Adml Radakin’s intervention comes in the wake of a two-year-long Armed Forces recruitment ad campaign called “You Belong Here”, designed to show the military as a modern, inclusive employer. What has not evolved as fast, however, is physical selection criteria, which critics say is outdated and over-fussy.
In the past decade, for example, thousands of applicants have been blocked for conditions like hay fever, eczema and even acne. MoD guidelines from 2019 state that severe adolescent pimples can “affect the ability to wear military clothing or to operate military equipment”.
A seriously spotty back. Now carry an 80lb pack for 4 days. Doesn’t work, does it?
“There is a view that those joining the Armed Forces will be there till pension age, when in reality, most don’t serve anything like that long,” O’Neill says. “That drives a demand for physical perfection. There’s also an assumption that anyone in uniform must be able to pick up a weapon and fight – but there are probably some areas where you could change that.”
As B inND has said around here. The British army does so assume – everyone’s trained sa a soldier first. The American doesn’t – techs are techs, not soldiers. Either system works but you do need to pick one.
Little Green Men on special ops will kill you whether you have done the How to Fight course or not.
Watch the army hire another 100,000 diversity commissars and then go on to claim that the army is now at a fighting strength higher than it has been since WW2.
“Either system works but you do need to pick one.”
The US system seems to be better. Specialism and all that. You wouldn’t put all the ladies who helped break Enigma onto Sword beach. Niels Bohr helped kill a quarter of a million Japanese people at the age of 60. I’m pretty sure I could operate one of these NLAW weapons and fix it if it went wrong better than some kid who could more easily walk 10 miles. As long as I’ve got transport, I can do it.
It’s all – or a lot of it, for a while – about to be rendered irrelevant by drones.
Drones have their place. Like tanks do.
But you still can’t hold territory with a drone cloud. The best you can do is make the enemy work for it.
There’s no substitute for an 18-year old with a rifle. And there probably never will be, though he might have a drone cloud of his own.
There are signs of change. I was at a jobs fair a couple of years ago, and there was a military recruitment stall there. I was chatting and asked “is there anything for an overweight over-55-year-old?” Reply: No, must be under 50, must be physically fit. Although…. Cyber Operations are open to recruiting older people with less insistance on the outdoor physical fitness requirements.
According to statistics published last year, roughly three-quarters of the million-odd people who applied to join Britain’s Armed Forces over the past decade, gave up because the procedure went on too long. Some 83 per cent of the 707,000 people who applied to join the Army voluntarily withdrew their application.
That’s good news. 580,000 got a real job instead.
Risking their lives for King and country is one thing.
Dulce et decorum est pro kebab shops mori.
“When I was head of the navy, I tried to join the navy. It was shockingly difficult. I could not believe it,” Adml Radakin added.
Lessons, no doubt, have been learned.
Right now, Britain’s military chiefs cannot afford to be that choosy. At a summit in The Hague last month, all Nato member nations pledged to increase defence spending to 5 per cent by 2035 to counter the threat from Russia.
So important we defeat Russia, guys. Can you imagine if our country was invaded by millions of unwanted foreigners?
Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures show Britain’s naval forces have failed to hit their recruitment targets every year since 2011, registering a deficit of more than 1,500 personnel in 2023-24. Overall, intake was therefore 40 per cent below the desired level, with the Army and the Royal Air Force missing their own targets too, by 37 per cent and 30 per cent respectively.
But they’re world class.
A particularly tricky hurdle is mental health. Generation Z have been taught not to see this as a taboo subject, and to seek professional help if they have issues. But a medical history of mental health issues or self-harm can complicate an application to the military, where everyone must be assessed on how they will cope in extremis, in a warzone.
Yes, give people like me guns and tanks.
One category where fitness rules have already been relaxed is the new National Cyber Force, where recruits will do a shortened version of the 10-week basic training. MoD guidelines also state that applicants, “will not be required to serve in dangerous environments, and there is no weapons handling involved.”
While some fear this risks creating a “two-tier military”, others argue it is simply pragmatic. As one defence insider jokes: “Alan Turing probably couldn’t do many push-ups.”
I bet he could if there was an adolescent boy underneath him.
@ Steve
There is NOTHING outside your imagination to suggest that Alan Turing was a paedophile. Repressed “GAY” (homosexual) undoubtedly, but not a paedophile or a sexual predator – and when he thought he had found a mate he got completely ripped off (not something that often happens to the predator in a relationship).
john77 – ?
nobody mentioned pedos except you. I was referring to Turing’s 19 year old boyfriend.
and when he thought he had found a mate he got completely ripped off (not something that often happens to the predator in a relationship
But happens all the time in sexual relationships between foolish older men and adolescent boys. I know they’ve sanctified him in recent years because gay, but let’s not be naive. He was a dirty man.
