Quality of recruits is of paramount importance with scrupulous vetting. The fitness and suitabilty for operations has been diluted to try to make up the numbers. Percentages of women, Muslims etc is irrelevant - quality is needed, along with the removal of DEI and HR rubbish. More RN is fine though without many exquisite hulls, such as T45 and T26 which absorb too much of the limited funds. Healey, having resigned because of in-year savings and the insufficiently funded DIP is now Mr Moneybags which will be an interesting outcome for the Halloween budget.
No-one is trying to recruit Muslims or women because of DEI targets. We need more recruits, full stop. If we had a big enough military with only white blokes, fine. But we haven't. We should be getting everyone in and then training them, not turning them away (unless they're demonstrably untrainable). If we persist with having a tiny but highly skilled army we'll only be able to conduct surgical operations. Yes it feels great when we can boast how individual Royal Marines are better soldiers than individual US Marines, but what's the use of that if you're trying to raise a full corps?
When I was serving non-white numbers were strongly sought after - that was prior to DEI rubbish. Anyway, retention has been difficult since the lawfare of the Iraq-Afghanistan campaigns caused so much harm - consider the Special Forces who have been trampled upon.
Timely and very helpful contribution to the debate. The four measures proposed to build support for higher spending seem very sensible, although you might want to extend the recruitment-legitmacy programme to other groups such as young women who may also have understandably negative views of the UK military given some recent reports. What is unfortunate is that the YouGov polling didn't include a 13th way of raising money which is to repurpose the £24bn of Russian State assets currently frozen in UK banks. The work of distinguished experts such as Prof Buchheit and various others has demonstrated that the legal case for doing so is fairly solid. Sadly the commercial argument - that the damage to the reputation of UK financial services of repurposing is too negative - is being made in private, and to date those opposed to repurposing seem unprepared to make their case in public. As we know UK Government policy as re-stated in Nov 2025 is that "a swift decision on securing long-term financing for Ukraine, including through the use of the full value of immobilised Russian sovereign assets, will be critical." Ideally of course this would be done with our European allies but there is no reason why it cannot be done unilaterally. At the next Budget in Oct 2026 we may discover the extent to which Ministers and senior officials support repurposing or whether their declared policy is designed to placate certain audiences rather than actually be implemented.
Sure, getting public consent for defense spending would make doing that more sustainable.
The problem is that the public might get to like requiring the government to get the public’s consent for a whole lot of other things …
Quality of recruits is of paramount importance with scrupulous vetting. The fitness and suitabilty for operations has been diluted to try to make up the numbers. Percentages of women, Muslims etc is irrelevant - quality is needed, along with the removal of DEI and HR rubbish. More RN is fine though without many exquisite hulls, such as T45 and T26 which absorb too much of the limited funds. Healey, having resigned because of in-year savings and the insufficiently funded DIP is now Mr Moneybags which will be an interesting outcome for the Halloween budget.
No-one is trying to recruit Muslims or women because of DEI targets. We need more recruits, full stop. If we had a big enough military with only white blokes, fine. But we haven't. We should be getting everyone in and then training them, not turning them away (unless they're demonstrably untrainable). If we persist with having a tiny but highly skilled army we'll only be able to conduct surgical operations. Yes it feels great when we can boast how individual Royal Marines are better soldiers than individual US Marines, but what's the use of that if you're trying to raise a full corps?
When I was serving non-white numbers were strongly sought after - that was prior to DEI rubbish. Anyway, retention has been difficult since the lawfare of the Iraq-Afghanistan campaigns caused so much harm - consider the Special Forces who have been trampled upon.
Timely and very helpful contribution to the debate. The four measures proposed to build support for higher spending seem very sensible, although you might want to extend the recruitment-legitmacy programme to other groups such as young women who may also have understandably negative views of the UK military given some recent reports. What is unfortunate is that the YouGov polling didn't include a 13th way of raising money which is to repurpose the £24bn of Russian State assets currently frozen in UK banks. The work of distinguished experts such as Prof Buchheit and various others has demonstrated that the legal case for doing so is fairly solid. Sadly the commercial argument - that the damage to the reputation of UK financial services of repurposing is too negative - is being made in private, and to date those opposed to repurposing seem unprepared to make their case in public. As we know UK Government policy as re-stated in Nov 2025 is that "a swift decision on securing long-term financing for Ukraine, including through the use of the full value of immobilised Russian sovereign assets, will be critical." Ideally of course this would be done with our European allies but there is no reason why it cannot be done unilaterally. At the next Budget in Oct 2026 we may discover the extent to which Ministers and senior officials support repurposing or whether their declared policy is designed to placate certain audiences rather than actually be implemented.