"National Service Guarantees Citizenship" - The Case For Very Limited Conscription In the UK

 

It is a rather remarkable state of affairs to be in when No10 Downing Street feels the need to confirm that it is not HM Government policy to bring back conscription to the UK. This previously unthinkable interjection occurred after remarks from the Chief of the General Staff (CGS), General Sir Patrick Sanders, on the wider context of how the UK needs to shift its thinking towards the move to conflict. In his view, there is a need for a national debate around how the UK population need to mentally prepare for the changes that society would experience were the Russian threat to become outright war. These remarks have in turn spurred a wider debate about conscription and national service in the UK and what more can be done to boost the mass of the armed forces in peacetime.

The UK has not had any form of conscription since the last national servicemen were called up in 1960. Since that point it has been reliant on an entirely volunteer force made up of three core parts. The regular armed forces, the volunteer reserves (spare time members who serve for varying periods) and the regular reserve. The latter was of key importance during the Cold War as a source of personnel who would retain some equipment, documents and limited contact with the military after leaving in the expectation of being called up in the event of general war. The regular reserve was quietly left to languish after 1991 and to all intents and purposes became little more than a paperwork exercise – there was no practical way it could be used or drawn on for people in an emergency.  It now appears that MOD thinking is shifting towards re-establishing a ‘whole force’ which increases the mass of people who can be drawn on to both augment the regular force and provide mass to regenerate parts of the military in wartime. Such a move would represent a very significant policy shift and provide several challenges to put in place, but it is definitely a move that needs to be considered.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

The first question to ask is ‘what is the MOD requirement likely to be for’? There seems to be a few different requirements here. Firstly providing mass, to have a pool of partially trained people able to serve if called upon, with less training needed. Secondly it is a way to close gaps in the existing regular structure, providing people with some experience already to augment into a unit to help thicken its operational capability. Finally it seems to be about finding specialists with highly niche skills that do not usually exist in the military, but which would be needed in wartime (e.g. specialist engineers, cyber tech sector etc).

There would be a few ways of doing this short of bringing back conscription. The first would be to expand the opportunities for people to conduct condensed training ahead of university then go onto study and be a reservist. There is a long tradition of this in the armed forces, offering ‘gap year commissions’ for people to serve for a year then leave. More recently the Army experimented during OP HERRICK by recruiting people to serve in 4 PARA with the promise of completing training and deploying on an Op Tour as part of an FTRS contract -a move that, anecdotally, was popular to young men seeking a bit of adventure before doing a ‘real job’. Finally the RNR offers a summer commissioning programme for both Ratings and Officers, who do 6-12 weeks full time training at RALEIGH and BRNC before passing out and becoming reservists.

The benefits of programmes like this is that they offer people paid work, a chance to do something very different with their time and some good adventure at a point in their life when they are (relatively) commitment free. The challenge is working out the return of service and benefit to the military. Anecdotally many of the RNR personnel who joined the accelerated training programme have quickly gone onto Regular careers, meaning the Reserves did not benefit in creating a new cadre of personnel. People may also not want to retain links to the military after uni, meaning that for all the good Gap Year commissions offer, they do not bring long term benefits to the Service.

Relying on people with ‘muscle memory’ is of arguably finite benefit. Having done a short amount of reservist training a few years ago doesn’t mean you will be of value to the modern military if called on. If anything there is nothing more dangerous than ex-reservists with ‘bad habits’ going back through training again – far easier to shape and mould recruits from scratch for the sake of a few weeks additional training.

A similar argument applies to the Regular Reserve, where suggestions have been made that service leavers should attend an annual weekend each year to ‘stay in touch’ and pass their fitness test and weapons handling test. Such a move is likely to be challenging to deliver – many people leave the military for good reasons and don’t want to re-engage. Is putting grumpy ex-soldiers in for a weekend of ‘mandatory fun’ involving live ammunition really a sensible idea? This move would require a very fundamental mindset shift on the part of the British public to a point where a ‘whole force’ approach is central to how joiners think – they join because they reasonably expect a long-term commitment to the military as a lifelong calling, not a finite short term job.  The optics of making the Regular Reserve a far more central part of the military experience will need careful handling, lest people perceive it as a ‘Hotel California’ experience that you can join, but never leave.

Perhaps the solution is instead to think far more literally about the concept of ‘whole force’ and be prepared to pay for it? By this the author means that rather than just extend service benefits to regular personnel, look at extending ‘the offer’ more widely to people to give them a reason to stay in, or at least stay in touch. For example, part of the challenge recruiting younger reservists is that ‘real life’ tends to get in the way and after they settle down, get a career, have kids etc many of them have less time and interest in  their military life. To keep people in the system, particularly experienced people with skills that are needed, versus new joiners, then the offer needs to be compelling to make staying for the long term make sense.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

A simple win would be to resort to old-fashioned bribery and financial inducements. For example in the UK right now the average expected student loan debt is around £45,000 per student. This will be subject to a phenomenally complicated repayment schedule, but in broad terms requires paying 9% of your salary each month over a certain earning threshold for many years. This means, for example, that a British Army Captain on appointment is paying £150 a month student repayments (£1824 per year) – it will take over 20 years to repay this debt.

One easy ‘quick win’ could be for the Government to commit to paying off a percentage of your outstanding student loan for each year you serve, reducing the balance and interest payments. For example it could scale up, maybe 5% for the first five years (paying off a quarter of your debt), then increasing to 10% for the next five years (75% paid off) and 12.5% for the next 4 years (100%) paid off. This would mean that the average service person (regular or reserve) would be student debt free if they served for 10-15 years, and would be thousands of pounds better off each year – money that could pay for mortgage. Suddenly staying in, even as a reservist, makes a lot more sense given the financial impact of leaving.

