Mooring lines lay on the deck as sailors man the rails of the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson while departing Pyeongtaek, South Korea, March 7, 2025. (Hannah Fry/U.S. Navy)
A new Navy program is giving non-deployable sailors a second chance to serve by placing them in shore-based assignments instead of forcing early separation.
The voluntary program, called EMPLOY, was launched by Navy Personnel Command and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. It allows sailors sidelined by medical conditions, such as injury or illness, to fill billets that would otherwise remain vacant.
“EMPLOY sailors … will not compete with Sailors rotating from sea to shore,” Rear Adm. Wayne Baze, head of the Personnel Command, said in a June 9 administrative message. “EMPLOY helps to retain our talent, improving their quality of service and increasing fleet readiness.”
The Navy says more than 7,800 sailors are now in a non-deployable status, including those in limited duty or under review by the Disability Evaluation System. Many of them are still capable of contributing to stateside roles.
“EMPLOY benefits both the sailor and the Navy,” Lt. Cmdr. Stuart Phillips, a Navy spokesman, told Stars and Stripes by email Tuesday. “We invest a significant amount of time and money in training and developing sailors, and sometimes, they find themselves in a temporary non-deployable status due to injury or a serious illness.”
The program matches sailors to jobs that align with their training and experience — even as they recover, Phillips said. For example, a sailor recovering from a musculoskeletal injury or under monitoring after cancer may still be eligible to work in a shore command.
“To be clear we aren’t lowering or changing standards,” he wrote. “We’re finding ways to keep our Sailors contributing to the mission from ashore while giving them time to recover from illnesses and injuries until they can return to sea duty.”
Sailors must volunteer and meet several requirements, including medical provider endorsement, a medical evaluation board and command approval, Phillips said. The Personnel Command then reviews candidates and assigns them to available billets.
If approved, sailors are reevaluated periodically, and no later than 15 months before their next rotation, according to the Navy administrative message. Based on their condition, they may return to sea duty, train for a new role, or be separated from active service.
Roughly 850 sailors have been considered for EMPLOY so far, and more than 300 have been retained, Phillips said.
“As stewards of taxpayer resources, when we retain these sailors who the Navy has invested so much time and money into training, we do right by our sailors, and we do right by the American taxpayers,” he wrote.
