story-type: ForcesWatch comment

The politics of the military recruitment crisis

Using military data and recent research on the experience of young recruits, we outline some of the entrenched problems faced by service personnel. We argue that current opportunities for change must not be overshadowed by operational and political demands for more recruits – or even national service.

Read a PDF version of this report

Summary

Fuelled by war-footing narratives, the long-standing recruitment shortfall in the armed forces has developed into a ‘recruitment crisis’ in the media. Changing attitudes of young people towards enlistment, and conscription, often get blame for the failure of the military to meet recruiting targets. However, the figures show that large number of applications to join up continue to be made but, for various reasons, these have not translated into new recruits. This suggests that, in constantly pushing for more recruits, the armed forces are actually demanding more suitable recruits, rejecting in one way or another the majority of those that do apply.

Ministry of Defence statistics show that the high net outflow of the last few years – which has caused such alarm – is now decreasing. It is likely to be partly a consequence of the high net intake in the previous period, which was a response to very prominent recruitment marketing in the years leading up to and during the Covid pandemic.… Read more

A back door to Parliament for defence contractors: mapping arms company influence in APPGs

Since its inception in 2010 the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces has been one of the least transparent of APPGs. Here, we lay out what we know – about its activities, sponsorship by the arms industry and the criticism it has received in the past. While the Armed Forces APPG is yet to reform since the general election we look at how defence companies continue to be involved in other parliamentary groups.

Formed after the general election that gave us the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Armed Forces was, according to its long-time chairman James Gray, the largest APPG in Parliament during its early years, with a membership of more than 300 MPs and Peers. It was formed by the merger of previously separate APPGs for the Royal Navy, Army, RAF and Royal Marines, entities we know little about due to the lack of historical records on APPGs.

Whilst Gray was among the Conservatives MPs who lost their seat in July 2024, his legacy – which also includes over a decade at the helm of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust – it is clear his influence was huge, even if, as we outline, much of the APPG’s work remains shrouded in secrecy.… Read more

Complicit partners? The UK-Israel Roadmap

UK-Israel relations are correctly under intense scrutiny as the assault on Gaza, the equally indiscriminate killing in Lebanon, and opportunistic attacks on Syria continue. So far, the new Labour government seems as committed to maintaining normal relations with Israel as its Conservative predecessor, making only the smallest of concessions to horrified public opinion.

In this context, it is vital to examine the cooperation agreements and partnerships that the UK has signed with Israel. Although developed and signed under the previous government, these agreements provide some of the context and rationale for the UK’s continuing support for Israel’s actions in spite of the overwhelming evidence of international war crimes and genocide against Palestinians, most recently compiled in last week’s report by Amnesty International.

Beyond its announcement a year and a half ago it has received little media or parliamentary attention despite the current political situation, yet its implications for the entwining of UK and Israeli interests, and the politics that go with them, are profound.

The 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel Bilateral Relations, signed in 2023, brings together both pre-existing and new initiatives under a single ‘strategic partnership’, and provides an ideological framework for it. The Roadmap is the culmination of years of diplomat engagement between Britain, the former colonial power in the region, and Israel, which serves as a key node of US/Western power in the area.… Read more

International antimilitarism

We’ve finished Series 5 of the Warrior Nation podcast. It’s hard to believe what started in a back shed at our offices has covered such a range of topics. From public memorialising of the military to the martial nature of policing, from drone warfare through to the role of art in resisting militarism.

The latest 6-episode series covers international antimilitarism and we wanted to take the chance to reflect on what we learned from our guests this time round.

Episode one – Demilitarising Education

Back in February we spoke to Demilitarise Education’s Jinsella Kennaway. For a number of years now dED have been working in universities to counter the presence of arms firms in education. We had a great discussion about strategy, tactics, efficiency and organizing; one which anybody could stand to learn from.

“We have to understand that hope is our greatest superpower. We have to reclaim the power of education so it can advance the world into a sustainable utopia that we all want to live in.”

You can listen to EP1 here.

Episode two – militarism & patriarchy in Israel

In March we spoke to Or, an activist and objector from the Israeli organisation New Profile.… Read more

100 days of Starmer: no substantial change to UK militarism

The Prime Minister’s first hundred days in power have been dissected by his supporters and political opponents alike. The timeworn metrics will include polls and analsysis of manifesto promises. With our critical military perspective, we look at the Starmer government’s actions in relation to Britain’s defence commitments and foreign policy.

It is worth starting with reference to our recent blog titled ‘Honourable and Gallant Members’: Patrician militarism prevails under Labour’. It describes Starmer’s carefully-posed speech at the National Arboretum a month before the general election. In this flag-draped setting he delivered a speech on foreign policy flanked by Labour candidates with military backgrounds. This was the culmination of a promotional strategy which stretches back through Starmer’s time in opposition. He and his team have always positioned themselves hawkishly, in close proximity to the flag and to the military.

The veterans present endorsed Starmer enthusiastically, suggesting the leader had restored their trust by breaking with the foreign policy of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Though as we pointed out, on many major military matters the 2019 manifesto differed very little from the 2024 manifesto.

It is also worth remembering that, as a leading cabinet minister in 2019 Starmer himself signed up to a number of commitments with anti-militarist credentials, such as:

  • respect international law and avoid needless military interventions
  • introduce a War Powers Act to ensure that no prime minister can bypass parliament to commit to conventional military action
  • conduct an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy

While it is too early to assess the likelihood of progress on these, recent developments are indicative of the Starmer government’s general approach to defence and foreign policy and the country’s relations with, and impact on, the rest of the world.… Read more

Dark Matter: The UK military ventures into space 

In August this year, the Ministry of Defence launched its first ever spy satellite into orbit from Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lift-off in California. Named after the Greek goddess of fortune, ‘Tyche’ is an earth-imaging satellite capable of capturing objects larger than one metre from its position in lower-earth orbit (roughly 5,000km into space).

