Taking the Shilling - Thoughts on Infantry Recruitment and Retention

 

The British Army is apparently under strength, and no less than 31 of the Army’s 32 Infantry Battalions do not have enough soldiers to ensure 100% ability to deploy. This is the summary of a story from the DailyMail today, which puts forward some grim numbers.

It notes that there should be 14,984 infantry soldiers, but in reality, only 11,301 are ‘fully deployable’ and ready for operations. In total there are 13,346 fully trained infantry soldiers right now, a deficit of some 1600 troops. Questions are being asked as to why this shortfall exists, with the blame being laid at the door of Capita (from a recruiting perspective) as well as accommodation shortfalls and other issues.

Is this a big issue, or is it something that is perhaps overstated, or even not that big a deal?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

There seem to be two different sets of numbers to worry about here. The first number is the total number of ‘fully deployable’ soldiers. It is simply not realistic to expect that 100% of the infantry will, every day, be fully deployable and medically fit for operations.

Like any large work force, people’s health varies, and their personal circumstances change. There will be days when troops call in sick, or they could be isolating with COVID symptoms, or they could be off on long term absence for a variety of reasons. As with every large work force in the world, there will never be a day when the Infantry is 100% ‘fully deployable’.

Every Army in the world has the same problem though. There is always going to be a throughput of soldiers who will not be able to go out for duty as a result of injuries they sustain. In a physically arduous role like that of an infanteer, injuries are more common due to the nature of the job.

Additionally, there may be troops away on courses, detachments, short term training and so on, the likes of which are vital to be done, but do mean that they couldn’t easily return in a hurry to their unit.

Its important to realise then that this does not mean the Army is somehow at risk of being unable to deliver on its operational duties. In the event that a surge deployment was required which called for extra troops to be available, there are a variety of long tried and tested ways of getting troop numbers up.

This could include adding reinforcement companies in, drawn from another unit, to bolster the understrength one. Or individual replacements in key roles could be sent through – for example a loan officer from another unit.

Also, in the event of a looming operation, many of those currently unable to deploy may find they recover, and their fitness status changes. Never underestimate the ability of a possible deployment to improve morale and aid physical recovery.

In summary then, the number of fully deployable troops is a bit of a red herring. It’s a figure that will change daily, and has little real bearing on the ability of the army to deploy and fight. Even on operations it will be less than 100% as troops are injured, fall ill or are away on R&R – in other words, its not something that needs to be worried about too much.

The wider context, the fact that the Infantry is roughly 10% understrength is also interesting, but for different reasons. Historically the Infantry has always struggled to recruit and remain at strength over many years – the fact that our infantry units are understrength is not in itself news, although there are good questions to ask about why this is the case.

As an external observer, there seem to be several factors that have to be considered here. Firstly, the nature of the job itself. Being an infanteer is a great job for a young person who is physically fit, but it does require you to want to spend a great deal of your working life outdoors, or in a variety of places where people are actively doing their best to kill you.

Trying to find the right combination of people with physical fitness, the intelligence to work with some pretty complex equipment, and a willingness to put up with a hard job is hard. It is sometimes easy to get people to join up and go ‘this is the qualifications you’ll get, or future prospects for a career’ (e.g. the more technical corps), but perhaps harder to do the same for an Infantry job.

Making the case to someone that they want to join up, live in a ditch and run around the woods while being shot at is hard – it isn’t for everyone and it requires a very particular person to want to do this for a living.

Even so, while certain long retired and out of touch personalities sought to use the Mail article to blame Capita, the fact is that recruiting is in a very healthy shape. The recruiting campaign ‘This is belonging’ which has been going on for several years now, and is run by the Army and Capita, is making an excellent effort to bring new recruits in to the system.

Although it had its teething problems, right now the system seems to be working well, and has really done a good job at appealing to the modern target audience, who are very different from their forbears.

There is a wider question to be asked about recruiting, particularly into the infantry, and how the Army can make use of the potential pool of interested recruits. One subject that is of interest to Humphrey is the way that the recruiting conversation has changed in recent years, away from careers centres and glossy brochures, into a much more web-based approach.

New recruits use the internet more to seek out information about their employer, trying to engage and get views and information, and also work out what will help their chances with passing tests. There is an entire industry dedicated to providing job search forums where people share views and knowledge to help each other out.

For example the Student Room forum has a Faststream thread that maintains a running spreadsheet on passmarks for different assessment centres, to help work out what the level of a pass is needed, and interview tips and practise shared (the flip side to this of course is that the more intelligence you share with others, the more you level the playing field and reduce your own chances is a separate debate).

In the armed forces, there has been a rise in sites offering help and advice, and its worth thinking about how the military life plays out in a way that tempts recruits in. Looking at sites like PPRUNE there is a long running thread on people seeking advice on officer selection or pilot aptitude tests. Does knowing this give the military a better applicant, or does it shape and coach those who want to pass in a way that means they are not honestly portraying themselves?

