Sorry, what? Smells like juvenoia. Every generation on average seems to see them selves as better than the last. Statistics often seem to show this as the opposite.
Assuming you’re a CFAV, it amazes me you have this attitude. What I see it the young people I get to work with in cadets often goes to show they are in-fact better, not worse. Same goes for the school kids I get to see when doing DofE stuff outside of cadets.
Stop reading Facebook/X/Tory news etc and get out there and see what people are doing. It’s not all knives gangs and boats like it’s made out to be.
I actually found myself wondering if should it happen, they might take the Ukrainian approach and start with the 30 - 45 y/o cadre first - try to keep the youths out of it.
Would it actually happen though? Probably not, not a vote winner.
The discussion about conscription is always an emotive one but probably needs to be overlayed with an “art of the possible” overlay.
Each service will have its own requirements which will be constrained by the both the complexity of the technology and the number of platforms in use. While it was usually said that the RAF and RN manned equipment and the Army equipped men (apologies for non -neutral terms) that balance is always changing with Army systems becoming more complex.
In the short term (probably out to 2 years) both the RAF and the RN will have to fight with what they have. The numbers of personnel that the RN can put to sea will remain limited as will the number of airframes that can be launched by the RAF. As far as my limited experience of the Army is concerned, it remains most effective when it has the correct balance of teeth and support arms (while you could put all Army personnel into the trenches immediately, they would only be effective for a very limited time as they would soon have insufficient logistic and repair enablers). At the latest HoC All-Party Defence Committee the statement was made that the military was ready for war now but could not sustain the effort for more than a few months.
While traditional conscription will give you cannon fodder you get very little else. If we want to build resilience for the future the Haythornthwaite Report of last year suggests a number of was of managing complex career patterns (mixed military and civilian careers) which, with a bit of thought could carry with them reserve commitments and build a meaningful tech savvy reserve. Given we are a part of the NATO alliance and others on the continent of Europe already have well established National Service systems (or are resurrecting relatively recently closed ones) and can generate basically trained infantry soldiers, perhaps we need to concentrate on the more tech heavy elements?
As for the comments concerning the current generation of young people (whatever letter they currently are), I am reminded of a comment by a CPO on a RN ship in San Carlos water about 18 years olds manning hastily mounted GPMG’s when he noted that despite concerns about how robust they would be in combat they proved to be just as resilient as their predecessors. I suspect that would be just as true today.
If we take the New Model Army of the 17th Century Civil Wars as being our first modern army, then Britain has had universal military conscription for barely thirty years out of 280 (Our oldest Household Division regiments were formed then), all of it during the 20th Century.
Those were the periods 1917-20, 1938-47, and 1947-63. Universal military service is not the norm in modern British military history. It can only be introduced by having a large enough armed forces in the first place, which includes many training establishments to house, equip and train the intakes of recruits. The last time we had that was pre-Options for Change, when each Regiment or Corps in the British Army had its own training depot, and RAF Swinderby could accept intakes of 150-250 recruits every week.
Underlying the demilitarisation of the UK that we have seen since then is our historic defence policy and the anti-militarism of the British people, who have always opposed conscription for a mass army (that attitude also has its roots in the Civil Wars). The British way of warfare is to commit land forces as sparingly as possible in a large war with allies, and use our naval forces to control shipping routes.
Generally we get other nations to commit mass armies to do the bulk of the land fighting, and only raise and deploy our own mass armies during long wars when we really have to, such as the Napoleonic War, World Wars and the Cold War. In the last period, we also needed large forces to enable the British Empire to be wound down and got rid of. We could do this because we have the seas and Europe as buffer zones.
So conscription and expansion of our armed forces on the Russo-Ukranian scale isn’t possible from the resources we have available, and proposals for it would face massive public and political resistance.
not that i am arguing against your comments, or that of the MOD, but the “experts” said the same about Ukraine, on both sides of the Russia vs West side of the line.
Everyone is surprised how well Ukraine held the Russian forces off, and they very quickly had a conscription that appeared to work in the short term, with the likes of the UK helping them in the long-term.
this needs to be remembered. no one is going to War in the near future with the UK, it will be with NATO and although ~150K personnel split three ways doesn’t sound a lot to defend Britain’s ~70million population, we’re not on our own.
How many troops are their in NATO and how does that number compare to Russian and Chinese numbers?
The Chinese PLA couldn’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag: they have zero operational experience, other than beating up unarmed Tibetan and Uighur people, and a bit of UN forces work in Africa. They have neither the ability or will to project air power to protect their own shipping in the Red Sea - routine air policing of restless natives the US and UK do without breaking sweat - or the available landing vessels to invade Taiwan.
The PLA won victories when deploying en masse across a border close to home during the Korean War, but didn’t perform anywhere near as well fighting the Vietnamese in the late 1970s. Since WWII, that’s been the sum of their military experience. There’s the usual inefficiency, corruption and cronyism we can expect within large, underused and flabby public organisations to add to the mix.
