Skip to content

More than a bit odd

The Armed Forces must stamp out its “laddish” nature, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned, as he revealed he found the military’s culture “really worrying”….

The actual point of all that training being to inculcate a laddish, pack, nature.

People don’t charge machine gun nests for Queen, country, democracy nor equality of any type. They do it because not to do so is to let down the lads. Thus the aim and intent of training is to get people into being part of that cohesive group of lass – of whatever race, gender etc – who will charge machine gun nests for each other.

Pity the CDS has forgotten this…..

35 thoughts on “More than a bit odd”

  1. He hasn’t forgotten. He wants a pension more than an effective army. He’ll say anything.
    He wants to be seen as a good guy, so he mouth the fashionable phrases.
    Narcissistic tendencies at the top always crowd out talent in peace time.

  2. The Meissen Bison

    The army needs to recruit more men who know all about male grooming products but are unable to change a car tyre.

  3. See my comment the other day about why the NHS is shit but the Army works. Once women start moving into a male ethos organisation its days are numbered as a functioning body. You can see the rot has already set in the Army, the signs are all there. In a decade or two it won’t be able to achieve anything, because everything will constantly collapse – machinery, processes, chains of command. Just like the NHS.

  4. @ Jim – That’ll be a problem if there’s another Covid type emergency in the future. It was the Army which was largely responsible for getting the “Nightingale” hospitals built in a few days. Alright, they weren’t actually needed, but it shows that things CAN get done in this country, when all the usual petty rules & bureaucracy are torn up…

  5. I think it’s also the nature of the life. If there’s a fair chance of dying every day you’re deployed, you’re going to be a bit more short-term in your perspective on how much you drink and your relations with women (i.e. shagging the ones you can get).

  6. Anyone know about his career? Was there much charging machine gun nests or was it more PR work with hostile civilians?

  7. Dave Ward,

    Most of the public sector accepts failure as acceptable and routine. Blow £12bn on a crap IT system, nothing happens. Develop a contact tracing app that everyone said wouldn’t work, you keep your job. They did a pandemic rehearsal a few years ago, which is a really good idea, but none of the issues were rectified.

  8. I have commented before that as UK approaches Net Zero, Norway or Denmark will invade, taking over the remnants of your once great country. Now I think the invasion may come way before 2050.

    We have the cycle where the military rises to meet a major challenge, and succeeds. Then years/decades of inaction leads to inanity. Chaps like Hitler notice and take advantage. UK military needs a damn good war to fight.

    Another parallel: Leftards make a mess of a country. The people vote in conservatives to fix the mess. Once fixed, the people vote the same fvcking Leftards back in.

  9. I commend unto him the slogan favoured by Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

    The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

    Of course Kipling was a poet but even bloody generals are allowed to learn from poets.

  10. Leftards make a mess of a country. The people vote in conservatives to fix the mess. Once fixed, the people vote the same fvcking Leftards back in.

    But what we actually have is

    Leftards make a mess of a country. The people vote in conservatives to fix the mess but they do fuck all about it. Leftards double their efforts to fuck up the country. Conservatives decide to repaint their aeroplane.

  11. Bloke in North Dorset

    Richard T,

    There were many machine gun attacks in the Falklands, Col H Jones VC being the most famous but there were plenty more in the final assaults up the various mountains. Also Iraq, Brian Jones MC, he who was wrongly and maliciously accused of abusing PoWs by Phil Shiner and many more, plus plenty of less famous ones in Afghanistan.

  12. I have commented before that as UK approaches Net Zero, Norway or Denmark will invade…

    That assumes Norway and Denmark aren’t also disappearing up their own arses.

  13. BiND, yes, I know storming machine gun nests happened in the Falklands (although there can’t be many still serving who were in that), and I’m not surprised that there were similar things in Afghanistan.

    What I asked was whether the man making these comments had a career involving that sort of thing.

    Looking at his Wikipedia page, I suspect he didn’t – “As a junior officer he served in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Germany and Great Britain”, then he was “military assistant to the Chief of the General Staff” and “joined the directing staff at the Staff College”. Out to Bosnia and Basra before he was back on the Staff doing “restructuring”. Then a spell in Afghanistan, but to “assist Afghanistan in rebuilding key government institutions”.

    Tough jobs some of them, but I would guess they are more the sort of thing where you have to hold your nerve in difficult situations involving hostile civilians without opening fire, rather than storming machine gun nests.

    Which, I wonder, may explain why he doesn’t have a high regard for laddish camaraderie, if he’s not been involved in the sort of actions that require it.

  14. Considering that the British Army rarely left Basra airport, because militias had taken over the city and that it has become one of the great debacles of the British Army, I am not sure that his service there is anything to boast about.

    He was awarded a DSO but for his adminsitrative work rather than machine-gun storming.

  15. Disclaimer: I am a former member of a premier laddish group, fast-jet (specifically, fighter, mud-movers come second) aircrew, albeit now in my dotage so my firsthand experience is about 45+ years out of date.
    In my day and particular field, laddishness carried a high reputational premium but to rise like scum to the top it had to be carefully managed. Hence frequent comments like “why TF was he promoted?” and nicknames like “The Scottish Group Captain” whose name shall never be mentioned.
    My hypothesis is that downstream in the military, laddishness is an essential requirement (machine-gun nest equivalents) but upstream, it’s a political embarrassment.

  16. @gamecock
    “UK approaches Net Zero, Norway or Denmark” – norway is way worse than us, I have it down as the first western country to actually go tits up, though I am not sure what tits up will look like. The oil wealth has facilitated the feminisation of norway, it must surely fall.

  17. @ Johnny bonk – if Norway does go tits up it will probably be pretty spectacular. I went out with a Noriegian girl for a bit and, well words fail me.

