Privatise the Military, Change the World.

Guest Contributor

It’s well-known that the British military is suffering from a ‘recruitment and retention’ crisis. It has been trying to solve this for some time with lots of small, marginal tweaks to the existing system that produce little more than rounding error improvements to recruitment or retention and together do nothing to stem the slow disintegration of all three services. ‘Woke’ adverts, tweaks to the medical process so that people with asthma can join, removal of traditional fitness standards and their replacement with weird pilates-style movements like medicine ball throws – are like trying to bail out the Titanic.

There is clearly something broken about the inherent logic of military recruitment in Britain today. We’re not at war, so nobody will sign up to ‘protect our country’. We have a generous welfare state and a highly fluid labour market due to things like OpenUniversity and the ‘gig economy’, so nobody will join the military to escape poverty. Once upon a time, some might have joined up to see the world, but low-cost air travel has removed that incentive. Why sign your youth away when you can fly anywhere in Europe for the price of a nice dinner?

Telegraph op-eds ghostwritten for Army top brass drip with contempt for today's youth, who no longer want to serve their country because of gentle parenting techniques, marry-huana and Netflix. But if I wanted to 'serve my country', why would I join the military? Who am I serving by spending 10 years of my life semi-submerged in muddy puddles in Wales? Constantly training for wars that won’t come, at great expense to the taxpayer.

Or maybe those wars will come, and I will bravely defend the British people from, erm, having their Soft Power eroded, or from whatever would happen if we don’t honour our international obligations to Israel, or something. Besides, in the era of mass immigration the very idea of the 'nation' has been deconstructed into oblivion anyway.

"Zoomers, you must spend your 20s engaging in repetitive mock-battles while living in mouldy battery farm-style barracks next to Afghan asylum seekers and taking home minimum wage just in case our Nation - that is, the 70 million or so people with no defining shared characteristic apart from the legal right to reside in Britain, which is a right freely given by the government to anyone in the world anyway - requires you to Serve in a Conflict which may have such a vague justification as 'Human Rights' or 'International Law'.

You must do so enthusiastically because your grandparents lived much tougher lives than you - they grew up with only three channels on the tellybox. What’s that? You’d rather live and work in London for a Big Four consulting firm? You were all told to go to university and now you’re expecting white-collar professional jobs? That’s the problem with your generation, always ‘me, me, me’. The only thing for it is hard labour until you learn to Work as a Team. Also, porn is now banned. Fuck you.” It’s unsurprising that this is not a popular pitch.

The military isn’t just poorly paid, it demands long periods of time away from home and makes a normal family life almost impossible. The only ‘civvie’ jobs that put that level of strain on people’s personal lives are oil rig engineers and saturation divers, and they consequently pay many times more than the military does. Without a war, without a near-monopoly on adventure and travel and without a nation to even defend, no amount of pay-rises, veteran discounts at McDonalds, free childcare, or signing bonuses are going to fix this problem.

National Service was proposed by the last government because some ‘at the top’ clearly know that this problem isn’t fixable. However, national service was always completely Unworkable. And I don’t mean unworkable as in ‘difficult’ or ‘currently prevented from being possible by law’, I mean it was always obviously impossible.The government could not organise the conscription of a generation for no specific purpose, in anticipation of a possible war with Russia over an issue that does not remotely impact us, because some brassy matrons think kids today are lazy. It would be unable to crack down on universal evasion or prevent the exodus of the entire working age population if it tried to do so. There was never any risk of the British government even attempting this course of action.

But there were attempts by some on twitter to suggest that there was a real threat of conscription as a new form of Woke Totalitarianism, and some tried to innovate a theory that ‘militarism’ was some kind of intrinsic pillar of Wokeness, but this is ridiculous. The British military (especially the Army and Royal Marines) is staffed mostly by right-wing extremists, even though top brass are unsurprisingly in agreement with our political establishment that the role of the military is to be the expeditionary arm of the British state, which is an all-purpose NGO. The British military has Woke upper leadership, like almost every single private and public organisation in the world, because Wokeness is the global official ideology.

