Praying for Recruits? The brilliant new British Army recruiting campaign

The new British Army recruiting campaign was leaked to the press today, originally having been scheduled to launch later in the week. Reaction to it has varied, from significant support from some, to angry and irate media reactions from former Retired Colonels who were apparently the Supreme Grand Allied Intergalactic Commander in Afghanistan (or some similar title) and other assorted types who loathe it as it makes the Army look 'weak'. 

The challenge for the British Army today is that it is understrength, it has a difficult recruiting message to convey and it needs to show how it can appeal to a cross section of society who have been brought up in a totally different environment to their forbears.  The Army in particular has a struggle to identify the sort of person who would join and what sort of person it is actually looking for, and how it can overcome many of the myths that have built up about it as an organisation.

The traditional recruiting model as alluded to in many accounts of Service life seems to have been built on the idea of a young man entering a run-down shop in a city centre precinct, usually from a challenging past and probably with few qualifications or experience, and then after a selection process is sent off to join the Army, which proceeds to turn their life around.

Modern recruiting poster

Recruiting material has focused on the slightly nebulous concept of ‘be the best’ (without really defining what this means), amidst pictures of tanks and guns and cool equipment, usually with some strap lines about what the opportunities were. At its nadir, it resulted in a campaign about a chap called ‘Frank’ who seemed to spend more time windsurfing, parachuting and skiing than the average participant in a tampon commerical.

The Army has perhaps failed to poorly engage with society and understand what it is that the recruiting pool of today wants, and how to engage with them properly. Inside the system it is easy to understand the offer – good friends, good opportunities and a chance to do some really cool stuff, all wrapped in a comfortably embracing lifestyle and social organisation that will literally provide cradle to grave support to you and your family.

To the recruits of today the Army is a mystery. It is increasingly closed off from society, with fewer and fewer people joining it, and ever fewer veterans actively able to champion the benefits it can offer people. Most families in the 1960s and 70s had plenty of veterans in them from the War or National Service. Today very few do, meaning the ability to talk to a parent or relative about the military is reduced, and perceptions remain firmly stuck in the past.

There are many preconceptions that have sprung up and not been adequately challenged, and now form part of the myth. The sense is of a remote isolated organisation with shouting, silly practises and which demands total obedience, superhuman fitness and a willingness to abandon what you believe in. Many people think that joining will condemn them to be little more than cannon fodder, going to a remote desert country to be killed, or kill innocent people in a war without end. Unlike the RN or the RAF, the Army fundamentally has an image problem that is extremely difficult to shake off.

The challenge is to overcome these myths, to explain to people that joining the Army does not mean you stop having to do things that matter to you, and that actually you can join as a normal human being. The Royal Marines found that one of the most backfiring campaigns in their recent history was the '99% need not apply', primarily because 99% of people did just that. They took one look, decided that the Marines wanted superhuman athletes and didn’t bother going for it.

How it used to be done...

By contrast, one of the best recruiting tools has been the Commando and Sailor School TV shows, which showed a bunch of very normal and decidedly average people turn up and along the way become something better. Many in service personnel loathed these shows, feeling they didn’t do a good job of defining what it meant to be in the system, yet recruiters reported that after each episode there was a huge rise in the number of prospective recruits. People felt that this was something that they could actually do, and they wanted to give it a go.

The youth of today have had a totally different type of upbringing – every child in this country has been born in the 21^st century, to a world of different types of PE, different education and most importantly they have grown up almost surgically fused to their electronic tablets / phones and the internet. They see the world in a completely different manner to adults, and their views on what the Army can offer will have been formed and informed by a totally different set of channels of information, and not some stale careers evening presentation.

There are a lot of myths out there that need to be challenged and countered in order to bring people in to the system – kids who are perhaps not massively fit right now, but have the brains and aptitude to be the brilliant engineers and technicians that the Corp of Signals, RE & REME desperately need. There is an enormous amount of untapped potential on the streets, with many really good recruits out there who never join up – because the Army has failed to communicate that it is somewhere that they would want to be.

Many kids today are perhaps more overtly emotional about their feelings, and better able to share and express when they are upset. That doesn’t make them less able to kill people – it just means that they are less afraid to say when they are not having a great time of it. At the moment the Army is seen by some as an organisation that doesn’t want humans, but emotionally stunted individuals- yet nothing could be further from the truth. Getting the message to potential recruits that the Army wants them to be human is a good one – people don’t want to join an organisation that wants to take away the core essence of who they are as human beings.

There was some discussion about the fact that the Army emphasised that you can still pray in the Army, as if this was a bad thing. It is perhaps ironic that many of those harrumphing loudly about this fairly obvious statement saw it as a bad thing, when the link between faith and firepower is indisputable. The first Article of War in the Royal Navy is about ensuring all personnel have the ability to access Religious Services, while the Chaplaincy continues to provide an essential and often forgotten spiritual component of fighting power.

As the demographics of the UK change, some people are less religious and perhaps pay lip-service to faith. Other areas are increasingly religious, and access to their faith is an important part of their lives. It is entirely appropriate to challenge the misconception that being a soldier means you cannot pray – if that is what is holding people back from joining, then lets do the utmost to kill the myth. The added benefit is that it may encourage more applicants from diverse backgrounds and faiths who want to serve, but who have held back over this misconception.