    They were glorious, freckled perfection..

  18. “That assumes Norway and Denmark aren’t also disappearing up their own arses.”

    That’ll be a bit of a stretch.

    Comments are fair. Many nations are in a race to the bottom.

    “The people vote in conservatives to fix the mess but they do fuck all about it.”

    That explains why the cycles are getting deeper.

  19. Ottokring said:
    “Considering that the British Army rarely left Basra airport, because militias had taken over the city and that it has become one of the great debacles of the British Army, I am not sure that his service there is anything to boast about.”

    Ah, that’s what I suspected, but didn’t know enough to be sure.

    So, from his record, does it look like he has ever done any actual fighting? Ever attacked anything?

  20. He’s not serious is he, or is it so bad that even the Military now have to feign wokeness with Ministers?

    If he’s serious re-deploy this unfit for purpose cvnt to the Met sans compo* where he can take the knee and wring his hands in full compliance with the organisation’s ethos.

    TM Ecks

  21. Looking down the list, has any Chief of Defense Staff since Guthrie (retired nearly 20 years ago) actually attacked an enemy with a gun in his hand?

    That might explain a lot.

  22. asiaseen,

    “My hypothesis is that downstream in the military, laddishness is an essential requirement (machine-gun nest equivalents) but upstream, it’s a political embarrassment.”

    That’s just bad management. It’s like someone running a theatre company complaining about how many gays there are. Or not liking that a graphic designer has a whole lot of piercings in her face. That’s what a lot of graphic designers are like and if you want to argue about it, they’ll quit.

    Government can never just focus on the job, which strikes me as: threaten and kill Johnny Foreigner’s soldiers with as little collateral damage as possible. That’s what you’re there for. Everything else is gravy. No-one running a double glazing company cares if the sales guy shags the odd housewife or goes home and watches Triumph of the Will for fun. Did you sell double glazing, yes or no?

  23. Bloke in North Dorset

    Before Maggie changed the system the CDS was chosen from the head of each service by Buggin’s turn, now the OM selects the one they want to work with and in this case he was May’s pick. But to even get in to those upper echelons they will have had to work for ministers and cabinet secretaries and other politicians and whilst politicians can’t get them promoted they can certainly put the mockers on their careers in terms of working at MoD and hence the highest office.

    The current crop of the most senior officers will have started to come of age, politically, during the Blair and Cameron years, so I suppose that explains a lot.

    To be fair to them on the service front, unless they came through elite or special forces they’re unlikely to have had a chance for combat. Before Iraq we were mostly serving in a Germany and NATO.

    The top brass may not like the laddish culture but most of the training is still carried out by SNCOs and it will take a while for them to become woke. What we should be watching is Sandhurst training, they’re the ones who are now products of woke universities, if they are woke it bodes I’ll as they will be the platoon commanders supervising the SNCOs.. we’ll probably hear about those culture clashes if and when they happen.

  24. . . . as he revealed he found the military’s culture “really worrying”.

    The twat has been in the military his entire adult life and only now decides this “really worrying” aspect is worthy of revelation. This kind of opportunistic, lying shit is enough to persuade me that the controversies on his wiki page are true.

  25. I was in the cadet force with Nick Carter at school. He couldn’t build a raft out of ropes, planks and oil drums to get across a river.

  26. “What we should be watching is Sandhurst training, they’re the ones who are now products of woke universities, if they are woke it bodes I’ll as they will be the platoon commanders supervising the SNCOs.”

    Is Dr Lynette Nusbacher still at Sandhurst?

  27. Bloke in North Dorset said:
    “Before Maggie changed the system the CDS was chosen from the head of each service by Buggin’s turn”

    Well, I always thought that too. But having looked down the Wikipedia list, that change seems to have happened in 1977, so under Callaghan. Starting from when the post was founded in 1959, it went:
    – RAF, Navy, Army,
    – RAF, Navy, Army,
    – RAF, Navy … RAF

    The RAF man that Callaghan appointed out of turn was Neil Cameron, appointed 31st August 1977. The Army man who didn’t get it was Roland Gibbs. I can’t see any obvious reason on either of their Wikipedia pages to suggest why.

  28. Gen. Nick Woke:
    “If they do that I think we have got a much better chance of stamping out the laddish and, often much worse than that, thoroughly unacceptable behaviour that means that we undoubtedly push some of the really talented female, but also black, Asian and minority ethnic people that we have in the armed forces, out after only a few years”

    Talented in what way? I think we know – being woke snowflakes

    Some sense:
    “…However Richard Drax, Tory MP and member of the Defence Select Committee, told The Daily Telegraph that while it was important to crack down on racism he did not want to see banter banished from the Armed Forces completely. “Racism is totally unacceptable,” Mr Drax said.

    “But there has always been a great sense of humour in the Armed Forces and in dealing with crisis they say the strangest things. It’s a delicate balance. You don’t want to ruin that.” …”

    @Alex
    Thanks

  29. Bloke in North Dorset

    RichardT,

    That’s interesting, thanks. Just goes to show how easy things become folklore.

  30. A lot of good soldiers leave after a few years. Black, White, Female, whatever. Because it’s a job for the young unattached, and you get fed up with the constant moving, being away, and if you’re good, the pointy pyramid of promotion, especially (as everywhere) when you are not a good politics player.

    (I think SNCOs still know how to keep the junior officers straight.)

  31. @rhoda
    Very true.. Colonel Tim Collins being a notable one – straight talking patriot liked & respected by his subordinates

    Col. Tim Collins’ inspirational speech to 1 Batt., Royal Irish Regiment, on 19 March 2003, immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq

    @MC
    Anything? No

    Worse than Blair? Probably not, he sowed the seeds

    Good News: 50% to Uni “arbitary number” binned – it’s a start

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *