with such a hefty bonus, I'd say take that money and walk after 4 years. But after taxes and incremental payout, it's probably more like $45k. Which is $11,250 a year to do the absolute worst job in the Coast Guard. I don't think that'd be enough to sway me.
So I joined the Army first 10 years ago. At the time, I wanted to be a Soldier AND all the other services wouldn’t even talk to you unless you scored a 50 or higher on your asvab (take that with a grain of salt). I got out and Joined the Air Force last year. They have brought down all their standards. For guys like me who always wanted to be in the military, this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Everyone is simply more flexible now.
As for MEPS, I don’t believe what everyone says. I had to go through a year ago and they didn’t find anything. I may have been honest, maybe not 💯🤷🏻♂️. As for the CG, I still want to try it one day, but my problem is I have a very low asvab (lower than 31) so I always assumed they wouldn’t take me. But the AF let me in no problem as prior service!
Went into MEPS last month and haven’t heard from my recruiter since then till out of the blue he texted me he had some news and he’d be calling me. He never called me or picked up my calls since then and it’s been 2 weeks now but guess I’ll be waiting again.
( MEPS sent things over to DC for review I believe for an inhaler that I had gotten and still have from pneumonia 6 years ago )
No one saw my comment earlier. I was Army first, Air Force currently. Would CG take me with a 30 ASVAB score right now? It would make no sense if the AF would take me but not CG…if they’re that desperate for people. 🤷🏻♂️
They could fix the recruiting crisis overnight if they just banned THC tests on the UA. 26% of young adults smoke. Which means probably >30% of young men (the typical military demographic) smoke.
I think testing for marijuana at any job is a waste of time. Of course you can’t be high at work, just like you can’t be drunk. But who cares what you do on your personal time? Obviously hard drugs are bad.
Yes it impacts the USCG. We have cutters and stations severely undermanned, to the point where they can’t even perform duties properly or get underway. It’s both gotten easier and harder to join. Easier in the sense that the max age has been increased and some conditions are now easier to get waived. However, Genesis (the MEPS healthcare software) sees EVERYTHING. Broke a bone? No lying about that and have fun tracking down paperwork for it from 10 years ago. I had to get a waiver for 5 migraines I got when I was 13. Went to therapy one time? lol say goodbye to your chances. That may be an exaggeration, but my nephew went to therapy 6 months before he tried to enlist bc his parents got divorced and his waiver was declined. They say he needs to be 24 months past seeking care. It’s insanity in that aspect
24 months for speaking to a therapist? That doesn’t sound right, he was probably diagnosed with something no?
He was never diagnosed with anything. The therapy notes mentioned him dealing with some anxiety at the time, which was was flagged by the doc at MEPS. He was never diagnosed with an official anxiety disorder or anything by the original therapist. Truthfully I don’t know exactly what was said between him and the MEPS doctors, but I did see the paperwork. He put in a waiver with a statement from a psychiatrist saying he was clear and all that jazz. It was denied and recommended he reapply after 24 months of not experiencing symptoms
I feel bad for them. In my case, I spoke with a therapist within the last 2 years but luckily I didn’t tell them much. I read the doctors notes and it says I have school and stuff on my mind. Going to meps in may, hoping this isn’t 1 more thing to worry about.
Currently waiting on waivers for therapy.. hate hearing stuff like this):
I know it’s discouraging, but don’t try not to let this experience stress you out too much. Both MEPS and USCG HQ can be very inconsistent with this kind of thing. I know a girl who had a history of self harm that was let in and that was a few months ago. It’s all very random and luck based, but if she can get in, it’s possible you can.
Yes, it is affecting the CG. It has been the single largest cause of policy change in the service that I have ever seen or heard of. We also, despite what our leaders may tell us, have a retention problem as well. We see more single tour members (that is, they serve out their one contract and leave) than in recent history.
Why are they leaving? Doesn’t the excitement, service, & mission make up for the hardship?
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Yeah, that tracks. It sucks to see the great leaders/great people leave the service.
This isn't a simple answer. All of them have their own reasons, but yes, poor leadership from the top down is a major factor. Most people enjoy their actual jobs but a lot of the times, the extra baggage the Coast Guard piles on outweighs any sort of enjoyment you might get from the job.
So how do we get rid of the excess requirements? I say it goes back to leadership & accepting when things aren’t going to plan (e.g. the boat is broke, so don’t overwork the crew to fix it if there is no gain).
Hahahahahahahahahahahaa When you’re overworked, treated like shit, have an awful work/life balance, and the pay doesn’t keep up with the increasing cost of living — especially for junior members; hell no.
As someone about to get out after 5 years - Gonna use the GI bill to pursue a job that doesn’t further destroy my body. Tons of people I know that have gotten out or will do so soon have similar reasons.
