A citizens’ army is in the news once again after a major defence review unveiled by the prime minister.
As part of a pledge to make the UK “battle-ready”, Keir Starmer has ordered up to a dozen new attack submarines, £15bn worth of nuclear warheads and thousands of new long-range weapons. The report made 62 recommendations, including creating a British Army that is “ten times more lethal” with more personnel, long-range missiles and land-drone swarms.
Welcome: the MOD’s planned military service “gap years”.... aka Gen Z conscription. And it’s here that we run into a problem.
It’s not the first time we’ve heard the idea of national service mooted this year – in January, General Sir Patrick Sanders said that the British army must expand, following years of personnel and financial cuts. But the government would have a tough task forcing people to the parade ground, especially in light of the current recruitment struggles.
Seeking to roll back on the cuts that have been forced on the army, with regular forces at 100,000 in 2010 shrinking to fewer than 76,000 today, Sanders was on record as saying recent cuts [from the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review and the 2021 Defence in a Competitive Age report] were a “mistake”.
Sanders ambitiously urged the UK to raise the army to 120,000, in preparedness for the unexpected.
So, why do we need more troops? The British army being overstretched may come as a surprise to irregular military listeners, after the close of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. But contributions to the UN mission in Cyprus, Nato mission in Kosovo and commitments in the Falklands, Belize, Germany and Canada continue.
Enter President Putin: instability in Ukraine means the Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP) deployments in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland bear an unpredictability. These activities require resources. British army retention is struggling. Sanders’s – and now Starmer’s – solution? An expanded “citizen army”.
It might work if it is voluntary, but conscription would face enormous challenges unless the UK faced the most existential threat.
The UK recruits soldiers who are aged between 16 and 35 and you must be at least 18 to serve in combat. In Ukraine, where the conscription age is set at 25, there has been strong resistance against the push for younger conscripts. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is estimated currently to be 43.
An expanded recruitment pool from a wide cross-section of society might include qualified engineers, tradespeople or IT professionals for intelligence and communications, areas where the army has struggled to recruit recently. It is a mistake to imagine that combat soldiers can be spawned overnight: modern soldiering is more complex than ever.
It is an open secret that we have been training Ukrainians in the UK on short, sharp, bootcamp-style training programmes. British conscripts could expect something similar. Eighteen-hour days, combat camping, building up to section and platoon attacks, ready to be inserted into units led by experienced soldiers incentivised or pulled back into service.
Mobile phones are an unhelpful aspect of military campaigns. In initial training, mobiles are locked in a box for most of the week, except for a few hours, to remove distractions. In combat, modern targeting systems have made phones a beacon to enemy missile attacks.
Recruitment preclusions already exist for people with certain medical histories; asthma sufferers are currently unsuitable for service, as are eating disorder sufferers, people diagnosed on the autistic spectrum and those with serious muscular skeletal injuries, which would restrict suitability.
Infanteers (combat soldiers) need to run an 8.7 “beep test”. There has been an ongoing relaxation in some areas recently because what it really comes down to is: how many people you need, where you need them and for what.
National service has long held appeal, especially within the Gen Z 16-24 age group. Bringing together people from every corner and community in our society could build bridges at a time when they are sorely needed. The Swiss and Norwegians both have compulsory military registration for all 18-year-old men. There are things we admire in both societies.
This form of national service could bring a sense of social cohesion and mixing that we need. Any effort to create a citizen army should be rooted in volunteering, creating broad, cross-societal engagement with tangible benefits and a fixed commitment.
But compulsory immediate conscription would be a disaster in the UK: the protests, civil disobedience and helicopter parenting would be abrupt unless the threat was broadly accepted.
Be warned, for this is what it would entail. Phones in the box. Stand by your beds. Pile your plate high at breakfast with whatever food is on offer, you will need the energy for 18 hours a day of basic training...
Mike Crofts is a former British army captain who served two tours of Afghanistan. He is now the CEO of human performance company Leading Purpose and the founder of criminal justice charity 3Pillars Project