Not everyone is a soldier. The Senior Service and crab air both require people fit for duty but they don’t need to be as fit as an infantry soldier. Of course the crabs do need to ensure good back posture and range of movement for when they are stacking blankets.
Drones have their place. Like tanks do.
Tanks are finished, for now.
I’m not saying they can’t ever come back, but it’s going to take an entire rethink in terms of defence, jamming, anti-air capability, armour etc, and probably isn’t worth the candle when you look at the cost of 1x eg Abrams/Challenger vs 1x drone of the sort that can destroy it without too much bother.
Every single Abrams sent to Ukraine has either been destroyed or disabled.
But you still can’t hold territory with a drone cloud. The best you can do is make the enemy work for it.
No. You can’t hold territory with old school air power, because old school airpower is vulnerable to AA and rival air forces, and consists of limited numbers of large and extremely expensive aircraft with limited fuel capacity containing very expensive and not limitless pilots who get tired.
If you could fill the air between (say) Birmingham and Coventry with a thousand Apaches you could certainly stop anyone from Birmingham advancing to Coventry, and thus could hold Coventry.
You can’t because i) you haven’t got a thousand Apaches, and ii) the few you do have are as above expensive and offer limited time on station because they run out of fuel or the pilots die of sleep deprivation unless you rotate them in and out.
Drones have changed all that, which is why Ukraine has devolved into the very odd war that it currently is.
There’s no substitute for an 18-year old with a rifle.
I have watched countless videos of 18-year-olds with rifles being killed, often in quite sadistic ways, by drone operators 300 miles away eating Hobnobs and drinking tea. If every satellite suddenly falls out of the sky maybe the 18-year-old makes a comeback, though you don’t actually need satellite coverage to programme drones to kill anything that moves within a given area.
(In my Birmingham to Coventry example you would of course only hold the land until the enemy’s drones overwhelmed yours. You could then send your infantry over, and you probably would, but they would advance behind a screen of drones [and the usual artillery].) The immediate future belongs to whoever can mass produce drones in sufficiently huge numbers, basically. So not us.)
Talking about the Army and mostly overseas operations….
Even American specialists were/are trained in military skills, as noted above when you’re in a war zone the enemy doesn’t differentiate. Cooks, bottle washers ans everyone else has to be capable of defending their location.
I know it’s different now but even in my day it was recognised that not everyone needed to be trained to infantry levels of fitness. There were 2 fitness tests:
A Combat Fitness Test* for the test for teeth arms which involved 10 miles inside 2 hours carrying full kit for those who were likely to be involved on the front line and doing the fighting and a Basic Fitness Test for everyone else which was 1.5 miles in 15 minutes as a squad then 1.5 miles individual run inside a time set by your age.
If your job didn’t involve field operations, including at the rear, it was civilianised to save money, again recognising that not everyone needs to be capable of fighting. That applied to GCHQ types who would be shipped home at the first sign of trouble along with every other civilian providing support services.
*As it happens my best man had a back scarred by acne but managed the CFT OK.
I’m pretty sure I could operate one of these NLAW weapons and fix it if it went wrong better than some kid who could more easily walk 10 miles. As long as I’ve got transport, I can do it.
I’ll bet you couldn’t in a combat situation and you can kiss goodbye to the idea of getting a lift to the front line, as the Russians have found out. And the Russians are testing to destruction the idea that 60-year-olds can be effective in a combat zone.
Interested – Tanks are finished, for now.
No. Being able to bring a heavily armoured 120mm gun to the party for direct fire on enemy positions is very useful and can’t be replaced.
Drones are having a bit of a torpedo moment. The humble torpedo was also supposed to make big capital ships obsolete, but instead we just built quick firing guns to blow torpedo boats out of the water before they could get in range. Despite the high attrition rate of tanks in Ukraine, both sides are still using tanks wherever they can. They’ll even use “obsolete” tanks like the T-62 and Leopard 1, because the tank may be vulnerable to drones but it’s still less vulnerable than any other vehicle or walking.
NB most disabled tanks are hauled off, repaired, and sent back to the fight. They’re very rarely destroyed by drones. If Russia and Ukraine didn’t have tanks, they’d have even more casualties. This war doesn’t prove the obsolescence of tanks, but their absolute necessity in the direst of circumstances, and the importance of having an industrial base that can supply, repair and refurbish tanks.
Btw I’m surprised captured drone operators don’t have their fingers cut off.
Steve – from what little I can tell from skimming the news, drones are effective because they’re so much cheaper than tanks or aircraft.