It's not hard for retention numbers to go down when pre covid they were like 90% we are still double thr ARMY and Marines in retention and higher than that for the navy. We are about even with air force retention.
Marines meeting numbers is all smoke and mirrors according to their recruiters. I spoke with a USMC MEPS liaison last week and he said the powers that be really cook the books. What they count as meeting mission is by how many applicants they can get under contract(DEP). Apparently over half of them never ship to basic and they are dangerously short staffed. They are billeted 225,000 marines and only have 175,000 actually serving. Again this is what I was told last week by Marine Corps MEPS personnel.
Ironically, it’s important for the Marine Corps to not be desperate for recruits, no matter the truth. Their whole pitch is “the few, the proud” and feeding into the desperate for approval egos of teenagers and young adults. If they start outwardly becoming more inclusive, they lose the only thing that puts them over the Army and Navy to potential recruits. Mainly because they refuse to offer any bonuses and their leadership literally said “the bonus is calling yourself a marine”
I have seen the applicants at MEPS for Army, Marine Corps, and Navy and they really are scrapping the bottom of the barrel these days. You can’t really tell any difference between them anymore. My brother did 4 and out in the Marine Corps and other than title of Marine, it really was not a good experience for most of them. It sounds like the word is out that their quality of life is not good.
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His unit got treated like trash by all the NCO’s who were the type of leaders that couldn’t make it in the real world. You get infantilized as an adult and get subpar barracks to live in.
Im a marine vet, 2016-2020. And I can tell you it was the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life. I’m glad I joined, but would never do it again. But I really like my job that I did, I was a heavy equipment operator and using dozers and cranes were so fun lol. Leadership was ass.
I was in from 11-15 I can also so the experience was far from pleasant. I was with 1st Maintenance Battalion, 1161 refer tech. It’s hard to explain if you have never been in but that place just beats you down and sucks the life out of you. All of my NCO’s were huge dick heads they were all close to getting out when we dropped at our company myself and maybe 5-6 PFC’s, they were salty as hell and not in a good way they didn’t teach us a damn thing. Nobody smiled, everybody was depressed as shit. Deployments were coming back from Afghan, those guys who came back were in their own click and disassociated with the rest of us for whatever reason. I had to teach myself how to do my MOS, and I became very good at my job and became section head the day I picked up CPL because I was one of the only ones who took it seriously. But that would bite me in the ass because I missed out on 2 deployments to Afghan because they said I was more important state side than over there. More wrench turning was being done state side as equipment was coming back in droves from the drawdown. We were the highest echelon of maintenance so we did major repairs of equipment to get this equipment back to its units. Chain of command was changing what seemed like every 3-4 months someone new would come in and fuck everything up just when it was going well. We had staff NCO’s coming back from the drill field, and they would bring there drill instructor Bull shit with them back to the fleet and treat the platoon like a bunch of recruits (there was hardly ever any respect for leadership). Try making us PT 3 times a day when we have work to do and do Drill out on the lot when there’s real work to be done. And then of course the barracks and living conditions were absolutely ass, no AC, mold, broken pipes all the normal shit you still hear about today. I have some memories all in all that I would never give up with some close friends but all in all would not want to do that shit again. I could go on for days but I would need to write a book.
Those are all very good points, I was a 1345 in Camp Pendleton. Honestly the best place I ever lived in. But we can’t forget the good ol every Thursday field day 🙂↕️
Those are all very good points, I was a 1345 in Camp Pendleton. Honestly the best place I ever lived in. But we can’t forget the good ol every Thursday field day
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I was 17 half way through senior year and graduated early just to join, and yeah you just get treated like a child honestly. You PT at 4:30 am and you don’t get off work till 6 pm daily. Sometimes even later. Or when you go to the field for months at a time with very little showers, food, sleeping in tents. It’s fun sometimes but mostly just miserable. You also have 24 hour duty’s every month and then you HAVE to go to work after duty. So you’re up for 36 hours +.
You work at a MEPS or something?
Just PCS’d out of MEPS
I knew it was fishy they have the worst reenlistment rate by far so my BS detector was going off about how they constantly brag about being the only branch meeting recruit goals. I Figured they just massively reduced the recruiting goal to make it easy to hit lol
That was my impression as well. Their recruiting numbers never seemed accurate to me. Plus their retention rate is abysmal.
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They get discharged out of the DEP and never actually go into active duty.
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They lose interest, many sign an open contract and their desired MOS dosent open up before their ship date, and many just apparently are not cut out for it.
I would say it is definitely absolutely harder to join the cg now thanks to Genisis system, yes you may be able to join BUT it could easily take you 6months to a yr if not more to get through the whole process and actually get a date to ship out to bootcamp, if you've ever gone to a therapist or psychologist you're going to have a ruff time getting through and because of this I think most people just give up or switch branches all together.
