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Young people criticise military activities in schools as government announces more funding for cadets

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A week after the government pledged a further £1 million for more cadet forces in state secondary schools, a new film is launched which shows that many young people are critical of the promotion of military activities in their schools.

The film, ‘Engage: the military and young people’, which will be launched on Thursday 26 June, explores the opinions of British teenagers on the military’s ‘youth engagement’ activities – particularly the cadets – and the governments ‘Military Ethos in Schools’ policy.

On 18 June the Department for Education announced that it will give £1 million (with additional match funding) from the Libor banking fines towards the expansion of the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) in state schools, as part of the Department for Education’s ‘Military Ethos in Schools’ programme (2, 3). This is on top of the almost £11 million already allocated to establish 100 new CCF units by 2015 (4) and nearly £5 million for military-led activities for ‘disengaged pupils’ (5).

ForcesWatch, who commissioned the film, are concerned that the expansion of cadet units, and other military-led activities, in schools serves as a soft recruitment tool and training programme for the armed forces and question whether the promotion of military activities within education is appropriate (6).… Read more

The British Army frontline: women and children first

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Child Soldiers International: We now face the prospect of 16 year old girls joining the army in combat roles.

Shortly after announcing it would be reviewing the ban on women in combat roles, the Ministry of Defence last week published annual recruitment figures which revealed that 1,140 women joined the armed forces in the year to April 2014, accounting for 9.6 per cent of total intake.  This marks a small increase on the previous year’s figures, when just 8.4 per cent of new recruits were female.  Nevertheless, it is clear that the armed forces – and the Army in particular – remain overwhelmingly a young man’s game: last year, 17-year-old boys enlisting outnumbered women and girls of all ages combined.

Regardless of the numbers involved, it is right for the MoD continuously to review its personnel policies to ensure they are in line with anti-discrimination legislation and reflective of modern social norms.  If combat roles are opened up to women, it will be one of the biggest developments in British armed forces personnel policy since 1999, when a European Court of Human Rights judgement forced the MoD to end its ban on gay servicemen and women.

Prior to the court’s ruling, the MoD had argued vehemently that allowing openly gay people to serve in the armed forces would have catastrophic effects on unit cohesion and operational effectiveness. … Read more

Your country needs your children – MoD targets teens to fix recruitment crisis

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  • More than 1 in 10 Army recruits are now just 16 years old
  • More than 1 in 4 are under 18 – too young to be deployed

Amid ongoing controversy around the MoD’s struggling recruitment campaigns for the armed forces, figures published this week reveal that the Army has resorted to increasing numbers of 16-year-olds in an attempt to fix the recruitment shortfall.

Annual personnel figures published by the MoD on Thursday show an increase in the number of 16-year-olds recruited from 9 per cent of total Army intake in 2012/13 to 13 per cent in 2013/14. Many of them would have begun the enlistment process when they were 15 years old. More than one in four (27 per cent) Army recruits last year were under 18 – too young to be deployed into hostilities. In total numbers, recruitment figures for 16- and 17-year-olds were higher than for any other age groups.

These figures are released just a few months after the Defence Select Committee expressed frustration at the MoD’s continued failure to produce any evidence to justify its policy of recruiting minors, which research has shown to be financially and operationally unsound. The Defence Committee had previously challenged the MoD to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the policy in July 2013.

… Read more

UK under fire for recruiting an ‘army of children’

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MoD finds itself in the company of countries such as North Korea over use of teenage soldiers.

More than one in 10 new Army recruits are boy soldiers of just 16 years old, according to the latest figures released by the Ministry of Defence. And more than one in four of all new Army recruits are under 18 – too young to be sent into combat.

The figures, released last week, have sparked renewed criticism of the British Army’s use of boy soldiers. Following an outcry over the deployment of 17-year-olds to the Gulf War in 1991, and to Kosovo in 1999, the Army amended its rules stopping soldiers under 18 from being sent on operations where there was a possibility of fighting. Despite this, at least 20 soldiers aged 17 are known to have served in Afghanistan and Iraq due to errors by the MoD.

Critics claim the figures mean Britain stands alongside some of the world’s most repressive regimes by recruiting children into the armed forces – among under 20 countries, including North Korea and Iran, that allow 16-year-olds to join up. They accused the MoD of deliberately targetting teenagers not old enough to vote in a bid to boost recruitment.

… Read more

Drone Wars: Pilots reveal debilitating stress beyond virtual battlefield

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“To extinguish a person’s life is a very personal thing. While physically we don’t experience the five senses when we engage a target — unlike [how] an infantryman might — in my experience, the emotional impact on the operator is equal.”

In the final years of his nearly 30-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Slim spent 10 to 12 hours a day in a cool, dark room in the Arizona desert, stationed in front of monitors that beamed back aerial footage from Afghanistan.

Slim’s unit operated around the clock, flying Predator dronesthousands of miles away over Afghanistan, to monitor — and sometimes eliminate — “targets” across the war-ridden country. As a sensor operator for these remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs, it was his job to coordinate the drones’ onboard cameras, and, if a missile was released, to laser-guide the weapon to its destination.

These types of missions are part of the military’s expanding drone program, which has developed a reputation for carrying out shadowy and highly classified operations — ones that sometimes blur legal or moral lines. As such, their use in warfare has been steeped in controversy. [How Unmanned Drone Aircraft Work (Infographic)]

Critics say firing weapons from behind a computer screen, while safely sitting thousands of miles away, could desensitize pilots to the act of killing.… Read more

Arms and the Woman: Militarizing Gender Wars

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You know the British Army is experiencing a crisis in recruitment when they start to make noises about ending the ban on women in combat roles. Earlier this year, General Sir Peter Wall, head of the UK armed forces, conceded that it might be time to drop the current restrictions that bar women from the infantry section of the army. The general admitted that such a move would make the armed forces “look more normal to society” at a time when they were desperately trying to attract new recruits, both full and part-time. It would also demonstrate that the organization was committed to equal opportunities despite women comprising only 10% of the total workforce.

Perceptions of soldiering as a unique form of public service draw on notions of gender that are deeply rooted in society yet, at the same time, media representations of military work also shape these norms, as well as occasionally challenging them. Discussions about female soldiers routinely provoke ‘common sense’ observations about the physical and psychological differences between men and women while gender neutral access to combat roles is often considered the ultimate test of social equality. But this focus on women’s capacity to kill can be a distraction from other crucial dimensions of gender and militarism that deserve public scrutiny, not least the long running argument about whether human rights laws should be applicable within military institutions.… Read more

Take arms firms out of the Big Bang Fair

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Letter signed by over 100, including ForcesWatch

As engineers, health professionals, educationists and others who believe in the power of science and engineering as a force for good, we are writing to condemn the continued sponsorship of today’s Big Bang Fair by BAE Systems and other arms companies such as Thales, Selex ES, Doosan, Rolls-Royce and Airbus. It might seem like a joke: the UK’s largest youth science and engineering education event, named the Big Bang Fair, is sponsored by companies who make very big bangs indeed. Except the arms trade isn’t funny. All of these companies have a track record of supplying countries with appalling human rights records. Doosan is involved in cluster bomb manufacture.

The casual and unquestioned way these companies are allowed public relations space at educational events reflects a serious problem at the heart of modern British science. We need programmes which offer young people unbiased spaces to learn about science and engineering as it is currently constituted – including environmental and human rights concerns – and what it could look like.

If the government is serious in its support of science and engineering – not just a few choice companies associated with them – it must invest more fully in education so the Big Bang Fair 2015 need not be reliant on sponsorship which so narrows its scope.… Read more

FUTURE ARMY 2020: Defence Committee increases pressure to MoD to raise enlistment age to 18

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The Defence Select Committee has increased the pressure on the MoD to stop enlisting minors, in a report published today.

The report, which follows a major inquiry into the MoD’s Future Army 2020 plan, called on the MoD “to respond in detail to the argument that the Army could phase out the recruitment of minors without detriment to the Army 2020 plans”.

The Future Army 2020 report highlighted evidence presented by campaign groups Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch that raising the enlistment age to 18 would save around £94 million per year on training costs and increase the Army’s operational effectiveness.

The Committee’s challenge over enlistment age comes just a few months after church groups across the UK, including the Church of Scotland and the Bishops of the Church in Wales, wrote to the Minister for the Armed Forces calling for the enlistment age to be raised to 18. Recent research has shown that those who enlist below this age are at higher risk of injury in training, suicide, bullying, sexual harassment, mental illness, alcoholism, long-term unemployment, and violent offending than recruits who enlist as adults.

Following the Defence Committee’s previous challenge over the recruitment of minors in its report on the Education of Service Personnel last year, the MoD instructed the Army to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the policy.… Read more

Disaster militarism

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The country’s military institutions must not be seen as deserving of special consideration. Once the ethos of public service has been smashed and discredited by neoliberal restructuring, the danger is that it will take more than an army to bring it back. By Vron Ware.

For some time now, Up in Arms has been drawing attention to the process of militarisation taking place in the UK. This has meant tracking the changing profile of the armed forces in civil society, ears pricked for anything that suggests that military norms and values are inherently superior and therefore worthy of unquestioning support. It can be hard to distinguish the long term shifts from the immediate gear changes, and to know how seriously to take some of the ‘information’ that makes it into the public domain – particularly if it emanates from unnamed ‘senior’ officials in defence departments or cranky media pundits with an interest in military welfare.

Take the use of soldiers in Britain’s recent flood disasters. Following their successful deployment as security guards for the London Olympics, the MoD could be more confident that the public would accept their role as a reserve body of odd-job men who by their physical strength and numbers alone could be put to work in a civil emergency.… Read more

Gove’s Troops To Teachers ‘A Costly Flop’

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Michael Gove’s scheme to train ex-squaddies as teachers was labelled an “expensive flop” yesterday after it was revealed the Tory Education Secretary mustered just 132 recruits.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal 322 former soldiers applied for teacher training between March 2011 and April 2013

Despite just 132 being accepted, Mr Gove has now thrown £10 million in public funds at a new two-year Troops to Teachers scheme.

If the latest scheme enlists the same low numbers, the maximum cost of getting each new recruit ready for the classroom could be a stunning £75,000.

A Department for Education spokeswoman insisted yesterday that the £10 million is the maximum available for the programme over the next two years.

But National Union of Teachers North England regional secretary Mike McDonald is among campaigners to have raised concerns over Mr Gove’s latest “vanity project.”

He told the Star: “He’s very austere when it comes to things like teachers’ pay, pensions and conditions but when it comes to his pet projects such as this, free schools and academies it seems money is no object.

“It’s just one waste after another.

“I’m not against the training of troops to be teachers but to spend this amount of money on it and for it to yield such a poor result is quite appalling, particularly with all the cuts affecting public services.”… Read more