'Service Guarantees Citizenship' - Is there a case for National Service?
Should the UK bring back National Service? A perennial space
filler for bored columnists, people talking in pubs and any many of other
social situations where people can blame the lack of discipline in todays society
on the fact that todays youth have never heard the sweet whispered tones of an angry
Sergeant Major on the parade ground.
The latest contribution to the debate came today in a paper written
by RAND, partly funded by the MOD by Professor Hew Strachan ‘The Utility of
military force and public understanding in todays Britain’. One of the key
findings of the paper was that a discussion on National Service should not be
off the table in perpetuity, but instead considered in an appropriate manner.
The article has been picked up online and in the press. This has quickly led to some suggestions by observers that what
the author was trying to suggest was that we should bring back conscription,
get the youth of today to be forced to serve and that we should see a return to
the ‘good old days’. Cue an avalanche of comments on social media about how
this is either the best idea ever, or a very foolish proposition indeed.
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Do we need national service or more short service commissions? |
This coverage feels slightly unfair as it is perhaps
slightly at odds with the paper as a whole, which is well worth reading. It
explores in some detail the relationship between the British Government, the
military and the British public, and how over time the links and understanding
have diminished with the shrinking of the armed forces and the reduction in
numbers of those who can truly be called veterans.
The paper notes the increased focus on casualties, despite
their being smaller than ever relatively speaking, and the paucity of effective
voices from serving personnel, noting that the current media policy restrictions
in place make it harder now for a serving officer to speak to the press than it
was for a junior officer in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
The paper explores how the public can be both better informed
about the role of the armed forces and national security, and also how to
ensure that Defence has an effective voice in national security construct that
has in its opinion, in recent years, seen MOD influence wane to the detriment,
while centralised policy making bodies like the National Security Council have
gained more power and authority.
This is a subject that could be written about at length, and
one that Humphrey perhaps mildly disagrees with – the NSC is only as powerful
as the strength of its contributing departments and Ministers, and is a collegiate
body to co-ordinate policy making, not replace the role of the MOD as a war
fighting organisation. The same could be said of its criticisms around the restructuring
in the MOD that focused on the creation of the Defence Board – focusing too
much on the presence (or lack of) the Chiefs, and not enough on the other structures
that came into being for operational matters.
One of the most significant interventions though came at the
end where the paper calls for a serious debate with Scandinavian countries to
learn about their experience of bring back some form of limited national service
for youth. It notes that it is poor policy to assume that national service is
off the table forever, but stops short of making any recommendations about it
in detail.
So, the first question is, could a resurrected National Service
for regular personnel be a good model for the armed forces of today? Fully
professional for almost 60 years now, the training structure is built and optimised
to develop people on long term courses, and not rush people through short term
basic training to do a job for 18 months.
The ranks, career structures and ways of working are built around
a force of professional people serving for an open period of time, and on early
training being used to build future success later on. The junior soldiers and
sailors of today will be the future Senior Rates and Commissioned Officers of
15-20 years time.
A National Service model would significantly upset this, by
instead creating a draft of new entrants on a regular basis, requiring constant
training and then only being useful for one, perhaps two postings before
leaving. When you consider the length of training time required, which is
usually at least 6 months for even the most non-technical of trades, you would
be creating a system whereby people would be arriving on their front line unit
just in time to consider demobilisation in due course.
The value to the armed forces would be minimal in the short
term as it would require a constant change of junior people, and a struggle to
find roles for them to fill that were meaningful – if an engineer takes 2-4 years,
or a pilot 5-7 years to train, what use is a national service person who will be
in for less than 2 years in total?
Add this to the burden on the recruiting system and the loss
of staff to training establishments to train this group up and it is easy to
see that from an operational perspective, National Service would place a
significant burden for little operational gain on the military.
This was a conclusion reached in the 1950s when the papers for
the 1957 Defence White Paper considering the issue of conscription identified
that large chunks of Army regular manpower was being taken up permanently
training conscripts, to little operational effect. One of the key rationale for
scrapping conscription was the need to release technically trained people to
industry to help with economic rebuilding, rather than serve in the armed
forces as a whole.
The final challenge with bringing people in for some form of
National Service is to identify how many you’d need and how you could gainfully
use them. National Service worked because the Army was much larger than normal,
and had sufficient units and equipment on strength to post people to.
