Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER
DANDEKER AND
PROFESSOR HEW
STRACHAN
25 MARCH 2008
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you
very much indeed for coming. I wonder if I could ask you both
to introduce yourselves.
Professor Strachan: I am Hew Strachan.
I am Chichele Professor of The History of War at Oxford and I
direct the Leverhulme programme at Oxford on the changing character
of war.
Professor Dandeker: I am Christopher
Dandeker. I am from the Department of War Studies at King's College
London. I am a Professor of Military Sociology. I am also Head
of the School of Social Science and Public Policy and, with Simon
Wessely, Co-Director of the King's Centre for Military Health
Research.
Q2 Chairman: Thanks very much indeed
for coming to start off our inquiry into Recruitment and Retention
in the Armed Forces. The purpose of this morning's evidence is
that you will be here for about 45 minutes, if that does not insult
the value of your evidence to the Committee. It will be helpful
in setting the scene and providing an overview of where we are
going on this inquiry. I would ask if you could start by giving
us that scene-setting context. Is there a long term problem with
recruitment and retention in the Armed Forces? Is it a trend which
is becoming apparent? Is it a blip? How would you characterise
the current difficulties that are generally acknowledged in recruitment
and retention in the Armed Forces? Which of you would like to
start?
Professor Strachan: It is the
historian's question, is it? I do not think there is anything
new about problems of recruiting and retention in the Armed Forces.
Throughout the 19th century, throughout the 1930s, since 1945
(with the exception, obviously, of the period of conscription),
the Armed Forces have struggled to meet recruitment targets. That
is a very general statement because what is much more evident
and I think is largely a consequence of the trend in current operations
is what reports call pinch points—particular problems in
relation to particular specialisations. There is a change there
because I think when Christopher and I were doing this eight years
or so ago, the last time this Committee looked at this issue,
the problem was much more evident in generalised branches of the
Armed Forces rather than specialist branches. Specialist branches
had much better recruitment and retention partly, I think, because
there was a long term prospect of employment whenever they left
the Armed Forces. Today there is a problem with particular specialisations,
no doubt partly reflecting a buoyant economy. There is another
thing I would say though and that is that of course any debate
that goes on about the Armed Forces today has to balance what
they are doing currently operationally and what that means for
the long term health of the Armed Forces. There is a tendency
to reflect what the long term future might be in the light of
what are immediate pressures and, of course, there is the $64,000
question: how far are those current pressures going to continue
into the future? The issue, it seems to me, is that we are still
expecting ourselves to produce Armed Forces that have balanced
capabilities, that have, in the jargon, the ability to fight a
major war at one end of the spectrum and at the same time carry
on with counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, and the practicalities
which the Armed Forces are facing at the moment. The fear that
is often voiced by chiefs of staff is that, in trying to meet
the demands of current operations, how far are you jeopardising
the long term capability to fight a major war should a major war
eventuate. We might have reached the point, given the size of
the Armed Forces, where there has to be a choice. There has to
be an opportunity cost here because to retain balanced capabilities
across the full spectrum may be impossible given the current size
of the Armed Forces and the current recruitment and retention
difficulties. You are going to have to structure the Armed Forces
to do particular things. That is going to require an unbalancing
if you produce Armed Forces that are well adjusted, for example,
to operations in Afghanistan; you are not going to retain an all-round
capability of the sort that the Armed Forces expect, and I do
not think we are fully asking ourselves that question. If we do
ask ourselves that question we may be rather clearer about the
sort of structure for the Armed Forces that we want and what sort
of specialisations we are trying to achieve and where the recruitment
and retention effort should be directed, but until we have a sense
of the answer to the big strategic questions recruitment and retention
are operating in a vacuum. There is a danger of looking at the
wrong end of the stick.
Q3 Chairman: So when you say we might
have reached the point when we have to make the choice between
a balanced and a specialist Armed Forces it sounds as though your
answer to the question is that we have reached that point.
Professor Strachan: Given current
resourcing, yes, we have. Even if there were not recruiting and
retention problems, even if the Armed Forces were not failing
to meet current targets,—and, as I say, the mismatch between
targets and achievement is not historically enormously significant
because this has always been the case except in times of very
high unemployment—and if we are not going to have Armed
Forces that are adequately resourced, then, yes, we have reached
that point.
Q4 Chairman: Professor Dandeker,
do you want to add to that, and would you differentiate in any
way between recruitment and retention?
