Why young Brits aren’t dying to join the army

The British armed forces face a serious recruitment problem. The army itself, currently numbering around 70,000 personnel, is the smallest it’s been since the Napoleonic wars.

The Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review, published this week, is an attempt to remedy the UK’s military problems, and move Britain towards a position of ‘war-fighting readiness’. It even talks up making the army ‘10 times more lethal’… by 2035. As former British army chief Lord Dannat scoffed, this was the equivalent of saying in 1938 to Adolf Hitler, ‘please don’t attack us until 1946 because we’re not going to be ready’.

Yet amid the review’s bluster, there is an attempt to grapple with the armed forces’ recruitment issues, through what it calls ‘military gap years’. This idea is apparently inspired by a similar Australian model. Though the exact details remain to be seen, it is likely the scheme will involve a year-long ‘taster’ of the armed forces for school and college leavers.

Perhaps this will convince a few young people that the army is for them. But one has to wonder if this new proposal truly cuts to the heart of why young people’s interest in joining the armed forces has dwindled in recent years. After all, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been making a concerted effort to attract Gen Z recruits for a while now. It shortened the enlistment process by nearly 40 per cent at the start of this year, offered junior officers and new recruits modest pay rises last year, and has engaged in countless glossy recruitment campaigns for at least a decade now.

Yet, it’s all been to no avail. At the turn of the millennium, when enlistment times were longer, wages lower and marketing campaigns far less flashy, the armed forces were largely hitting their recruitment targets of around 25,000 new personnel per year. But by 2024, they were only hitting 60 to 70 per cent of their much lower recruitment target of 14,000. That’s quite a drop-off.

Former defence secretary Lord Hammond takes a straightforward view on the matter. He claims that today’s young people simply aren’t up to the task. Apparently, they remain unwilling to ‘drop their pens and computers’ in favour of something bigger.

Perhaps there is a smidgen of truth to this. British Gen Zers have not grown up in the shadow of war, or been raised by parents who passed on the stoic endurance of those who did. Perhaps we are too complacent. We have lounged beneath trees that were planted long before our time, with little reason to believe that we might be ousted from their shade. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has raised a new awareness among Zoomers of the persistence of war. But it has not served as the big wake-up call some think it should have. To most of us, the possibility of war on or near British soil remains almost amusingly abstract.

But there is a deeper issue here. There is no escaping the fact that my generation is a notoriously un-patriotic lot. A survey last year revealed that just 11 per cent of 18- to 27-year-olds would be willing to take up arms to defend Britain, with 48 per cent saying it is a ‘racist country’. A sense of guilt about and even loathing towards Britain’s past and present is prominent among Gen Zers. Which is hardly a surprise. Too many have been raised to believe at school and college that Britain was built on the backs and ‘souls’ of slaves, and that its most prolific wartime leader actually committed atrocities to rival Hitler’s. As a result, they’re hardly going to be in a rush to fight for their country.

In what was presumably a ‘eureka!’ moment, the Strategic Defence Review acknowledged that if the MoD wants people to potentially lay down their lives in defence of their country, they need to have a sense of what they are fighting for. To this end, it outlines plans for ‘two years of public-outreach events and improved education about the armed forces in schools’.

But these initiatives are too little, too late, given the damage already done by the MoD’s near decade-long involvement in the culture war against Britain’s past and present.

Its anxious hand-flapping about trans inclusivity has led to bizarre episodes, such as the Pride flag being flown by a Royal Artillery Regiment on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and biologically male recruits being permitted to share accommodation with women. Concern about appearing too Christian prompted the removal of crosses from some chaplain’s caps and a warning to be given to soldiers ahead of Armistice Day to avoid acts of remembrance with ‘Christian elements’. An email from an RAF squadron leader, leaked in 2023, bemoaned the excess of ‘useless white male pilots’ joining up – which seemed like the perfect way to deter white males from signing up.

It has often looked as if the armed forces have been more concerned with being culture-war-ready than war-ready – something that has undoubtedly deterred more prospective recruits than long processing times ever could. Like so many of Britain’s institutions, the recruitment problems of the armed forces stem from this embrace of rampant identity politics during the 2010s. This has estranged veterans and dissuaded many young people from enlisting. There is little sense in fighting for a nation that its own military higher-ups barely value.

If the armed forces are serious about recruiting more young people, the solution won’t be gap-year programmes or enlistment shortcuts. The whole service needs a cultural rewiring. It needs to stop playing up to the culture warriors’ view of Britain and the West as the source of all the world’s evils, and start conceiving of our nation as one worth fighting for.

The Strategic Defence Review may have identified recruitment as the issue. But if the armed forces still fail to address the root causes, a new lick of paint won’t fix the rot underneath.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.