In the 1950s there were an average of 700 – 800,000 people in the
armed forces as a whole, meaning it was easy to absorb new people into roles
fill by conscripts. As soon as National Service ended, this figure quickly fell
to under 400,000, much closer in size to the armed forces of the pre-war years.
Today the overall regular head count is barely 140,000.
If you want to achieve the effect of raising public
awareness and debate about the military, by using national service as a means
of bringing it into the public consciousness again, you need to do more than recruit
penny packets of people. This in turn means a big growth in the military, but
it is hard to define what operational or security threat necessitates an Army
of 40 50,000 conscripts on top of existing regular service personnel, or what impact
this could have on regular outputs.
Put simply, if you want national service to be meaningful,
you need to grow the regular armed forces to a size where the population feels
it is something they are engaged with, and that it is not a niche commitment forced
on a minority of people unable to escape it.
Brought together this quickly suggests that the argument for
a regular military to be enlarged via the use of conscripts is neither desirable
or feasible. Too short a service means they are of limited military value on
operations, while there is likely to be a significant impact on wider operations
as a result. This is before considering that there are unlikely to be many
roles needed for a two year stint, and the cost is high and benefits are relatively
low.
Normally this is where articles considering the return of some
form of national service end, assuming it doesn’t make sense in the modern
armed forces. However, Humphrey is inclined to disagree slightly – there is, in
theory, potentially a path to doing something, but it requires rethinking the problem.
The issues the paper considers are not ones of a state
needing to grow its armed forces to face an existential threat. This is about
ensuring the public understands the military in an instinctive way, that when they
see people deploying they understand the human emotions and cost involved, and
they engage in the political debate about the role and value of the use of violence
and lethal force in our toolkit of national policy options in a more informed
way.
Part of the problem with national service is that it is too
timebound and too targeted. It also doesn’t fix the problem of longer term
engagement with the system. Telling a group of 18 year olds that they are, whether
they like it or not, to spend a period of time away from home in an alien
society of discipline and rigid adherence to rules, does not necessarily win
much support.
People will quickly work out ways to evade being called up –
from identifying they have recurring bone spurs, to parents who oppose it
somehow getting inhalers prescribed from the doctor for ‘asthma’ (to this day a
major reason for medical rejection in the recruitment process), people will find
a way to not go. The problem then is that you do not improve public connectivity
with the military, you merely force some people to go, not all the people.
Perhaps the solution
is to take a much longer term perspective focusing on two key areas. Firstly,
look at ways to expand the Cadet movement, working carefully with other youth
movement organisations to give children a sense of discipline, excitement and
adventure in carefully controlled circumstances. So many former cadets speak throughout
their lives of the value of the Cadet movement, and praise it for its positive
impact.
If you listen to many tales of national service in the
1950s, much of it seemed to focus on the intense bonding stage of basic training
as people came together as a team. The fundamentals of basic training haven’t
changed in millennia – make a group of strangers become closer than family by
working against the system to succeed. You don’t need two years national service
to teach this – it can be done in 6 weeks in a non military environment, as all
too many shows like Lads Army or ‘SAS Are You Tough Enough’ continue to prove.
But if you were minded to consider this route, using the
Cadet movement to bring the team bonding and discipline stages at an early
stage could be a very positive intervention in an individuals life, helping
bond strong sense of affinity to the military without having to serve as a conscript.
The second challenge to consider is the length of time required
to be credible – two years is simply not enough time to learn your craft. You
then leave and forget much of what you knew, making your recall value in a crisis
of limited use, and over time your links to the system and the military drop
away as you have less and less contact with it. Conscription may be brilliant
to teach 18 year olds about army life – what it doesn’t do is help 45 year old
Dave in the pub remain linked in the same way beyond trying to convince gullible
people he was ‘in the Sassssssss’.
Perhaps one option to look at is to instead shift the debate
into making national service something that is done via the medium of the
Reserve Forces. Keep the regular military as an entirely professional body
formed only of professionals and intended for deployment as the lead element on
any operation.
Instead use the Reserve Forces as a construct to build a
life long link to the military by approaching national service in a very
different way. The precise details would need working out, but if you treated
membership as a much longer term engagement, whereby you served two years of
training over 10-20 years, you could see people join as a conscript, and then
choose to remain in as a volunteer for much longer.
