NAVAL AIR FACILITY MISAWA, Japan — The Navy’s Perform to Serve program likely will grow to include second-term sailors by the end of this summer, officials with the Navy Personnel Command’s Center for Career Development told sailors here last week.

“It’s coming for them,” said Command Master Chief Bill Andersen, senior enlisted adviser for operations at the career center. “We’re going to move them around.”

If they’re not performing, “they’ll leave as well,” he said.

Perform to Serve, initially rolled out in February 2003 for certain overmanned career ratings, is one of several tools the Navy is using to reshape and streamline its force, Andersen said.

“If we hire you to fly a plane and you can’t, you go home … If we hire you to drive ships and you can’t, you go home,” he said to NAF Misawa senior enlisted sailors.

Perform to Serve now includes all first-term sailors, regardless of their rate, requiring any sailor with less than six years of service to apply for re-enlistment. “Not only do we look at fully manned and overmanned, but we also look at undermanned ratings now,” Andersen said, “so if you’re not performing in any particular group, you’ll be asked to separate.”

But, he added, the program is not a separation tool. “The separation portion is there to say, ‘Hey, we mean it. We expect you to make some decisions, we expect you to perform … If you don’t, we’ll find someone else.’”

Currently, about 81 percent of sailors who apply for re-enlistment under Perform to Serve stay in their rating, Andersen said. About 15 percent convert into a new rating and are retrained, while about 3.8 percent separate.

Competition is keener for overmanned rates, but Navy Capt. Raoul Rall, Center for Career Development operations officer, said sailors aren’t forced to convert to a different rating. However, if they’re not performing well, they’re at risk of being separated, he said.

Andersen said sailors may ask for up to three conversion ratings. His advice: “The smartest thing to say is, ‘Not only do I want to stay in my job, but if that doesn’t work, here are three jobs I’m interested in.”

Andersen and Rall briefed sailors at Misawa and on Okinawa on career development issues, policies and initiatives last week. The team, which also includes senior enlisted detailers from Navy Personnel Command in Millington, Tenn., is scheduled to visit Sasebo Naval Base this week. A trip is planned this fall for Yokosuka Naval Base and Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, and the team also will make the rounds at Chinhae, Pusan and Seoul in South Korea.

Rall said the goal is to talk to sailors about what they need to know to be successful.

“We see about 50,000 sailors a year,” he said. “It’s a little bit of mentoring, a little bit of counseling, and it’s a little bit of information.”

The Navy, he added, “wants to have the right sailor at the right time with the right training.”

Andersen said the Navy also will look to reshape its force in the future by recruiting for specific jobs instead of aiming for an end-strength number.

There will be a push, he said, to recruit more female sailors by allowing them to fill rates traditionally reserved for males. Also, the Navy is looking at ways to retain more female sailors with seniority to fill empty female racks at sea, he said.

Junior female sailors on ships need mentorship “and they need that from female sailors with experience,” Andersen said.

To encourage more female sailors to re-enlist, the Navy is considering how to make it easier for them to balance their career with starting a family. One idea being tossed about is a one-year sabbatical, Andersen said. Someone with active-duty experience in the Reserve could fill in for the sailor for a year, “and we put you in the reserves for a year. At the end of that, you come back in the same place you were,” he said.