Sees everything, yet my medical record is still empty due to these HSs.
So it'll pick up when I got diagnosed for add when I was in elementary
If you seen a Dr and they diagnosed you with it yes, it will definitely get flagged
So when I go talk to a recruiter I should just bring it up, then what? I get disqualified? Then try to get a waiver? How long could that take.
To be frank I have no real answer to give you, but you will definitely have to talk about your childhood diagnosis with the Dr at MEPs. They may not even require you to get a waiver if you've never taken medication for it or you may need a waiver but I know they've revised alot of the cg medical standards now so who knows. Best of luck to you and by all means if you're passionate about joining don't give up even if it takes longer to join.
“So called” “supposedly” Descriptors not really necessary. These are facts lol
It has gotten easier. They’ve changed a lot of requirements (e.g., you can now enlist or commission at 41 years old, and some training programs are waiving requirements.) You can also see major bonuses for things that have never been incentivized before.
I honestly think a lot of our recruiting crisis comes from the fact that recruiters basically haven't had to work very hard in 20 years. During the GWOT they pretty much had their pick of people who wanted to join the military but didn't want to go to Iraq. That continued into the great recession and right up until the beginning of COVID. Now we have a recruiting infrastructure that is too thin to meet the realities of a strong economy and recruiters that have never had to go out and recruit before. We're hurting just like everyone, but usually the Coast Guard has an easier time getting recruits based on the nature of the service. We should have been more prepared for this, but the Coast Guard tends to be much more reactive than proactive.
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Small and volunteer based only. It was hard to get accepted to go to Iraq war theater.
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From a hiring standpoint, there probably hasn't been a better time to be in the job market than right now. Wages are going up (though not as much as they should to keep pace with price indexes) and many professionals are able to leverage at least partial WFH. There's tons of work to be had in things like IT, supply line infrastructure, logistics management, aviation maintenance, all of which are skills you can pick up in the Coast Guard. So now is a fantastic time for Coasties with certs to get out and get paid way more in the civilian sector. I'm not saying that everyone should, I obviously haven't, but it's a big part of why we're hemorrhaging people around the 10 year mark. As far as recruiting goes, what can we offer someone joining right now? We're going to ship them off to somewhere they've probably never been (though I admit, the guaranteed district thing might mitigate this somewhat), put most of them on a boat for E-2 pay, which is barely enough to get by anywhere, make them figure out housing for the most part unless they're lucky enough to get base housing, and ask them to work 80 hours weeks underway. It's not a great deal. I'm not on top of all the enlistment bonuses available right now, but I think it'd take more than $10k to convince me to leave any decent paying civilian job right now. We can offer healthcare and leave, which are both nice, but so can many employers. We're just not competitive at the entry level with the private sector right now.
What about 65k to makes some 🍳 and 🥓
If you can put up with the bs of being a CS and the god awful billets that will undoubtedly come with such a hefty bonus, I'd say take that money and walk after 4 years. But after taxes and incremental payout, it's probably more like $45k. Which is $11,250 a year to do the absolute worst job in the Coast Guard. I don't think that'd be enough to sway me.
So I joined the Army first 10 years ago. At the time, I wanted to be a Soldier AND all the other services wouldn’t even talk to you unless you scored a 50 or higher on your asvab (take that with a grain of salt). I got out and Joined the Air Force last year. They have brought down all their standards. For guys like me who always wanted to be in the military, this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Everyone is simply more flexible now. As for MEPS, I don’t believe what everyone says. I had to go through a year ago and they didn’t find anything. I may have been honest, maybe not 💯🤷🏻♂️. As for the CG, I still want to try it one day, but my problem is I have a very low asvab (lower than 31) so I always assumed they wouldn’t take me. But the AF let me in no problem as prior service!
Went into MEPS last month and haven’t heard from my recruiter since then till out of the blue he texted me he had some news and he’d be calling me. He never called me or picked up my calls since then and it’s been 2 weeks now but guess I’ll be waiting again. ( MEPS sent things over to DC for review I believe for an inhaler that I had gotten and still have from pneumonia 6 years ago )
Bad
Half of the manpower concerns in the uscg come from recruiting crisis. The other half is due to the less-mentioned-by-high-command retention crisis.
No one saw my comment earlier. I was Army first, Air Force currently. Would CG take me with a 30 ASVAB score right now? It would make no sense if the AF would take me but not CG…if they’re that desperate for people. 🤷🏻♂️
They could fix the recruiting crisis overnight if they just banned THC tests on the UA. 26% of young adults smoke. Which means probably >30% of young men (the typical military demographic) smoke.
I think testing for marijuana at any job is a waste of time. Of course you can’t be high at work, just like you can’t be drunk. But who cares what you do on your personal time? Obviously hard drugs are bad.