Answering the Call - Commonwealth Recruitment into the British Armed Forces

The MOD has announced significant changes to the way that recruitment for Commonwealth citizens will work in the Armed Forces (full story HERE). Under the new system recruits from Commonwealth nations will not have to have any residency requirements to be able to join – compared to five years under the old system.

Currently there are around 4500 service members from the Commonwealth in the British Armed Forces (and a further approximately 4000 Gurkhas, due to grow by around 25% in coming years) out of a total headcount of 140,000 personnel – so approximately 6% of the regular forces are from overseas.

On the one hand this announcement should be rightly welcomed, it represents a continued statement about the valued place that our friends from the Commonwealth play in the security of the UK. On the other hand, Humphrey feels that in some ways this announcement represents a wider policy failure – the purpose of this short blog is to try and explain his conflicted views here.

From the outset it is essential to be clear. Commonwealth service personnel play a vital role in the British Armed Forces – there is no doubt that allowing them to join is the right thing to do.  Having worked with many Commonwealth nationals in the military, nationality comes second to the practical point of getting the job done. Also never forget the sheer bravery displayed by many – such as Beharry Johnson VC on operations across the globe.

The recruitment by Commonwealth nations of other nationalities is also not a uniquely British trend either. For instance there is a well trodden path of British personnel joining the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand armed forces after their career is up in the UK. For many years Navy News ran adverts each month lauding the virtues of serving in New

Zealand, whilst Australia offers a very generous package for former UK personnel.

More widely the French maintain their much vaunted Foreign Legion, while the Spanish Foreign Legion admits recruits from former Spanish Colonies (and to be fair has some extremely eclectic taste in uniforms). The US armed forces also recruit a wide diaspora of people – Humphrey recalls meeting a young soldier from Manchester who was forming part of the US Army M1A1 tank display crew at an arms show in Paris once – he’d decided to join the US and not the British armed forces for various obscure reasons.

There is definitely a long trend of service across borders that proves that this can, and does work extremely well. Without doubt we should be grateful that people from the Commonwealth are prepared to join the UK armed forces and put their lives on the line for this country, and welcome them, and their families without hesitation or equivocation in to the UK.

Is this a Policy Failure?

But, Humphrey feels more widely conflicted in feeling that somehow, somewhere, there has been a policy failure. What he cannot understand is how the situation has arisen whereby for decades now the UK has been institutionally unable to recruit and retain sufficient numbers of UK nationals to join up and serve-  thus forcing this reliance on good people from abroad to volunteer to serve.

To his mind the issues of concern are built around understand what is going wrong that means that insufficient numbers of UK recruits are making it into the system in the first place, and why aren’t they staying for the long haul?

There is no easy answer to this question, but it seems to boil down to a couple of distinct themes.

Firstly, the recruiting system we have seems to be set at a bar which rejects people too quickly for often spurious reasons. In 2017 over 100,000 people applied to join the armed forces, and only 7441 were successful. While all recruiting pipelines will never recruit 100% of applicants, to lose 93% of those who applied does seem to be a little excessive.

A starting point must be asking whether the system is too quick to reject people on medical reasons, or more widely if society has become so inured to ‘going to the doctor to get a diagnosis’ that medical records are more complex now, and more likely to raise issues needing judgement and examination, and possible rejection. You only have to look on sites like ARRSE or Rum Ration to see tales from potential recruits rejected due to being overly honest on the form, and admitting to a minor incident years previously of something that never happened again, only to see a long investigation and medical rejection.

The next question to ask is why are UK adults (not just youth) consistently not signing up in the numbers required to meet the needs of the military? Part of this seems to be about understanding how the current generation view the armed forces – unlike recruits from the 50s to the 90s who grew up on stories of the war and what Dad / Grandad did in it, this current generation has less direct access to the armed forces lifestyle, experience and culture.

As the military becomes smaller and more isolated from society, it is harder to explain what it does and how it does it. The veteran diaspora grows smaller with every passing year (sadly we are realistically only a few years from losing the last of the WW2 generation), and with it the shared experience of the military world.