Of course, I wouldn’t try to invade China; they’d soon get their act together to fight very well, like the Russian Army did in short order in 2023.
The Russians are the main threat to European civilisation, having returned to their Mongol Horde roots: a people whose whole existence is not to spread a superior culture but to plunder, lay waste and oppress those they perceive to be weaker than them.
And just those a little older who showed bravery and fortitude in Iraq and Afghanistan to name but two conflicts in the recent past, fought by British forces.
The figures for NATO minus the USA are the ones I’d like to see. The USA is also the leading military power of the alliance opposing China - our other superpower enemy. There is also the sum of China + Russia + anyone else of the ‘Global South Awkward Club who don’t like the West.’
Therefore we Europeans must have the forces, resources and national will to defend ourselves against Russia on our border without needing or expecting the US to do nearly all of our fighting for us. Even now the US Navy is protecting shipping in the Red Sea, a trade route of limited benefit to the USA.
The Americans have their own long southern border which is under threat from uncontrolled immigration and heavily armed drug smugglers. Defending that properly in future will take immense amounts of federal money. Just building a wall is not enough: an obstacle is useless unless covered by firepower and observation. I believe the Israelis found that out the hard way recently. The DDR set the Gold Standard for border control, though.
These posts from cadets show us why humanity can never end war as a resolution to disputes between nations: war is a fun and challenging way to prove one’s manhood. The political class rely on this masculine trait to fill their armies with willing volunteers, and send them off to fight other willing volunteers.
War is actually fun to many young men who are serving as soldiers, until it reaches the point where it isn’t. However, all the horror stories about war which are preached to young men to make them more pacifistic and co-operative have precisely the opposite effect: like habitual criminals, another cohort of society almost exclusively male, the young soldier thinks the law applies to other people, and he won’t get caught up with the consequences. He has added justification in his belief that his militarism is more chivalrous that that of his enemy, so he has a duty as well as the desire to fight.
One of the reasons cited to explain militarism in young men is that those who volunteer for service are doing so because of patriotism or belief in a worthy cause, but you can take it from me that those reasons are subordinate to the two I outlined above. The latter two are there to some degree, but in armed forces which are dominated and commanded by professional soldiers, they are never discussed at any level. Any discussions between soldiers about military matters tend to be about weapons, equipment and tactics, rather than the reasons why they are on campaign at all.
Serving in the military on operations is indeed fun and challenging: I served in Northern Ireland and in the 1991 Gulf War within my first few years, and those two tours were the best times I had then.
Of course, unlike civilians in both those theatres of conflict, I wasn’t suffering the misery of terrorism or the hardships of a genocidal occupation. Unlike other soldiers who were victims of those wars, I wasn’t either maimed for life by an IED or burnt alive by a fuel-air bomb. These were all things happening to other people whilst I was in those theatres.
Humans have developed but not evolved from our primitive ancestors. Right now we seem to be regressing, despite all of our education and experience, all the more tragic because we have less need to resolve problems using violence as a first resort than ever before.
The DDR’s government would have said the Berlin Wall and Inner German Border fence were there to control the mass immigration of victims of the Capitalist West from entering the Socialist Paradise of East Germany. The guard towers were set back from the barriers and looked westwards, so it could have been used either way. Indeed, the DDR was arguably the least worst of the Warsaw Pact nations, and its citizens had a better standard of living than most of the world’s population today. One had to deal with industrial pollution from burning brown coal, and the Stasi, but one can’t have everything!
Indeed, those of us growing up in the pre-1980s Britain of heavy industry would have sucked in our share of pollution without noticing it at all, and the Stasi only went after those who were dumb enough to have something to hide, anyway… not much different to most countries in that respect, really. We could ask Julian Assange about the limits of a liberal country’s tolerance for a politically-motivated crime.
The DDR actually was democratic: each sector of the economy (industrial workers, farmers, the education sector etc) had their share of representatives within the government, and the workers within each sector voted in their representatives. That is a similar form of democracy to the Corporate State proposed in the 1930s as an alternative to the UK’s version of democracy by Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (who served as a cavalryman and then the Royal Flying Corps in WWI).
However, in the Fascist Corporate State, a form of State Controlled Capitalism, one has a higher limit of personal wealth one can amass compared to a socialist state: China now has many billionaires whose businesses are directed and kept in check by the CCP, and that’s what they call Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Some people are more equal than others.
The weak point of all authoritarian methods of government is that they rapidly become subsumed by the infallible leader’s personal prejudices, something avoided in our liberal western democracies, where we have an effective vote and voice that our elected representatives listen to, understand and immediately respond to in the professional, mature and wise manner to which we have long been accustomed.
…just like another national organisation we can think of.
