In just a few weeks, the Marine Corps hit its 2026 fiscal year retention goals, “earlier than ever before,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith announced.
The Marine Corps’ leaders shared the news in a new video featuring Smith and Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Carlos A. Ruiz. The announcement video was produced in October, showing how quickly the Marine Corps did hit their goal, but the video was not released until this past week due to the lengthy government shutdown.
“While a few MOSs remain open, the overwhelming majority of our retention goals have already been achieved,” Smith said, referring to military occupational specialties.
The Marine Corps also quickly hit its retention goals in the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, but this is the quickest it has achieved that milestone. The Marine Corps has been successful in recent months with keeping its ranks full. In September the service announced it had hit its recruiting goal for the 2025 fiscal year, beating its 30,535 target by one Marine; the military branches all reached their recruitment numbers.
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Maybe it was pride and solidarity as the Marines celebrated 250 years with several events in the fall that helped with retention. Maybe it was a set of new policies the Marine Corps put out. Earlier this year the service laid out opportunities for lateral moves to different military occupational specialties, with many of them being highly technical. Those included mechanic jobs to service MQ-9 Reaper drones, data systems technician jobs and roles in air defense systems.
Ruiz also noted that there are still lateral move opportunities for Marines who have not yet reenlisted but want to, to fill “critical need” MOSs. The Marine Corps in general has been working to fill several technical and highly specialized roles, even offering large bonuses for new recruits with electronic or cyber expertise.
The Marines call themselves a “middleweight force,” which in part helps keep its ranks full and in some cases leads to the service offering an early retirement for some troops ahead of the end of their contract.
In a new MARADMIN released this month, after already meeting its goal, the Marine Corps said that any new retention requests received starting Dec. 1 will be “processed and adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.” Additionally, any Marine looking to make one of those lateral career moves will see their request examined, with approval dependent in part on school availability to learn the new MOS.