Professor Dandeker: What has been
a good move by the Ministry of Defence over the last eight to
ten years is a much more explicit recognition of the interaction
between recruitment, retention and other aspects of personnel
policy. If you look at the Armed Forces' overarching personnel
strategy that gives a clear indication of that thinking, that
is to say (and I know it is a cliché) that one of the worst
things that can happen to recruitment is a disaffected veteran.
I think that thinking, the need to relate the activities of cultivating
the areas where you recruit from, then obtaining the people, retaining
them and making them reasonably happy so long as you want them
and they want to stay and then looking after them when they have
left and remembering them, are all part of, if you like, a spectrum
of activity. It is to the credit of MoD and the individual Services
that that contextual thinking, that interactive thinking about
recruitment and retention and the other activities to which I
have referred is good news. The second point I would make is in
relation to Professor Strachan's comment about means and ends
and the balanced capability point. I think time is pressing because
the pressures on means and ends are not, so it seems to me, going
to go away any time soon. I think the commitment to Iraq is likely
to remain whatever aspirations there are to reduce personnel deployed
there in the summer. I do not see a major reduction there. That
is just an academic guess. Whatever the outcome of the US presidential
election, if I had to bet I would see a continuing (and again
we can debate it) serious commitment by the US to Iraq for at
least one, possibly more than one, presidential term, so the pressures
upon the UK Armed Forces in terms of calibrating means and ends
and therefore thinking through this issue of balanced capability
or not is something that cannot be ignored.
Q5 Chairman: Do you think media stories,
like Deepcut, like mistreatment of prisoners, have had an effect
on this, and is the impact of those stories diminishing at all
over time?
Professor Dandeker: It depends
on the effect on what. If I could start with one issue, I think
it is interesting that in and around Government Deepcut is no
longer a particular base. It is a wider phenomenon. People talk
about the Deepcut issue, and I think even if Deepcut was knocked
down, abolished, renamed and so on, the cultural phenomenon of
Deepcut, that is to say, straying the wrong side of tough training
into the field of illegitimate transgressions of the rights of
personnel who have volunteered to serve their country, is there
and those responsible for recruiting and training personnel are
aware it is there, are aware of the need to balance the requirement
to be fit to fight, in other words, train people to be fit to
fight, but on the other hand not sanction or permit illegitimate
and illegal activities which lead to bullying and harassment.
Those damage the recruitment climate, not so much necessarily
directly on young people but on what are known as the gatekeepers,
those to whom young people turn for advice when they are thinking
about their military careers. So far as abuses in theatre are
concerned, those affect the reputation of the Armed Forces and
clearly affect Military Covenant issues about which you might
want to talk later. I think that damages the reputation of the
Armed Forces in exactly the same way (and I know it is again a
cliché) as one bad doctor can do a huge amount of damage
to the medical profession disproportionate to the activities of
any single individual. I think the same can be said for abuses
in Iraq so far as the recruitment climate is concerned.
Q6 Chairman: Have you anything to
add, Professor Strachan?
Professor Strachan: I would not
agree with that, actually. I think the Deepcut issue has gone
away. I think the Deepcut issue was always bigger in the mind
of the Army itself than it was in the minds of the public, for
all that it was headline news. It is always striking (and this
is comparatively unchanging over time) how high is the regard
in which the British Armed Forces have been held by the public.
You will confront concerns among senior officers about Deepcut,
a belief that they are being vilified by the press and having
a tough time, which is not reflected in any broad spectrum attitudinal
surveys. I think we need to be aware of that because it ties into
another question about how the public sees the Armed Forces, which
is the crucial distinction between a public unhappiness about
certain wars and a public perception of the Armed Forces. The
two things are not necessarily linked and this is the point about
how far you generalise from current circumstances into the future,
because if the current wars are unpopular that is a much bigger
issue than Deepcut, and if the wars are unpopular then of course
they can affect what Christopher has called the gatekeepers and
those who might have an influence on those who wish to enlist.
However, if the wars were deemed to be popular, deemed to be acceptable,
deemed to be necessary, there would be a different relationship.
Q7 Mr Holloway: Professor Dandeker,
of course it is unacceptable to lay into recruits, but is not
the true Deepcut effect what I have been hearing for the last
five or six years, that because we have softened the training
a lot of these kids are going out not fit to fight?
