One thought on “How can we rebuild our shrinking armed forces? Simple. Recruit more white men.”

1. As Tim Collins points out simple demographics mean even a “representative” armed forces would be over 80% “white” for a start. Then there is the issue of familiarity, people tend to seek jobs they have some familiarity with due to members of their family or circle working in them. We can see this in Actors, Doctors, Teachers , Trades, Public Services etc. In my county the professional Army had recruited from some quite specific Towns in the ten boroughs over many decades. There being a couple of such in the Borough I worked. I became aware of this particularly during the middle eastern wars where there were a number of servicemen’s funerals in two particular Churches. Each being a significant community event. Delving deeper it was clear there was a tradition of recruitment (and an office in each town) from these places and commonly there were generations of soldiers. In working with some Veterans charities in both it became clear that this recruitment success was not based on ignorance of the dangers because so many in the community were servicemen and there were all sorts of organisations for both the celebration of service and dealing with the results of danger. I make this point because its often said the difficulty in recruitment is because TV has laid bare the risks. In my experience this is not so.

   One “own goal” was of course shutting local recruitment in the towns that had supplied our soldiers for generations. But the RAF scandal (due to a female officer “whistle blowing”) laid bare a number of the practices in recruitment and advancement that both discriminated against white males and severely curtailed the numbers recruited. Two appear to be also implicated in Army recruitment.

   The first is actually illegal but practiced in the RAF despite a number of cases proving it so (e.g. Cheshire Police Force). Simply filtering out white male candidates from the recruitment process despite them actually fulfilling the criteria in recruitment tests. The RAF was caught doing exactly this, and paid out compensation. This is done so that the % of “diversity hires” increases to the desired “target”, by simply reducing the size of the cohort overall. Of course this not only means illegal discrimination against white male candidates it dramatically reduces the number of recruits!

   This first practice followed on from frustration with the previous, and more common practice (because its harder to prove). Whereby if the RAF recruitment cohort looks likely to have “too many white men” they simply abandoned the process for all candidates making a claim they were full or some such. In the hope that the next cohort would produce a better balance. Of course the problems with this are the expense of repeated abandoned recruitments, reputational issues with potential recruits as they get news frequently long processes of recruitment often result in nothing and the obvious problem that you haven’t recruited anybody! Hence the RAF then went onto the illegal discrimination route where they only lost the white candidates but did recruit at least some candidates to fill depleted ranks.

   I highlight these two because there is evidence, in tribunal cases, that both are used by other public services in their desperation to meet diversity “targets”.

   Just as a thought experiment imagine the carnage that would happen in our hospitals if it was decided that nursing should be “representative” of the general population in gender (or indeed in ethnicity). After all it could be more convincingly argued that male patients may prefer males to support them (killing our enemies is not a sensitive service after all, though our enemies might prefer a more female british army). Yet no one seriously thinks of the idiotic targets and resultant recruitment debacles, indeed we happily plunder the developing world for their trained nurses!

   Though nations in extremis may have female volunteers (Ukraine eg.) Or wildly outnumbered may conscript females (Israel for example) as Tim Collins points out there is no evidence of masses of women wanting to soldier, much as the same can be said for Nursing.

   LikeLike

   Reply