If Herr Pistorius had confined his observations to “five years”, it might have sharpened the minds of our American allies a little and they could have hastened their important programme to ensure that their armed forces are sufficiently diverse from a race, religion and gender perspective — something that will surely terrify Vladimir Putin, who has been gravely remiss in such matters.
Our armed forces have followed the American lead, I am delighted to say, so that when western Europe is a charred desert glowing with caesium-137, we can at least be comfortable that our military preparations had been approved by Stonewall and BLM and the United Nations special rapporteur on ensuring the Armageddon is properly diverse and decolonised. Suck that up, Vlad.
The general gist of the various chilling pronouncements from Nato and defence ministers across Europe — including Sweden’s and our own Churchill-in-waiting, Grant Shapps — is that perhaps we ought to take the prospect of fairly imminent war more seriously. We have been assuaged by peaceable affluence for too long. The problem, though, is that few of us can be arsed. A rather large minority of our fellow countrymen find nothing remotely commendable in the history and traditions of our nation. This includes, alas, pretty much the entire civil service. Fight to defend what, they might be asking themselves as the sirens wail — imperialism and inequality?
Remove them from the equation and you are left with the people who usually do the bulk of the fighting when our country is in trouble: young, working-class, white men. They, surely, will still be up for a punch-up with Ivan, no? A bit of gently irradiated aggro? It would seem not. And who, now, would blame them?
There is a recruiting crisis in the military of both the US and the UK. In particular there has been a massive drop in the number of white recruits to the US army, which finds itself 10,000 short. The number of white men signing up has dropped from 44,000 to 25,000 in under five years. The problem in the UK is even worse, across all three branches of our armed services. As The Times reported yesterday, our army has shrunk by 40 per cent since 2010 and now stands below 70,000 — people simply are not joining up. So grave is the crisis that the army has taken men away from soldiering and shoved them into recruitment offices to drum up business. The top brass are thinking of relaxing their ban on tattoos and asthma, those twin signifiers of social impoverishment.
The Royal Navy and the RAF have fared similarly and it is not a huge mystery why. All branches of the armed services, here and in America, have been at pains to display how marvellously progressive they are and have targeted advertising at those members of our communities who are not white, working-class males. Now, that may indeed have had the effect of increasing the number of black, middle-class servicewomen. But by how much? Nowhere near enough to cover the shortfall from the traditional reservoir of soldiering.
And if you are a white, working-class male, would you really consider joining the RAF after that dreadful debacle when it was found to have discriminated directly against people from your demographic? Or when all the adverts are directed towards everybody but you? Or when Shapps, alone in his own little world, suggests that the answer to the recruitment crisis lies in hiring women? Might you not think: stuff this for a game of soldiers? We’ll leave it to them, then?
It is much as Kipling had it more than 100 years ago: “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’/ But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;/ An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;/ An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!”
Or is it Lieutenant Commander Chris Easterbrook? Commander of MCM2 Crew 5?
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