Professor Dandeker: It goes back
to my point about balance. It is important to have robust training
to enable recruits, once they have been trained, to survive in
demanding conditions. Indeed, it is a duty of care of the trainers
to ensure that people can survive those difficult circumstances
and that that which is seen as tough on the day may actually save
their life later on in an operation. Going back to Hew's point,
I think I agree with him that the dominant mood in the public
is an enormous respect for the Armed Services, for their courage,
for their resilience, and not least for their competence in being
able to deal with things that are very demanding and take place
in difficult circumstances and are often politically controversial
operations, a point to which I will return. That having been said,
those same opinion polls do show that some significant sections
of the population find some aspects of the Armed Forces, some
of their culture, some of their ways of doing things, anachronistic
and that provides an opening for, if you like, the Deepcut effect
to erode some of those sectors of the public even though they
are strongly in support of the Armed Services.
Chairman: I want to move on, I am afraid,
because we have a lot of ground to cover. Is your question absolutely
essential, Kevan?
Mr Jones: It is, yes. In the last Parliament
three members of the Committee were part of the year-long inquiry
into Deepcut and the duty of care which I think one of you were
involved in. There is a big difference, is there not, between
robust training and some of the appalling cases that we came across
(although there was a minority of instances, I have to say), so
I have dismissed completely the nonsense that Adam Holloway put
forward.
Mr Holloway: I know a bit about it.
Mr Jones: You might do, but from some
of the cases we went through and some of the families we spoke
to, I am sorry, I do not think you have justified some of the
things we discovered, and I reiterate that this is a minority
of things. What we found during that inquiry, and is it not part
of the general perception, is that society has moved on, it has
become more questioning and less deferential, yet possibly the
Army, or certain sections of it, is still stuck back in some type
of nirvana of the 1950s that thinks that deference and not questioning
authority and having other choices in careers is perhaps --- my
colleague says public school attitudes are still prevalent.
Mr Hancock: Overweight public school
attitudes in the officer corps.
Q8 Chairman: Would you like to answer
that briefly? Be as quick as possible, please, because we have
got a lot of work to get through in less than half an hour.
Professor Dandeker: My brief response
to that is that I think the Armed Forces are much more aware of
that post-deferential climate to which reference has been made
and therefore of the need for the Armed Services to be very clear
and principled in terms of describing how the Army is rather different
from civilian society and why it needs to be so; it is not different
because of tradition but because of its operational need and I
think for the cohort of officers that have come through over the
last ten years that is second nature to them. They recognise the
society and how to adjust to it.
Q9 Mr Hancock: I would like to go
back to the previous report, particularly the Deepcut one, and
the previous retention report we did. One of the things that was
brought up time and time again was that the threshold for recruitment
had been lowered, the educational requirement and in some cases
the fitness requirement had been lowered, so it became a real
shock to people when they had been recruited what they were going
to go through, and part of the problems experienced not only at
Deepcut but throughout the military was the fact that they had
recruited people who maybe ten years previously or maybe a little
longer than that would not necessarily have got over the threshold
of being recruited in the first place and that the military were
not equipped to deal with this quality of recruit, and that is
why so much of the bullying took place which was identified not
just at Deepcut but throughout the Armed Forces although, as Kevan
rightly says, a minority of people were involved. That was given
to us as one of the real issues that the military had not been
able to deal with.
Professor Dandeker: I would just
say that on both sides of the Atlantic there is a persistent problem
of how to recruit sufficient numbers of people to the Armed Forces
and that certain compromises are made in terms of quality and
therefore adjustments have to be made in terms of the recruitment
and training regimes to allow that decline or dilution of quality
to be made up without sacrificing the overall quality of people
who come out at the other end of the training.
Q10 Chairman: Professor Strachan?
Professor Strachan: I would make
two very quick points. One is that the shift to more active operations
in itself takes some of the heat out of this argument, it seems
to me. One of the difficulties in peacetime training is that the
Army's declared need to be different becomes less self-evidently
in need of defending if the need to be different is more robustly
in the public's mind, which is the consequence of current operations.
The second point I would make is that there is clearly a distinction
between the hierarchical chain of command and the pressures that
that can generate, the patterns of behaviour, which are seen to
be central to the management of operations by the Armed Forces,
and personnel issues, many of which could be divorced, it seems
to me, from the command chain. I know that is not a view that
the Armed Forces themselves fully accept. They would see that
the management of personnel as essentially good command, and I
can see exactly where they are coming from in making that argument,
but there are points where these two things could be distinguished.
Maybe one of the messages that the Armed Forces should take back,
when and if the operational tempo declines, is the need only to
defend what has to be defended rather than find itself in the
position of having to defend things that are indefensible. It
has made the mistake of doing that in the past.