With National Service ruled out, and tweaks to service life being insufficient, we come to the third possible solution to the problem. This what is actually being resorted to, silently: commonwealthifiction. The process by which this is taking place and the consequences that will ensue have been described already here. I strongly recommend readers acquaint themselves with this phenomenon because it threatens to cause the next massive wave of immigration to plug a perceived labour shortage that utterly destroys the sector/institution it is supposed to save. Hospitality, health and social care and higher education are the three biggest victims so far devoured by the Tyranid swarm.

The substack article linked above presaged a brazen campaign by certain politicians and 'Defence' hobby journalists to lift the cap on Commonwealth recruitment into the military, and also the foundation of a new 'Gurkha Artillery regiment'. The government clearly can't afford to pay British soldiers enough to make soldiering an attractive profession, but third-worlders from commonwealth countries may provide a limitless source of recruits if a British passport is given to every soldier. Cue calls for a brilliantly barmy and bonkers new British Sikh regiment.

Now, dearest J’accuse reader, you’ll be delighted to know that there is one more option. There is a solution to the problem - a moderate, sensible, innovative solution, but one that requires a bit of pragmatism and outside-the-box thinking. That solution is: a blimmin’ brilliant public-private partnership. A Partnership with British Business. Solutions where the government doesn’t have to do anything but just has to *stop* doing something, or make it legal for people to do something and profit from it themselves, are always the best.

At present, military training institutions (Sandhurst, Catterick, Dartmouth, Lympstone, Cranwell etc) accept recruits, train them, and turn them into soldiers (airmen, sailors, whatever) with a minimum service length. These institutions should be rethought of as Universities training people to receive specific Military Qualifications, like undergraduate degrees. There should be no minimum service length and the majority of the regular Army should be converted into Reserve units, save for a few specific units maintained full-time as strategic assets. The Defence of the Realm can be assured by Trident, a large reserve force and an Iron Dome-like ballistic missile defence umbrella.

The intricacies of this plan are not especially important and could be debated by more intelligent and better-informed individuals than myself. What is important is the principle, which is the privatisation of the soldiering profession. Think about it like privatisation of the railways – the State clearly can’t administer a military. Whether the Royal Navy and RAF should undergo this change is debatable as well – I believe they should. Perhaps you believe that abolishing the regular Army is too far, in which case a lite form of this plan would be just allowing a portion of soldiers to take civil service-like private sector work placements, subject to approval.

Truth be told, dearest reader, this wouldn’t be done so that squaddies can resume careers as electricians with ‘Lvl 1. Infantryman qualified’ stickers on the side of their vans. No, the point of this would be to allow qualified soldiers to take private military contracts immediately after passing out of training. Private security companies pay ex-soldiers six-figure sums for fairly routine close protection work. These contracts are freely available to find online. Actual private military work in the third world is even more ridiculously lucrative, but rarer and much more dangerous. The demand for these services is going to increase, especially if supply is made freely available. In case I haven’t been clear: I want to put the British Army up for sale.

Soldiering would be transformed into a middle-class profession almost overnight. Private soldiers would see action all across the world if they so desired, and would be properly reimbursed for it. Contracts would be voluntary, and the government could easily retain control by maintaining a public ledger of approved customers for British-qualified military personnel, in line with foreign policy goals. Third-world warlords could hire a British Army regiment to crush their rivals in exchange for giving mineral rights to British companies. Threaten another friendly warlord, and the British government could instruct its soldiers to return home. Foreign policy conducted by manipulation of British PMC activity alone, at zero cost to the taxpayer.

Policy wonks, boffins, think-tankers, Anglopooooosters, that is all. Please click the x in the top right-hand corner of the screen. You have received your orders, now go and advocate for this change on X.com. Thanks. That’s the end of the article.