Trying to get people interested in the armed forces as a career is doubly difficult when they have grown up on a diet of video footage of Afghanistan and Iraq, politically contentious wars supported by a steady stream of stories about PTSD and amputees. It is right to raise the profile of these cases, but is this focus on the human cost on operations detracting many from seeking to join?

It feels as if we are reaching a point where the system is struggling to work out how to adapt to the next generation of recruits and give them an offer and sufficiently speedy path into service. The modern generation are used to fast results and instant access to information – to encounter the slow process bound recruiting process which can take months to go from application to decision is off-putting and risks building in time where other job offers can emerge that are more tempting. The system has to be faster at getting people onto its books and into training.

The system also has to be able to work out how it generates the long term interest in selling the benefits of a military career to an audience to whom it is alien, and whose families have no frame of reference to offer advice. Unlike 30 years ago when most people knew someone who’d done time in the Army, there is no similar network now. Trying to work out how to reach out in a way that doesn’t patronise or overwhelm with jargon is going to be challenging.

Last week saw an amazing tweet from the Army Foundation College about a young soldier whose mother talked proudly of how he’d gone from failing at school to making something of his life thanks to the Army. There must be many more stories like this out there, but trying to find these people, get into the estates or towns where they live and encourage them to join is a challenge. How many angry, forgotten and abandoned young men and women could turn their lives around if they thought the Army would give them a second chance and a well paid job?

The ‘this is belonging’ campaign does a great job of setting out what it means to be a soldier, but if the target audience don’t see the adverts, or think the Army is like the Police in combat gear and thus the enemy, not a potential friend, it is hard to reach them.

At the other end of the spectrum getting into schools to sell the benefits of an Armed Forces career is also challenging – there doesn’t seem to be enough resource invested in the careers structure to build the sort of relationships needed with Careers Services and Teachers to help nudge good people into a better future.

There is a wider policy piece about the approach of the military and its lifestyle and whether this offer is compelling to younger people today. When you see things like ‘Sandwich Gate’ or images of people in black tie dress around the mess silver for dinner, that doesn’t always land well with a generation used to a totally different approach to life. The risk must be that there is a growing disconnect between what the Armed Forces (particularly certain Army Regiments) want their offer to be, and what the recruiting market wants it to be.

The modern potential recruit likely looks askance when offered the chance to join an organisation that insists on them wearing a three piece suit to eat a barely average meal in a sub-par travel-lodge facility and drink poor beer, albeit at subsidised prices, while being glared at for reading an email on their phone in the bar, probably from the Mess Committee complaining at the lack of Junior Officers using the facilities.

From a policy perspective, the questions have to be long term – why is the armed forces ‘offer’ not landing’, ‘are the values & standards we hold ourselves to the same as our recruiting pool and if not, how do we change’ and finally ‘are we letting a strict adherence to process get in the way of good recruits getting into the system’. This of course is not even beginning to address the wider issue of retention, which is also a deeply challenging subject worthy of an article in its own right!

There are wider questions to be asked about the long-term viability of recruiting from the Commonwealth – the challenge of sorting security clearances (particularly for employing staff in certain discrete roles), and the issue of what happens when a nation falls out with the Commonwealth or bars its nationals from joining (think South Africa and mercenaries).

There are many issues that need to be considered, and its not an easy thing to answer. But the time is probably right to ask why the UK armed forces have continually failed to bring in enough recruits of their own accord, why the young are not joining and ask hard questions about what needs to change in order to change this around.

Humphrey does not remotely subscribe to the idea that millennials cannot fight or that they lack the notion of Service. One only has to look at the performance on operations in recent years to realise the calibre of people is as good as ever – the will to serve, to lead and to close with and kill the enemy exists undiminished.

But, the challenge is that it seems to be getting ever harder to get these people into the system and serving in the first place – this is what needs to be fixed. To do this requires more than a short term change to residency requirements and a lot of long hard thinking about what needs to be done differently to ensure the British Armed Forces continue to attract the very best, both from our own islands and beyond, to serve the UK and Commonwealth.