Q11 Robert Key: Historically is there
a relationship between the public perception of a popular or an
unpopular war and recruitment and retention?
Professor Strachan: Good question.
I would say recruitment and retention are probably more directly
linked to the employment and unemployment situation, in other
words, to what the market is doing. This country has actually
fought in very few deeply unpopular wars. All our recent experience
has been very much in wars of national necessity and I think we
probably have to go back to the South African war to find a war
that generated as much internal division as these wars have done.
Ironically, that particular war did generate great popular enthusiasm
for recruitment and voluntary enlistment despite division at home
about the legitimacy of the war. I would say one of the reasons
for that is that South Africa self-evidently was within the Empire
and an area of British colonial settlement, so it was rather different
from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Q12 Robert Key: Has it made it significantly
harder for the Ministry of Defence and the Services to manage
this problem in an age of instant media coverage of everything
that is happening, embedded journalists and media, mobile phones
and photographs, the internet and websites and all of that?
Professor Strachan: We have been
involved in a study at Oxford that has been looking at precisely
this issue, the critical moment between breaking news on websites,
blogs and all the rest of it and how Government reacts, and, of
course, the crucial issue is that the Ministry of Defence is put
into a reactive position rather than a proactive position. That
in a way has been the Ministry of Defence's natural position anyway,
even before mobile telephones and blogs and instantaneous newspaper
reporting. There does seem to be a need to think more proactively
about how you manage these issues and how you engage with the
public than we currently have within the Armed Forces, in particular
but more generally within the Ministry of Defence. I do not think
it is a uniformed Armed Forces issue. On the whole the uniformed
Armed Forces are very good at communicating from operational theatres.
Professor Dandeker: I have two
quick comments. There is an argument on your point about recruitment.
It may well be merely action and operations that have a positive
effect rather than the popularity of a campaign, just the presence
of action and deployments. There was a blip after the Falklands
War which I think was not so much due to the popularity of a particular
operation; it is just that the presence of action can encourage
risk-takers amongst the young to join. So far as the breaking
news phenomenon is concerned, this connects back to the quality
of recruitment and there is a tension there, I think, that on
the one hand contemporary operations in the light of Hew's comments
about media pressures mean that soldiers are much more under scrutiny,
under pressure, not so much from people in the conflict area but
about how their actions are going to be judged, pretty instantaneously,
and ensuring that one recruits and trains people able to deal
with those sorts of operational pressures and media pressures
is a telling point for the future.
Q13 Robert Key: So would it help
the situation if members of our Armed Forces were to be encouraged
to wear their uniforms more in public (except in Peterborough)
and is the idea of an Armed Forces Day a sensible approach to
the problem?
Professor Strachan: I think it
always makes sense for members of the Armed Forces to wear their
uniforms in public, although I have to say you do not want to
go as far as an American general the other day who came to see
me in Oxford, who intended to turn up in college in uniform and
was dissuaded, fortunately, at the last moment. I think it would
be helpful, and, of course, again we are in a situation, which
the Peterborough example shows, where a minority is taken to represent
the views of the majority. I know the majority would be perfectly
happy to see members of the Armed Forces wear uniforms in public
in exactly the same way as they are in other countries. I am less
in favour of an Armed Forces Day, I have to say, because that
does seem to me a certain amount of fig-leaf posturing. We do
have Remembrance Sunday which is designed to be a day when we
commemorate the dead and from which the Armed Forces collectively
benefit. I am less certain of the value of what could become yet
another day for neglect and abuse (I mean abuse by neglect) rather
than proper attention.
Q14 Robert Key: I was very sorry
to see that the Ministry of Defence had downgraded visits by the
Forces to our schools and the withdrawal of the teams and putting
it all on the internet, and now we hear the NUT is debating today
whether or not we should allow the military into our schools,
which in my constituency will go down like a lump of lead because
we are such a military community.
Professor Strachan: I think there
are already many areas of the country where it is difficult for
the military to get into schools. This is not a new phenomenon.
I think though it highlights something that is central to where
we should look for responses, and that is at the regional level
rather than the national level. There is a tendency to think of
the issues we are confronting as somehow coming out from London
and being UK-generated. I am sorry if I am going off at a tangent
in relation to where the Chairman necessarily wishes to be, but
I think at the moment we have Armed Forces that are regionally
located. The Navy is concentrated in the south of England and
round Faslane, the Air Force historically has been down the east
coast of England, and so on, and the result is that the rest of
the United Kingdom has a very low awareness of the presence of
the Armed Forces, even if they were to wear uniform in public,
just because they are not around. The diminution of the Reserve
Forces is another reason for that being the case, and yet there
is often within local communities (not necessarily within particular
schools but there is no reason why it should not be within schools)
a readiness to embrace local representation in the Armed Forces
if the opportunity is there.