Remove the age limit for call up and instead propose that
people joining do an initial period of time away in a block to do basic
training (much like the Canadian Reserves do for many people over university
summer holidays). Then as they move into real life they retain obligations to
fill a specific role in the reserve, supporting weekends away, exercises or operations
as they see fit.
Those who want to discharge their obligations in the short
term could volunteer for an op tour – 4 Para reputedly did something like this
during the HERRICK years trying to bring people in as students who would join,
train, deploy and return in a very compressed timescale.
By using the Reserve as the model, you are not inflicting
military activity on people in quite the same way. More importantly you raise
the number of people in society who are aware of the armed forces by being a
wider part of them, without necessarily posing the same challenge on the
regular training system.
From a practical perspective this works well, the Reserve
system is optimised for more regular training of new entrants and a constant
churn of new recruits. It can also grow more easily without raising the same difficult
question of ‘what do we need 30 new infantry Bns for’ compared to standing up
part time units that can flex strength when needed.
It would also permit a pool of people able to be drawn on as
required for emergencies and civil crises, such as a COVID-19 style mobilisation,
enabling people to provide additional headcount when required, and stood down
when not needed.
From a wider perspective of thickening the link between the
public and the military, it is also an elegant way of building a lifelong relationship.
Those that serve may do so over many years, retaining ties and links far longer
than a concentrated two year block of regular service.
More importantly, they will know as Reservists that they are
the second line, and the one that will be called on to go should the Regular
Army need them. This is not dissimilar to the Army of the First World War,
where a small professional Army was all but wiped out in months, but the
Reserves held the line long enough to recruit
the citizen army of 1916 that went on to become the finest army that the UK had
ever deployed by 1918.
It is much easier to take a keen interest in the role of the
military and force if you know you are potentially going to deploy aged 30 or
40 than it is if you have long discharged your obligations. In this sense, a
move to using some form of national service via the Reserves would help fill the
notion that the Reservist is ‘twice the citizen’ because they are not only
carrying out their national service, but doing so while also contributing to society
as well.
All of this though needs to be considered as part of a much
wider national conversation around the level of involvement people want to have
with the state. For all the notion that the armed forces have limited impact in
society, the same could be said of the Police, Fire Service or NHS – we rarely
see or experience first hand what these organisations do, beyond having an
instinctive desire to be supportive of them.
If as a nation the choice were taken to endorse some form of
national service it would need to be done in a framework that ensured it was
not just military focused. It would also need to take into account of peoples
circumstances, diversity and gender concerns and ensure that people serving
could do so in a manner that did not hurt their job or real life, but enabled
them to serve as best as they could.
There is also a wider question around whether the British as
a nation need pressed people, or if the spirit of volunteering is strong.
Across society there are untold millions who volunteer and help across so many
different aspects of life that the need for forced service to tell the story of
just one part of society feels potentially heavy handed.
Far better perhaps to focus on ways of messaging effectively,
and having honest debates on policy than it is to rely on forcing 18 year olds
to wear a uniform for a few months to build a sense of national identity.
The last area of concern is that the risk is that we assume
that national service somehow guarantees citizenship. We assume that those who
do their service will emerge as valued members of society, keen to understand the
role of the armed forces and have a proper understanding of what it means to
commit the nation to a path of military action.
The problem though is that these people will not be
reflective of the nation as a whole. If you look at the lengthy list of reasons
why the British Armed Forces medically reject people, you can see that huge swathes
of the youth of today would be rejected out of hand by current medical standards.
The messaging therefore becomes dangerously invidious – ‘those
who served on national service are the only ones who understand Defence and who
are qualified to have a view on the path to war’. To say to someone who is in some
way disabled that their views do not count, and that they will never be
considered proper citizens because they have not served is dangerous.
The risk of reintroducing some form of national service is that
it merely taps into the same pool of people who will always be tapped up to
serve in a crisis or war. It does not extend the bounds of membership of the
armed forces, nor does it bring in new people and talent who may not necessarily
be able to run 2.4kn in a certain time, but who may be able to give so much
more by other means.
When you are an all volunteer service, then the case can be
made for medical standards at point of entry as a way of setting a clear entry standard.
But when we are saying that national service is a way of linking people to their
armed forces and to their government, we have effectively dismissed huge groups
of our population as people that do not matter because our standards have said
they cannot serve.