However I’d agree that the armour and fire power of tanks is still useful. Even the 18 year olds with rifles can still be used (up !!)
I’ve always felt that Ukraine’s error was to get rid of its nukes. I’m sure that if Puke had been threatened by all the nukes a quick google shows Ukraine to have had at independence, he’d have hesitated to attack.
What drones appear to have done is bring an end to large force attacks.
No longer are large groups of troops amassing to push forward. Doing so is suicide. Drones will spot them and vector in killer drones and artillery.
Now attacks are broken up into small groups of 3 or 4 people on motorbikes and quad bikes. Tanks, artillery, AA, and the like all have cages of to mitigate drone attacks.
Until drones are basically like People, they won’t replace soldiers, just change the face of the battlefield like so many weapons systems before them.
History is full of technology advances allegedly making existing ones obsolete
The current flavour is drones, the previous one was cyber and the one before that electronic warfare
Back before that precision weapons and before that combined arms
The only constant is poor bloody infantry
All these wonder weapons require significant in payment and a logistics tail that can be attacked or disrupted
Armies will require human soldiers for the foreseeable future
Until Skynet sorts itself out
Bboy – from what little I can tell from skimming the news, drones are effective because they’re so much cheaper than tanks or aircraft.
Yes. They’re infantry weapons, very useful to have but not a replacement for armour.
However I’d agree that the armour and fire power of tanks is still useful.
Yiss. They are more critical to this conflict than anyone foresaw. In Ukraine, they’re doing much the same job they did in WW1: support infantry attacks on fortified positions. But they are also very handy in defence.
Because this war is a positional, attritive conflict swarming with drones, the need for armour is greater. Tanks are just war consumables, after all. When they break down or are destroyed, it just proves you need more tanks. If you offered either side 1,000 tanks or 1,000,000 FPV drones, they’d choose the tanks.
CD – What drones appear to have done is bring an end to large force attacks.
No longer are large groups of troops amassing to push forward. Doing so is suicide. Drones will spot them and vector in killer drones and artillery.
Now attacks are broken up into small groups of 3 or 4 people on motorbikes and quad bikes. Tanks, artillery, AA, and the like all have cages of to mitigate drone attacks.
Drones definitely are a problem, but NB the war went positional *before* it became a drone war.
The main obstacle Russia faces isn’t the drones, it’s the millions of mines infesting the countryside around heavily fortified Soviet-built cities (the Soviets, unlike us, took civil defence seriously, they’ve got bunkers and metros a-plenty, they’ve got shelters and redoubts galore) and NATO’s ISR of Sauron that put a stop to big arrow warfare. Russia cannot gather a big fist, despite its superiority in numbers, because NATO will see them in real time and they’ll promptly be turned into HIMARS paste. (See also: Ukraine’s Summer Offensive)
Similarly, the main problem Ukraine faces from Russia isn’t their Putinist drones, but their overwhelming superiority in artillery, air power, and ability to mobilise a lot more (and going by the Telegram videos, younger, fitter and more motivated) men and materiel.
Even if drones didn’t exist, a lot of Ukrainian volunteers/conscripts have died in their hotels and training grounds, hundreds of miles from the front, because the Russians found their positions somehow* and sent cruise missiles. And plenty of Russians got whacked when Ukraine blew up their ammo dumps.
So we’re seeing a remake of WW1, even down to the use of “storm trooper” tactics. FPV drones won’t decide this war, but the old essentials – riflemen and their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns – will.
*A lot of people have died in this war because some idiot*had* to post a photograph on social media, which is immediately fed to the weaponised autists working in intel for either side. If you removed exif, these mentats can geolocate you from the shadow of a small dog in the background. Because troop concentrations invite not silly little grenade-drones, but state of the art missiles with hundreds of pounds of high explosive plus their not inconsiderable kinetic energy, it’s quite possible thousands of people have been killed by bad Internet opsec. Embarrassing.
No. Being able to bring a heavily armoured 120mm gun to the party for direct fire on enemy positions is very useful and can’t be replaced.
Drivel.
Drivel
Ok, what do you think tanks are being used for in Ukraine? Mobile discos?
Firstly, a lot of the medical criteria aren’t about an ability to do the job per se, they’re about your potential to become a burden. For example, my lad has a bone condition which renders his left arm more susceptible to breaking. Doesn’t stop him doing things, but if it were to happen in the jungle/arctic/desert where he couldn’t get to a hospital he’d be in the shit. It’s about minimising risk.
Secondly, drones may be a feature of the Ukraine war, but don’t extrapolate that to ‘future war’. If this thread has displayed nothing else, it’s that the military knowledge in this country is woeful.
@Steve, loved the Cranberries, Zombie reference…
Thank you Charles