It is easy to despair of young people as self-absorbed, isolated from reality and unwilling to take on the hard tasks that previous generations had to face. I have done it myself, and I suspect humans have been doing it since Adam and Eve worried that Cain seemed to lack dedication and work ethic. It is particularly tempting when we look at the armed forces: serving your country is physically and mentally demanding, inherently dangerous and inadequately rewarded. Why would Generation Z, which is so insular and fragile, be induced to join up?
Selling a career in defence as an escape from unemployment is hardly reaching for the stars
We may have underestimated young people. A poll organised by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has revealed that nearly half of the 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed wanted better opportunities for recruitment into the armed forces and the defence sector during their education, a fifth saw defence as a strong and meaningful career and half regarded it as a good career, albeit one with potentially challenging ethical elements.
If this is encouraging, we have Vladimir Putin to thank. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the first major conventional conflict in Europe since 1945, has transformed the way young people see the world and galvanised them into reconsidering the contributions they can and ought to make to it. They also see a career in defence in much broader terms than it has traditionally been presented: it need not simply be square-bashing parades or exhausting assault courses for aspirant combat soldiers, but new and recent graduates are considering careers in specialist disciplines like cyber security, artificial intelligence and space technology.
This was part of the intended appeal of Rishi Sunak’s misconceived national service plans launched in haste a year ago. He talked about 30,000 ‘selective’ placements in the armed forces to attract the ‘best and brightest’ to work in areas like logistics, procurement and civil contingencies as well as cyber security and other tech-heavy specialisms. There was always a sense that Sunak was improvising, fleshing out a sketchy policy as he went, and compulsory military service went against the grain of peacetime soldiering in Britain. If these sectors can attract young men and women voluntarily, so much the better.
There is no doubt that they are desperately needed. Recruitment into all three armed services has been problematic for years, and the government has already announced a new Armed Forces Recruitment Scheme from 2027 which will make the process of joining the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force quicker and easier, and provide a single point of entry. It aims to provide a conditional offer within ten days and confirmation of a starting date for training within 30 days.
The armed forces are already at historically low levels of personnel. Earlier this year, the Army had 67,107 trade-trained regular soldiers, the smallest number since the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, and outflow has consistently exceeded intake for several years. The defence industry, meanwhile, is suffering significant skills shortages in areas like communications, battlefield logistics and space defence, and these shortages are exacerbated by delays in security clearance for new employees.
Ministers are fond of talking tough on recruitment. Alistair Carns, the veterans minister and a highly decorated former Royal Marines colonel, recently said that young unemployed people could ‘get out’ of their current situation by joining the armed forces.
‘You don’t need to march up and down a parade square getting yelled at by a sergeant major. You can do anything from engineering on a fighter jet all the way through to being a chef.’
Selling a career in defence as an escape from unemployment is hardly reaching for the stars. The armed forces need greater mass overall, but they also need to attract the best qualified, most able and most highly motivated young people to very technical roles which will provide the United Kingdom with the advantages it needs over its likely adversaries.
It is easy to misjudge idealistic young people when they regard conflict in purely theoretical terms. Famously, in February 1933, the Oxford Union comfortably passed the motion ‘This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country’, scandalising public opinion. Yet many of the young men who supported that motion did indeed fight six years later when the United Kingdom went to war with Germany. Principles can look very different when the threat is suddenly imminent.
There is much the government needs to do. The overhaul of recruitment must be swift and successful, and the armed forces should be active in targeting and attracting the skills it needs. Ministers must ensure that the defence industry encounters as few obstacles as possible in recruiting and training employees. And there is still work needed to show young people the kinds of careers they can expect and the skills they can acquire. All of this will require expenditure, and that is something in short supply. But it does seem at least as if the audience is more receptive than we have tended to assume, and that should reassure us a little about the future.
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