Tyche will provide the UK armed forces with high-speed ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) data, and is the first of the MoD’s ISTARI project, which intends to launch an entire constellation of ISR satellites over the next ten years. Tyche’s inauguration was celebrated as a symbolic moment for British defence, marking ‘the end of the beginning for the UK space command’.

Galactic Britain

Although the UK’s space programme started in 1952, it remained a relatively small player in the domain compared to other states like the US, China, Russia, India, France and Japan. However, in the past five years, British defence in space has taken off exponentially.

‘As our adversaries advance their space capabilities, it is vital we invest in space to ensure we maintain a battle-winning advantage across this fast-evolving operational domain.’

The Conservative party turned its attention to space during the 2019 election campaign after NATO declared space, alongside cyber, an official ‘operational domain’.… Read more

‘Honourable and Gallant Members’: Patrician militarism prevails under Labour

The 2024 general election was a flat affair. A historically low turnout returned a blandly technocratic centrist government. For those with a serious interest in foreign policy and military matters there was very little to choose between the big parties.

Even before the election began, the Tories seemed to know the game was up. The sense of inevitability was compounded by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s stumbling on defence-nostalgia, a mainstay of British politics, at the very outset. First, over a widely derided pledge to ‘bring back national service’. Second, over his questionable commitment to the 80th D-Day commemorations which fell in the same period. The ‘party of defence’, whose invocations of patriotism, war and empire are so reflexive and have often wrong-footed Labour in the past, never seemed to get out of the blocks.

On election night, a number of so-called ‘big beasts’ of the Conservative party fell, as well as many more minor players. Labour, the party of Iraq and Afghanistan, returned to power as most expected. As press coverage pointed out, the high turn-over of seats presented something of an optical illusion given the low turn-out figures. In many constituencies the difference between the Labour and Tory vote seemed to align closely with the figures for defections to the hard-right anti-immigration party Reform UK.… Read more

GE24: Militarist manifestos?

It’s the first election since Labour’s landslide defeat in 2019, when there was a rare chance of a candidate with pretty solidly anti-militarist credentials forming a government. It was not to be, and it is arguable that foreign policy positions were a major cause of the defeat of the Corbyn-era Labour party. Certainly the then-party leadership’s commitments on Israel/Palestine, for example, rankled with mainstream MPs and the press. There had even been suggestions that a Corbyn win could lead to a military revolt, given the threat he was seen to pose to defence interests. Despite the alarm, Corbyn’s personal opposition to Trident or NATO, to pick just two issues, were not expressed in the last Labour manifesto.

Since then Labour has consciously re-converted towards militarism under Keir Starmer. And this election takes place against a background of political argument over troop numbers, defence budgets and ‘pre-war’ rhetoric, the intensification of a so-called ‘New Cold War’ and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We are also nine months into a US and UK-backed Israeli assault on Gaza which has at times severely wrong-footed mainstream political parties. Foreign policy, which conventional wisdom tells us rarely makes much difference to domestic elections, has shaped the tone, and may even affect the outcomes, of GE24.… Read more

Start Thinking Gamer: the British military’s new recruitment frontier

The history of video-games is, unfortunately, one that involves the military. Arguably the first digital video-game, SpaceWar!, was created by Pentagon-funded grad students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1960s. As the name suggests, the game itself was based on militarism and wedded to the twin concepts of nuclear conflict and space exploration prevalent at the time. The first known video-game tournament – a precursor to the now burgeoning eSports industry – saw competitors battle it out on SpaceWar! at the Pentagon funded Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in Calfornia. Military funding essentially meant Stanford University was one of only a handful of places globally with the hardware to host such an event.

The industry spawned by SpaceWar! has created a multitude of titles focused on warfare, from Atari’s Space Invaders and BattleZone, to Konami’s Contra, EA’s Desert Strike and, of course, the immensely popular Call of Duty franchise. To name but a few! And lest we forget the Pentagon’s foray into game development with uber-recruitment tool America’s Army, a free to play first-person shooter released in 2002 that was available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation during its 20-year lifespan. The US military was also a key funder of many of the technologies that led to the advancement of videogames throughout the Cold War period, including the Internet and 3-D navigation in virtual environments.… Read more

The Troubles so-called: Britain’s War in Ireland

A picture of MPs sitting in the Houses of Parliement where they are currently debating legislation on The Troubles.

In a recent conversation with one of the UK’s leading national security journalists, this writer heard a quote about Ireland which stuck with me: “what the English can never remember, the Irish can never forget”.

That conversation was with Ian Cobain, author of books on torture, state secrecy and, most recently, the period referred to as The Troubles. Ian is one of three guests on our latest Warrior Nation mini-series focusing on Ireland. The other interviews – one with a former occupying soldier turned peace activist and one with a Derry resident who experienced the brutality of the Troubles first-hand – came as the new bill on Northern Ireland legacy issues was passing through Parliament into law.

Its central aim appears to be to inoculate the British state against accountability, including through legal action. And the ideology which has driven it is one of British exceptionalism, militarism, coloniality and no small amount of anti-Irish feeling. You can read our full analysis of the legacy bill here.

Down the memory hole

The bill passed into law on 18 September 2023. All House of Lords amendment were rejected. This was despite almost universal opposition from human rights and victims’ group. In fact, as former soldier Lee Lavis pointed out in our first podcast episode, the bill did something quite unusual in Ireland, achieving the rarely achievable by uniting all sides in the conflict against it.… Read more