In turn its worth asking how sites that offer a view on careers in the military come across to people who could influence recruits. In the past when there was a much wider pool of veterans to speak to, people could ask their parents, relatives or friends what a career in the Army was like. They’d get views, but in turn they’d also be able to hear firsthand and make a value judgement.

Today its much harder to get that engagement, with a smaller veteran community, and a far smaller military footprint. Persuading people to join is at times difficult and needs good presence. If a potential recruit or their parent googles around to find information, the risk is that they come across unbalanced material -for example sites like ARRSE, which used to be a very cutting-edge military discussion site, yet today feels like it has sadly become an outpost of the BNP, and they may draw some very negative conclusions about the Army and its people.

There needs to be a good way of working out how to use both official and formal channels and wider unofficial but helpful channels to engage with potential recruits in a way that provides honest answers, but also doesn’t coach/overly prepare people to pass in a set way.

The worry is perhaps that if people with some talent turn up to an AOSB and perform in the way that people on the net said ‘this will work’ then they’re not only going to fail, as they’re clearly not performing like their true selves, but more widely they will deny the army a possible recruit.

There is perhaps an interesting debate to be had around the online informal recruiting space, between those sites which provide helpful and credible advice without coaching (a very good example of which is this site for the Parachute Regiment, which strikes that balance nicely), and those which could actively harm potential recruits’ chances.

There is perhaps a lot more that could be done around looking at how to get a serving presence online in sites like this, not in a formal recruiting capacity, but in the context of a ‘I’m serving in the British Army, what would you like to know’ – in other words reaching out beyond the formal recruiting channels and helping, but not overly coaching.

It is an interesting conundrum – how in a digital age do you ensure that the word is spread about Army recruitment, but that its done in a way which doesn’t stop the Army from meeting its goals and recruiting the people it wants to get in the right way?  

Last year alone, the British Army recruited 96% of its target, roughly 9600 soldiers, which given the challenges of COVID is a particularly laudable achievement. Given this, what is it that could drive the gap in numbers between planned and actual figures?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Looking at UK defence statistics, 15% of the Army leavers in 2020 did so due to the end of their contract, while 63% left for other reasons. A further look at the Continuous Attitude Survey suggests reasons for leaving were varied and took into account a wide range of issues including job satisfaction, promotion prospects, operational deployments and the desire to restore balance in family life.

One of the challenges for the infantry is the loss of many operations where they can actually go and do their job for real. After the TELIC / HERRICK years, where there was a significant amount of combat, and the chance for junior soldiers to deploy and go ‘downrange’, the current deployments plot for the infantry look pretty sparse.

While being deployed in Estonia and the Baltics plays a vital political deterrent role, it is also a job bereft of much glory, and comes with the added grim knowledge that your role in life is to act as a temporary roadblock for the Russian army.

More widely outside of small low intensity but risky deployments to Mali, Iraq and Afghanistan, there are no real opportunities for the infantry right now to go and do the job that they joined up for. Which in turn makes retention hard – there is a limit to the number of times you can motivate people that they should work long days and weekends to keep Salisbury Plain safe from enemy forces.

While the lack of deployment opportunities is in some ways a good thing politically, it does make it hard to retain people who are perhaps getting bored. A junior soldier today, joining up and hearing tales of ‘when I was on HERRICK’ and seeing SNCOs and senior officers with medal racks will wonder when their own opportunity to earn a gong will come.

There is a rise in the number of ‘naked soldiers’ those who have yet to earn a medal for their service, and who perhaps ask why they are bothering. When you couple this frustration with other factors, such as the fact that service accommodation remains, in some cases, shockingly bad, and the at times infantalising approach to life taken by the Army to its people, and you can begin to understand why the urge to leave grows.

What is of interest here then is trying to work out how to keep numbers up and retain people who may feel that service life no longer suits them. There is no easy answer here, and what works for one group will upset another – those with long memories will recall the moaning that used to come about before ‘Pay As You Dine’ by people charged for food that they never ate. Now that PAYD has come in,people moan for different reasons – both groups are right, but equally the Army has tried to listen to both and ended up making neither happy.

If you sit down with a group of soldiers and ask them ‘what would make you stay’ then the answers will vary. The problem is that trying to retain a young 20 something infantry private is very different to the drivers for a late 30 something SNCO with a family and worries about the future.

Brought together then, its hard to work out whether the Army can ever hope to get 100% strength in the infantry. Does it need to overrecruit early, bringing more people in than it needs, in order to cover off the later departures, or will the reasons for leaving remain timeless, and even if headcount increases, will the deeper and very personal frustrations with the role prevent it from reaching this target?

This is a fascinating subject to look at, and a lot more can be written on it. But the key message to draw is that no infantry unit, anywhere in the world, is ever 100% fully deployable, and that the challenges facing the Army today, are no different to the challenges it has faced for decades.

This does not mean that the UK is at risk, or that we are less safe. But there is a fascinating conversation to be had around how the Army reaches out, recruits and works out how to retain infantry in sufficient numbers as the contingency for the day when we do need brave men and women to willingly charge towards gunfire, in order to close with, and kill, the enemy.