A similar approach could be taken to housing. If a truly whole force perspective was taken, then why not build single living accommodation (SLA) for reservists across the UK? The offer could be simple, for as long as you are an active reservist, you are entitled to live at military rates in SLA, until such point as you buy your own property. Suddenly membership of the reserve becomes incredibly appealing as it means younger people at the start of their careers don’t need to find over £1000 per month to rent a room in London. It would be challenging to administer, but why not give it a go? If you could offer a reservist junior officer 5-10 years of very cheap accommodation and student loan repayment in return for regular commitment and call up when needed, retention would be far less difficult to manage.

This may sound obvious but saying ‘whole force’ means applying benefits to the ‘whole force’ – offering very cheap accommodation to reservists gives you a pool of people to draw on when needed. If you need a reserve force to provide mass when required, you need to set the conditions to retain it, not just rely on the offer of ‘world class leadership training’ (which, to be frank it really isn’t) and some vague promises of AT at some far-off date. Such a move would significantly increase costs, but at a price likely to be far less than expanding salaries or recruiting lots more regular personnel.

There are challenges to delivering this sort of move though. Not least that of medicals – if you want to recruit a force for ‘gap year commissions’ or specialists then you need to massively reduce the medical standards. Setting the bar high for an infanteer who needs to be intensely physical makes a lot of sense, but equally if medical standards stand in the way of good people joining, then they need to be re-evaluated. Thinking ‘whole force’ means accepting that you will bring people into service as a reservist whose medical card may be marked ‘only to be deployed in the event of general war’ and accepting they may struggle with some aspects of training. But equally if that risk in turn gives you access to linguists, software engineers and others with highly sought after skills then its probably a risk worth taking. We need to accept that the vast majority of the military won’t do front line close quarters combat – e.g Admin clerks, engineers and the RAF Regiment (😉), but that they can still do their bit.

If you insist on trying to make every recruit meet high standards you’ll end up running out of people (as happened in WW1 and WW2). Also it makes for an awkward conversation when it comes to what to do about the Regular Reserve when they arrive for call up – the vast majority of them have little chance as 30-50 somethings of meeting the medical standard of an 18 year old. At this point we’re either accepting them on risk or rejecting them outright. If the latter, then what is the point of a regular reserve, and if the former, why not take similar risks on new joiners?

The other question to ask is to generate this ‘whole force’, does the MOD need conscription to find people or can it rely on other approaches? There is a good argument that investment in the Cadet Force movement (one of the finest bodies of volunteers in the UK who have done untold good for their charges) and the University Units would help create a pool of interested applicants for regular and reserve service. Similarly looking to make more intelligent use of service leavers could also keep mass and skills in the system – for example, it could be set up so that every service leaver automatically transferred on leaving to the volunteer reserve, enabling them to keep a link to the military while they set up their new life. This seamless transfer would keep ties to the Service intact, while also keeping them available and credible on their equipment and training.

The risk of skills fade though is high and perhaps not considered enough. There is little point having a reserve to call on if all you get is middle aged veterans who haven’t used the equipment currently in service, are years out of date on tactics, procedures and equipment and who add little of direct value to a modern military. How much use (for example) would an RN regular reservist be if the last missile system they supported was the Sea Dart (which left service over a decade ago). The risk of relying on a regular reserve is that it gives the illusion of mass, but no certainties of skill or credible value to the current armed forces. This is where the volunteer reserve which at least trains regularly would add far more value to the force.

UK MOD © Crown copyright 2023

The wider question is whether this whole force needs some kind of ‘national service’ to find enough people to staff it. This is a complex question to ask because arguably the military don’t hugely need lots of unwilling conscripts who have been forced into a role they don’t want to do for 2 years. They won’t gain enough experience or skills to be useful and many of them will begrudge the experience. Equally though the armed forces do need people with very specialist skills that can take many years to acquire, and where the military struggle to compete with civilian recruiters. Take the Tech sector for instance, where employers are fighting with each other to attract highly skilled talent with very niche skills. Or look at the engineering sector where people with good engineering skills, particularly at supervisory levels, are needed in the military, but prove increasingly hard to retain.

Perhaps paradoxically some kind of national service is needed, but not for conscripts to serve at the start of their career, when they could in theory form some division many years later in a crisis using obsolete weapons and equipment. Instead what is needed is selective conscription of skilled people, at all stages in their career to fix the skills gaps inside the armed forces in peace and war.  A genuinely bold move maybe to offer extremely tempting incentives to volunteer (as discussed above) but for areas where needs are high and people are low, perhaps ‘conscription as a sponsored reservist’ may be considered. In this case, selecting people to be nominated to be a sponsored reservist and attend mandatory training, and then be called on when required for operations. Such a model may work well for the tech sector where the combination of military recruiting requirements almost automatically ruling many applicants out, plus the general sense of many in the sector that the military lifestyle is the last thing they want, means that conscription may be the best answer. Such a move would need significant flexibility on medical standards, and an acceptance that it existed as a last resort, but it could be a way to consider staffing gaps in a crisis where you need people with real world experience to be employed in a military environment.

Any move to do this would be politically deeply contentious in the UK but may prove to be the ultimate fallback for the delivery of a ‘whole force’ that can be called on at short notice. It would send a powerful deterrence message too, that the UK is embarking on deep societal change to respond to the threats posed by Russia and is willing to consider previously unthinkable steps to meet this.

Ultimately delivering the ‘whole force’ will require a lot of money, a lot of political willingness to do things very differently and a military willingness to fundamentally change how they recruit and operate. But it may be a price worth paying to ensure that ‘National Service guarantees citizenship’.