Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle engages with sailors and Marines at Houston’s City Hall during Fleet Week Houston on April 15, 2026. The inaugural Fleet Week Houston brought multiple U.S. Navy vessels and more than 1,000 sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen to the city for a series of events and experiences. (John Bellino/U.S. Navy)
HOUSTON — The Navy’s top officer has a problem — and he’s pretty happy about it.
The service is seeing record retention and recruiting levels for a second year in a row, a “dream problem” for a chief of naval operations, said Adm. Daryl Caudle, who stepped into the role in August after leading Fleet Forces Command.
Nearly all ships are filled at about 90% or higher, and nearly as many sailors are matched to their specific job on the ship, leaving him the breathing room to tackle other challenges within the service, Caudle said during an interview April 15 as the Navy hosted its first Fleet Week in a Texas city.
Caudle has leaned into keeping and incentivizing the best, most technically skilled sailors to remain in the service and is making sure their experience with the military is “world-class.”
Now eight months into the job, Caudle has prioritized work-life balance through a “Sailors First” initiative. It is focused on life challenges that can be exacerbated by the nature of military service, such as access to affordable child care, a variety of healthy meals, reliable internet access and smartphone-compatible administrative systems and housing that is not on the ship where a sailor is assigned to duty.
That work begins with bringing in clear-eyed new recruits who know what the Navy is about, he said. Recruiting is about 1 to 2 percentage points ahead of where it was this time last year, which saw the service enlist 44,096 future sailors — a number not seen since the early 2000s.
“Our process illuminates [Navy service]. They like going to sea. They like going to different countries. They like the combat arms part of the job. I think we have a very appealing mission set for people who want to do that for a living,” Caudle said.
The fact that about 90% of all enlistees make it to their first afloat unit shows that recruiters are finding the right folks for the job, and the service’s prep course and initial trainings are effective, he said.
Rear Adm. John Hewitt, the commander of Navy Region Southeast, speaks with 98-year-old retired Lt. Cmdr. Paul Martin at the Lone Star Flight Museum during Fleet Week Houston on April 18, 2026. (Jimmy Ivy III/U.S. Navy)
One of the first things Caudle focused on for those new, younger sailors is making sure they have a place to live off the ship when not underway. Dubbed “No Sailor Lives Afloat,” the initiative has moved roughly 5,900 sailors into barracks instead of berthing, according to Navy Installation Command.
To do this, the service authorized more senior sailors to receive a housing allowance to live off base and free up space in the barracks, Caudle said.
The idea that the sailors deployed for more than 10 months now on the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford — a post-Vietnam War record for a carrier — could come home and keep living on the ship “is just not right,” he said. It is small and restrictive and does not give them the reprieve from work needed to disconnect, socialize and learn independence.
“I want them to grow up a bit and be on their own, and I think they have the opportunity to do that more if they’re not on the ship,” he said.
Meeting that goal in some locations has proved more difficult because of low supplies of affordable housing near the base, such as in San Diego and Rota, Spain, and also across Japan, Caudle said.
Once sailors are settled on a base, Caudle has reimagined galley facilities to be more like those feeding athletes on college campuses across the United States. Unlike the Army, which is outsourcing a similar effort through private contracts, the Navy is sending its cooks to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
There, Navy cooks are training with professional chefs on a 35-day menu with different stations, said Rear Adm. John Hewitt, commander of Navy Region Southeast. The first transformed galley will open in his region next month at Naval Construction Battalion Center Gulfport, in Mississippi.
“I saw some pictures of them being trained by the chef, and the dishes they are putting out, it was like we’ve never seen in our galleys before,” said Hewitt, who oversees 18 bases. He answered questions during a tour of the littoral combat ship the USS St. Louis in Houston.
The move to fresh, made-to-order meals is answering a call from sailors for more healthy options and more variety, Hewitt said.
The USS Kearsarge gym received all new equipment as part of a renovation of the ship completed in late 2025. It was on display April 15, 2026, as part of Fleet Week Houston. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
Another quick fix that began in 2024 was for all gyms to stay open 24/7. It’s done, Hewitt said.
“You have to register, but once you’re registered, anytime, you can walk into any fitness center and gym. That’s huge,” he said. “That was a huge demand signal from the fleet, from our sailors, and they love it.”
An ongoing initiative to get free wireless internet to all bases is at about 85%, and Caudle said he’s now working toward smartphone-based applications for paperwork related to moving, pay and searching for a new assignment — not just a PDF that people fill out just as they would on paper.
“We’re really trying to flush all that out and give people a good experience where they can do most transactions they need to be successful via their phone. It’s just the way we do business today,” Caudle said.
He did acknowledge that there are facilities on Navy bases that have fallen into disrepair because of an underinvestment on infrastructure — something that plagued all the services.
For years, the Navy funded its facility needs at about 60% to 70%, leaving some of them “brittle.” That includes hangars, roads, piers and service infrastructure for air, oil, water and power.
“You can do that for a short period of time and then prioritize and hide the fact that you’re not getting all the resources you need to sustain your facilities, but eventually it catches up, and we’re there,” Caudle said.
“I don’t want our sailors to be in a classroom with a bucket beside them because the roof leaks,” he said. “I want them to feel like they’re in a world-class environment.”
Hewitt said turning the tide in the southeast region is going to take time and the order of repair prioritizes the requirements of the fleet.
“We have to be in sync with the fleet. You can think of wharfs, piers, dry docks, airfields, unaccompanied housing, all of those things are really, really high on the list,” he said.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle provides remarks at Houston’s City Hall during Fleet Week Houston on April 15, 2026. (John Bellino/U.S. Navy)
Much of that underfunding occurred as the U.S. put funds toward decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have pledged not to drag the military into more yearslong combat operations, the Navy is now the lead service in a more than six-week-long campaign against Iran.
Caudle said he still believes leaders at the Pentagon and White House are dedicated to full funding of infrastructure, but it would be “naive” not to think the previous cycle couldn’t reoccur.
“As administrations come and go, Congress has to really homogenize the actual need for us is to have consistent funding in the Armed Forces and not let any administration make mistakes to not keep it properly funded going forward,” Caudle said.
Though people get distracted and zero in on the technology and weapons it takes to win wars, Caudle said it is his job to watch out for the sailors behind each piece of equipment.
“It’s important for us to remember that,” he said. “You build a bunch of ships, but you don’t have all the resources to man, train and equip all of that, you hollow yourself out.”