How did this appeal to people who wanted to kill the Queens enemies?

This campaign does an excellent job of taking this sort of ridiculous myth and challenging it head on in a deliberate attempt to inform and educate their target audience. This isn’t about making retired generals happy, this is about messaging the younger generation of recruitment age and trying to make them think again about a career in the armed forces.

The challenge for the Army though is to not just stop the myths about who they want, but to then evolve as an organisation to be more reflective of the values of the society they recruit from. You can message as much as you like about how you can be a normal person and join, but when you see reports on things like ‘Sandwich gate’ (the Generals memo on how to eat) or ‘Biscuit Gate (the furore over what biscuits and coffee to buy) then this loses a lot of recruits as people look at an organisation seemingly out of step with the rest of 21^st Century Britain. The task is to preserve the best of tradition, showcasing what is done well but also not be afraid to question that which hurts the Army more than it preserves it.

One of the key themes raised by the opponents of the campaign today was built around the idea that people join the armed forces who are good in a fight and able to kill people, and not recruit some wimpy crying praying person who isn’t very fit. Such nonsense is actually dangerous because it is so palpably untrue.

The Army is an organisation where everyone is trained to be proficient with weapons, yet very very few of its people will ever close with the enemy in a section attack. Plenty of people will play some form of enabling role, helping to support the front line and potentially playing a part in delivering kinetic effects on the enemy. But, that does not mean that they need to be good in a fight.

Very few of the recruits joining the Army are likely to have ever been in a fight, and very few of them will ever be in a fight. Making out that the Army is only looking for a bunch of wannabe SAS types able to go and kill people doesn’t expand the pool of recruits, it closes it down. Many people will look at an armed forces career, identify their role and want to be part of something greater. They will think about the moral implications of their career choice, but won’t do much more than that. If the Army were to focus exclusively on looking for a fighter, then the average recruit will probably walk away, feeling it is not for them.

How it used to be done...

 Similarly, there is a danger in making out that only the Army do jobs that involve killing people, and that it should recruit accordingly. There are plenty of civil servants out there who play similar roles in enabling the delivery of violence, be it by sitting in the target board, delivering the intelligence products that enable a strike mission to be facilitated, or by providing scientific support to allow the mission to occur. As an example, Humphrey was far more heavily involved in the ‘kill chain’ of supporting and enabling missions that resulted in peoples deaths as a civil servant than he was as a member of the armed forces.

The Civil service recruits people from a diverse range of backgrounds and emphasises diversity of its people as one of its strengths. Yet there is no concern that the people brought in are somehow less able to do the job, often which has a far more direct impact on the front line of an operation than many parts of the Army. There is a danger in ‘special pleading’ that somehow only a certain person can join the military that reduces the recruiting pool and removes the chance to benefit from the incredible potential talent in our population.

The Army is an amazing organisation in the way that it gives real hope to many who join it without having had the best start in life. But if it continues to try and recruit exclusively from a pool of people best described as ‘angry youth with no qualifications’ then it will struggle to get the right fit of people into its ranks. In an era when even a simple infantryman can have a strategic effect, you need people with a diverse set of skills and experience to draw on to make the best of the circumstances.

Setting up a recruiting campaign that brings in the best of talent, that makes people feel they can join even if they are a little overweight (more pertinent than ever given the increasing age at which you can join), and let them realise they can be something better, without giving up what it is that made them great to begin with is essential. We need an Army that reflects the best of Britain today, not a stereotyped pale, male and stale organisation stuck in a time-warp of outdated practises and values.

Much better...

The one frustration about this situation is that the MOD appears to have refused to engage with the media on it. The campaign was leaked a few  days early, and reportedly the MOD has decided not to respond to any requests for information or interviews on this, fearing the negative coverage that may result.

It is sad to see the MOD clam up and refuse to defend one of the best recruitment campaigns in years. It is well put together, genuinely innovative and has a super message – yet judging by the stony silence emerging from Whitehall, you’d think the MOD  is trying to distance itself from the campaign. Surely, if you’ve done something like this, then you should have the courage of your convictions to defend it, and not pretend it hasn’t been leaked?

This event marks an increasing theme which is the seeming mismatch between the MOD having a really positive, really good story to tell, and then totally refusing to support it. Yes the story leaked (which by itself was a reprehensible thing to do), but the reaction seems to be to stick fingers in ears and go ‘I can’t hear you’ rather than engaging with the media. The outcome is that the story is being covered anyway, but instead of balanced coverage, the MOD is being slated by commentators. The only acknowledgement of the issue seems to have been an interview with Chief of the General Staff, as part of a wider interview on Today.

Instead of getting on the front foot, selling the huge benefits of this campaign, the story is instead being dominated by retired generals and Colonels with hugely outdated views that arguably are not representative of the Army today trying their best to undermine it. The irony of people who purport to want the Army to succeed slagging it off as being ‘weak’ and doing their best to kill a good recruiting campaign that would solve problems caused, in part, on their watch is not lost on Humphrey.

This story is good news, it is a bold move by the Army to really change the way it gets the best talent into the system. It presents an enormous chance to refresh their message and get a new generation of talented youth in to the armed forces, and represents a really innovative means of the Army fighting in the battle for talent. This move should be applauded and not derided.