Until and unless a model is found which mirrors that found
in Heinleins superb work ‘Starship Troopers’ where anyone regardless of ability,
acuity or circumstances can join and serve in some way, then we must ensure
that under no circumstances do we as a nation adopt the mantra that ‘Service Guarantees
Citizenship’?
Heinelen’s “service guarantees citizenship” is an interesting concept - it’s almost Israeli.
ReplyDeleteHere’s a suggestion - make it compulsory, no exceptions. One year when you’re 18 plus another two by the time you’re 40. But the army are just one of a number of agencies which can access the “pool of servers”. The NHS, DFID, DEFRA, the Emergency services can all draw from the well. Everyone does the same 6 week basic, during which your aptitude is assessed, then you’re sent out to your assigned billet. It could be the infantry, it could be handing out food parcels in Darfur.
But the military should use a bit of lateral thinking - there are many unfit IT geeks with cyber warfare skills that could be useful. And getting an 18 year old
Into shape shouldn’t really be that difficult.
Thoughtful argument as ever. And certainly creating a pool of options for "voluntary" service would, I think, be more acceptable than just the military.
ReplyDeleteHowever, please don't forget that the Reserve Forces are more than just the Army Reserve (TA). - "More importantly, they will know as Reservists that they are the second line, and the one that will be called on to go should the Regular Army need them" Having served 37 years in the Royal Naval Reserve (including 13 years full time reserve service, primarily in Northwood) I am possibly over conscious that it is all "Army". The call out of Reservists for COVID-19 is tri-service and a real bone of contention when they are all called "Army". This is in addition to the MR (Maritime Reserves) supplementing the regular forces in the Channel on anti smuggling and in the Gulf (maritime security) to name just a couple of places. So please keep the discussions going, but don't lump us all together!!
The era in which the concept of national service and fighting wars with mass mobilisation of manpower was the basis of an effective army originated in the Napoleonic period, and ended sometime after World War 2. Like all concepts of war it had its time, which starts and ends as technology changes the world. We should no more seek to go back to it than we should seek to train our soldiers to stand shoulder to shoulder and volley fire muzzle loaders at 100 yards.
ReplyDeleteIf you really, really want to have an impact and change on civilian society of the type that tends to be described from national service, the answer is a civilian institution not a military one. If there was a true desire for such a thing it could be easily set-up in a manner similar to a national government run scouts for teenagers, taking them away from home for a term to learn some lessons on life and get some basis fitness, while doing something socially beneficial, and with it compulsory and graded alongside GCSE's or A levels. But that would mean investing time, effort and new money, as opposed to gutting and re-purposing the existing army budget and manpower allocation in the background.
Really interesting thoughts there.
ReplyDeleteIn the outlook of the current crisis it appears obvious that a lot of people have the desire to help others for nothing in return but its own merits. I would wage that a lot would love to feel part of the NHS, or fire service or Police on a regular, voluntary basis. Do something more and bigger than the 9 to 5. Not everybody can get an exciting everyday job, and a lot could do with something more and the extra revenue.
It is possible to volunteer for the Fire Service or Police, but indeed the requirements are the same than in the Army in terms of fitness etc. This is because the notion of service is limited, just like that of reservist. Reading articles on this subject in the Wavell Room, it appears obvious that the debate of specialisation vs generalist is mingled with the professional vs reservist, and weighs heavy on the "national service" notion.
I think a good solution to this would be indeed to simplify this all under a National Service umbrella. Voluntary, encompassing all the services aforementioned and more in the same vein of "service to the nation and multitude". There, people of all backgrounds and fitness could contribute as part of a service. Depending on their level of aptitude, skill, their daily job, they could be more or less involved in different grades.
i.e. someone working daily as a developer but not really interested in going outdoors and travelling could still help the NHS via creating applications etc. as part of their service; surely they do not need to be physically fit for that.
On the other hand someone working as a builder 9 to 5 who wants some extra cash and do something exciting but keep the civilian lifestyle could go on and be more useful as a reservist infantry. It's all in the same place. It's all clear and transparent. People can move throughout their lives, situations etc into different services and apparatus. But they are still committed to "National Service".
And maybe accommodate non-UK citizens like myself who want to contribute to the country they live in?