Robert Key: So it is not a postcode problem
here in terms of saying that there are some areas where the military
are popular in schools and in the community and in other areas
not? It is just because they are either there or not there? You
are not suggesting that there are deliberate policies by particular
local authorities, say, to keep the police and the military out
of their schools?
Q15 Chairman: To add to that, you
said there were many areas where the Armed Forces could not get
in. Which are those areas?
Professor Strachan: When I was
Professor of Modern History at Glasgow we certainly had issues
in the Reserve Forces Association on which I served where there
were schools in the west of Scotland which would not accept visits.
Q16 Mr Jones: That is one example.
I have to say you are making this an issue which I do not recognise
from my own community.
Professor Strachan: I did not
say it was the whole of the United Kingdom. What I said was that
there are some areas where there are problems. That is what I
am trying to address. I quite recognise that it is different in
other areas but we are not talking about a uniform pattern here;
that is all I am saying.
Q17 Chairman: Professor Dandeker,
would you like to add anything?
Professor Dandeker: I agree with
Professor Strachan. I see no reason for a special Armed Forces
Day, particularly as it would be like reinventing tradition and
we already have well established traditions like Remembrance Day
and so on. I think encouraging the wearing of uniforms is fine.
I think the devil is in the detail. I think some kind of blanket,
mechanical instruction is not the most helpful way of proceeding.
I think encouragement is all that would be required. I also agree
that even if encouragement led to great success in terms of the
wearing of uniforms, the size of the Armed Forces means that you
could still get significant numbers of the population who did
not see a uniform, let alone what it meant. So far as the schools
are concerned, and I think this is very interesting, it is well
known now, particularly for the British Army, that they are aware,
like other organisations who want the best and brightest of young
people to come and join them, that young people get older quicker
and earlier and impressions are formed quite early. It is not
accident that 11-16 is a significant population. It is a malleable
population. That is why there are controversies surrounding the
presence of military recruiters in these sorts of environments.
It goes back to a point I made earlier: they are not recruiting;
they are cultivating the environment from which future recruits
may come, which is a very different point.
Chairman: We are moving on to the Military
Covenant.
Q18 Mr Hancock: There has been a
lot of debate about the Covenant, what it means to the military,
what it means to the general public. My question to both of you
is how important do you believe it is and what would be the advantage
of formalising a Covenant which is recognised by Parliament and
the military, not just the Army but the military generally, and
what would be the disadvantages of having a formalised Covenant?
Professor Strachan: I am going
to leave a large chunk of this because I think it is a future
issue. I am going to duck and say that historically one of the
things that has struck me is that the Military Covenant is a very
new expression. We peddle it as though it has always been there.
I was trying to think when actually it entered public discourse
and the answer is that it can only have been in the last couple
of years. What was there before was the sense of unlimited liability
on the part of those who join up, and of course that was often
stressed, to say that those who joined the Armed Services had
entered into an extraordinary contract which ultimately involved
the possible loss of their own lives, unlike any other form of
employment. But it was presented as a one-sided contract with
no expectations, extraordinarily, of a delivery from the other
side of the equation. The Military Covenant is essentially the
articulation of the idea that there should be a guarantee from
the other side. I suppose in many other forms of employment now
there is an expectation on both sides in terms of what should
be delivered, and clearly there is now an expectation from the
point of view of the British Armed Forces, but many of the issues
that are raised under the Military Covenant are issues to do with
specific under-provision in areas for which we should be providing,
even if there were a written and adhered-to Military Covenant.
The issues of housing, for example, pension rights, proper support
to your workforce, are issues that should be addressed whether
you have a written Military Covenant or you do not have a Military
Covenant. I am not entirely persuaded that there is a need for
a written document and I am slightly surprised that it has become
assumed that there is such a thing as a Military Covenant.
Q19 Mr Hancock: I would like to hear
what Professor Dandeker thinks about the advantages and disadvantages.
Professor Dandeker: I have two
or three quick points if I may. One is that when there is a discussion
of the need to be explicit about some kind of contract that itself
is interesting. It shows that some of the intuitive, unstated
assumptions governing the relationship between military and Government
and military and community have broken down when people start
grasping for explicit statements, and I think that in itself is
interesting. That is the first point.
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