You Can't Empty the Probation Office to Fill the Army

By Lynette Nusbacher

I used to tell my students at Sandhurst that in years gone by the Army would run a broom through the gutters of one bank of the Mersey to create the King's Regiment, and down the other bank of the Mersey to create the Cheshires. The sweepings of Britain's slums frightened the Duke of Wellington, and they frightened the French more. Now that ministers are reducing the Army below the size where it can maintain its shape, some voices are calling for us to run that broom through our prisons and probation offices to fill up the TA.

There is not a regular officer in the British Army who genuinely believes that reserve forces will be able to maintain operational capability in the face of regular force cuts. The leaders of our Army wait for a full Treasury to fund what they call 'contingency': the uncertain world of post-Afghanistan soldiering. The best they can hope for in the mean time is that a spectacular failure attributable to poorly-prepared Territorials or reservists will force a Chancellor to properly resource the Armed Forces.

The regular officers are right. Every regular captain who serves as adjutant to a Territorial unit will tell you that until reservists are incentivised to train regularly, and until their employers are better protected when they are mobilised, Britain's volunteer reserves will produce excellent specialist brains but few usable bayonets.

The 'cyber soldiers' are a case in point. The corporate cyber experts from the M4 corridor, many of them ex-regulars, show exceptional esprit-de-corps and volunteer again and again for deployment to Afghanistan and other, even more complex, environments. They are few, but they are brilliant. They represent the future of the Territorial Army.

Territorial infantry soldiers, on the other hand, are no good to the regulars unless they are broken up and sent to regular companies to be completely retrained as though they were new recruits.

The Americans have wired their armed forces so that major deployments require a large-scale call-up of reserves. They did so, carefully and deliberately, over the period between Vietnam and the first Gulf War. It took about ten years. The generals spent lavishly to achieve this, specifically to ensure that they would never again be sent without popular support to conduct operations overseas. Our armed forces don't think nearly so strategically, and the current exercise is all about ministers robbing the regular Peter to pay the reservist Paul.

In the past day or so the suggestion has been put about that the Army should reduce its standards to permit more people and a more diverse group of people to be recruited. This idea seems to work with the ministerial narrative that the Army will be able to maintain operational capability with reserve forces. It certainly contributes to the Regular Army's hopes for that future spectacular failure. It is, however, a terrible suggestion.

The British Army accepts soldiers from deprived backgrounds with astonishingly low levels of education and literacy. When I was an assistant recruiting officer in the Canadian Army we demanded that reservist infantry have at least the equivalent of good GCSEs. In Britain we have a cadre of education officers who bring young soldiers up to that level if they need the help.

Old soldiers will stoutly maintain that you don't need a high level of literacy to patrol the clay-walled compounds of Helmand Province, and perhaps they're right. We are ready to bring some very rough customers in the doors of our training regiments, and we can turn them into some very tough soldiers.

Yet the next war we fight won't be the last war. All our brightest officers can tell you that we now fight 'war among the people', and they can tell you about understanding 'human terrain'. In fact, one of the great achievements of our Army's leaders in recent years is putting 'understand' high up on our list of things soldiers and officers need to do. Making up numbers with the intellectually inferior and the morally corrupt is no way to ensure that the people who carry weapons for Queen and Country do so with understanding.

We have an army which has been built for years around the idea of operating with trusted allies, which in practice means the Americans first, Commonwealth second, and NATO third. The American Armed Forces tell their domestic audience that American soldiers must always be under American command, but privately they say that Brits and Canadians are fine too. That willingness to work with us is predicated on the professionalism of our army, and the ethos of our soldiers and our officers.

When we operate with my old comrades the Canadians, or with our good friends the Americans, we have to keep an eye on certain standards. The British Army has in American circles a reputation for being a bit thick, but loyal. When standing beside American generals with PhDs under their reflective belts, our commanders often do look nice but dim. Never mind the generals, when standing beside American majors with master's degrees funded by Uncle Sam, our majors, excellent men and women with skills honed through long operational experience, risk looking second-rate.

American soldiers, also often recruited from underprivileged backgrounds with poor levels of literacy, sometimes holding 'moral waivers' because of past convictions for serious crime; serve short terms in the forces but go on to higher education with their veterans' benefits and continue as educated, skilled low-ranking reservists. It's not our model, and following them on their path to the 'moral waiver' would get us a very different reservist. We would not need to invest in educating our school-leaving territorial soldiers, and when we were through with them we would send into the community ill-equipped to succeed.

Is education the making of a soldier? No, but it makes a difference, especially in the complex world of modern warfare.

What is the making of the modern soldier? Values, ethics and ethos.

I have a laminated card which tells the values and standards of the British soldier. It came from a box of these cards which was handed to every recruit under training at the Army Training Regiment in Pirbright. Old soldiers will tell you that kids who grew up with 'me, me, me' are hard to imbue with the idea of selfless devotion to one's comrades. Sometimes it means they have to carry these cards in their pockets to remind them. How much more difficult would it be if we force ourselves to accept a lower standard of recruit? How much harder will it be for the trainers and educators to create an ethos which can hold hard, violent men and women together, and make them a force their fellow-citizens can be proud of?

Take away our Army's ethos, and it is nothing more than an armed rabble, worthy of nobody's respect.

Dr Lynette Nusbacher was Senior Lecturer in War Studies at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Devil's Advocate to the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Head of the Strategic Horizons Unit in the Cabinet Office. She is a partner in the strategy think tank Nusbacher Associates.

lynette@nusbacher.com

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