It's not woke for an army to look like the society it defends
Shapps' attack on diversity shows zero understanding of the recruitment challenge
It's been Anti-Woke Week in the UK defence world. Or at least in that part of the defence world that still thinks we’re living in the 1950s.
It started with a leak to the Telegraph of the British Army's "Race Action Plan", which noted that the Army "struggles to attract talent from ethnic minority backgrounds into the officer corps".
Since one barrier to ethnic minority recruitment is security clearance - which delves deep into the family background of applicants, and is particularly arduous if you want to work in intelligence - it proposed to relax the rules.
That triggered an open letter from a dozen retired generals, decrying the move. Finally, an outraged Grant Shapps - who seemed remarkably un-outraged at the leak of information from his own department - launched an urgent inquiry into wokeness in the forces.
Since then there’ve been attacks on the Army for forcing people to study climate change, more outrage at an all-woman AWACS flight, and today Iain Duncan Smith has joined the outrage over “woke” housing policies that allocate Army accommodation according to, er, need.
This, in short, is a carefully choreographed intervention by figures aligned to the Tory right, designed to bring the Trumpian assault on "Diversity, Equality and Inclusion" into UK politics.
I’m not sure attacking one of our major institutions is a good idea, but since the same right-wing populist forces also decided to pick on the National Trust and the RNLI, it’s par for the course.
But it reflects a serious problem.
The UK Armed Forces are not just facing a recruitment crisis. They increasingly don't look like the society they are defending, either in terms of ethnicity and cultural attitudes. This is what former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace meant when he said the Royal Navy has a Gen Z problem.
So what are the facts? And how can the problems of diversity and inclusion be squared with the needs of national security, in the context of wider cultural and demographic change?
What the stats tell us...
The bi-annual diversity statistics for the armed forces reveal the problem. Women make up 11.3% of the armed forces and people from ethnic minorities make up 9%. By comparison, women make up 51% of the working age population, and people from non-white ethnic minorities 18.3%.
Since declaring your sexual orientation is voluntary in the military, the figures here are not adequate to draw firm comparisons about LGBTQ+ inclusion: only 25% of personnel have declared, and there are no public records of the results.
Digging deeper, there are significant variations across the services: 14% of the Army is non-white; while the Royal Navy/Royal Marines score 4.9% and the RAF 3.5%.
At the officer level the differences are acute: female recruitment stands at 14% - which is better than for "other ranks", while ethnic minorities make up just 2.8% of the officer corps, which is worse.
But it's once you get into the religious belief figures that you see the biggest elephant in the room. There were just 700 Muslims in the armed forces in 2022 - at 0.5% way out of line with 3.87 million Muslims in England & Wales alone, where they form 6.5% of the UK population. Hindus make up 1% of the armed forces, while Sikhs account for 0.1%.
The hugely important religious and cultural traditions of Britain's ethnic minorities, which are so salient in the rest of our public life, are massively under-represented in the Armed Forces.
It means not only that the forces do not look much like, say, Cardiff or Manchester. It means they look dramatically unlike Leicester, Bolton or Birmingham. In fact, if the forces were an English district their closest matches in terms of ethnicity would be Bournemouth, Rotherham or Market Harborough.
The argument of the generals is that (a) this does not matter; (b) making changes to encourage diversity risks damaging military effectiveness and (c) will cause our adversaries to laugh at us. They write:
"Within military culture what is to be sought above everything else is the delivery of 'fighting power' in order to defeat the King's enemies, together with the greatest uniformity of excellence and diversity of opinion. Nothing else matters. The Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill are an object lesson of the unforced unity in all their diversity of Imperial and Commonwealth Armies in defence of freedom".
As you might expect, I take a different view.
In the first place, unlike diversity and inclusion, equality is actually a human right defensible in law. "Sorry m'lud we based our equalities strategy on Orde Wingate and the Chindits," probably wouldn't cut it in a court today.
But why does diversity matter to national security? Why is it, in fact, key to delivering "fighting power"?
A pre-war armed force?
The answer is that while armies fight battles, societies fight wars. Like the writers of the open letter, I believe we are in probably a "pre-war" period - or what's being called in the military a period of "conditional peace" - with confrontation with Russia a serious possibility.
I also agree with Gen Sir Patrick Sanders that we are going to need stronger armed forces, a serious reserve force, and that "mass matters" in the deterrence of Russian aggression.
We are also going to need a bigger defence industry - where there is likewise a skills shortage, a diversity deficit and a security clearance problem among the workforce.
Above all we need to win the battle of social legitimacy for military institutions and the use of armed force - at a time when large numbers of people, dismayed at the outcome of expeditionary wars of choice over the past three decades, don't see the point.
In this, creating an armed force that looks, sounds and thinks like the people it is defending is going to be critical.
Otherwise you not only risk parts of society becoming indifferent or hostile to the actions we need to take against Russia and its proxies; at some point those doing the deterrence might begin to ask - why are we putting our lives on the line for people who don't care about us?
So those making the decisions should avoid getting dragged into the American-style backlash against DEI, and take a UK-focused look at the problem, and the potential solutions.
Stay as we are?
There's a rational argument, which I've heard from people in the military who are realists rather than nostalgics, which goes like this: we only need around 150,000 people to run the armed forces; they need to be excellent at every level; we've traditionally got the officers from public schools and the other ranks from working class families and communities with traditions of military service.
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