Army Reserve grows by just 60 despite aggresive recruitment push

The public does not have the patience or willing to contribute wealth and time for that to happen. Unfortunately.

Then we should never have taken any part in reconstituting an Afghan state, merely smash-and-grab against OBL and co., and the continuation of the war into 2014 is purposeless.

National service is not needed and completely counter productive. That is a stupid argument.

We need numbers, but those numbers need to be in the thousands, not millions.

My point was that the Government does not have an empty chamber in terms of boosting serving numbers. In that case don't make it universal? 1 in every X (whatever number it works out to be) 18-23 year old males does NS, random ballot same as jury service.

I agree. If you are going to go into conflict, one must commit and see it through to the very end, not just leave half way through so somebody else clears up the **** left behind. We never had that commitment in the first place.

It's because we have had no strong leaders (at prime ministerial or cabinet level) for the past 20 years who know anything about handling conflicts or resolving them. Not one of them have ever been in a school fight, never mind the Armed Forces. Bunch of jumped up pompous public school boys who could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Intelligent, but not street smart.

National Service is hated by the military. You get unmotivated, unsuitable candidates doing jobs they didn't volunteer for and are almost universally useless at it. A 2yr service period would barely cover the time it takes for the average recruit to become fully trained, let alone productive.

And that's before we even talk about how crap they are at the actual job. In Vietnam the Army units made up of conscriptees suffered far higher casualty rate than regular Army units.

My point was that the Government does not have an empty chamber in terms of boosting serving numbers. In that case don't make it universal? 1 in every X (whatever number it works out to be) 18-23 year old males does NS, random ballot same as jury service.

I'd rather fight alongside 1 volunteer, than 100 conscripts, because 1 volunteer would get the job done, whilst 100 conscripts will think up 100 reasons why their weapon does not work/ injuries/ ethical conflicts in the mind.

Conscription is not the answer and is completely counter productive.

What is then? You can increase pay but I don't think pay is what encourages people to join up or discourages them, plus long term you can make plenty of money by working for a private outfit like Academi. I suppose they could highlight the chance if doing private work more in advertising, but that probably runs contrary to the ethos of the armed forces.

I am not sure it is about fighting. We win fights almost effortlessly, even despite doing so with 9 fingers tied to our feet. The problem is their approach to "state building"; part of it is scientific and part of it is ideological.

First, the scientific - they believe that everyone is fundamentally not just the same biologically, but the same in terms of values, desires, and aspirations. The social democratic state is not used everywhere, but only because not everywhere is as advanced as the West. Once a social democratic state is established, it will flourish and endure forever, just like in the West. Ideological differences with the West will vanish.

It should have become clear this was false after observing 10-20 years of post-colonial Africa, Latin America, India, or at least the fake democracies of far Eastern Europe. But it has not. People believe, quite genuinely, that once girls go to school Islam will wither to a husk as Christianity has done in the West. Even if those schools are teaching that the Koran is the sole indisputable truth and the Mullahs are a greater authority than the state.

The Taliban insurgency will last forever not because we don't defeat them in fire fights, but because we permit the whole mechanism of indoctrination and recruitment to continue even on the ground we have captured. It doesn't exactly resemble those processes in an industrial state, so for the most part we don't even see it for what it is.

The second is ideological. There are certain beliefs that will prompt the current governing class to purge the unbeliever with fire and sword, Islamism just isn't one of them. Putin passed a law to stop people promoting homosexuality publicly. This sparked outrage, some argued even a rekindling of the Cold War. Even in this country one can lose one's job for being critical of homosexuality. But executions for apostasy are just "controversial", and anyway part of a proud anti-colonial tradition.

There's simply no desire to see crimes committed in the name of Islam in the same light as crimes committed in the name of Naziism. That's just the way things are done there, and anyway, if they'd kept quiet about it they would have been ok, if indeed they didn't deliberately provoke the state to bolster their asylum claim... An attempt to squash out Islamic theocracy in a conquered country would not attract the moral legitimacy at home needed to conduct a thorough de-Islamification on par with de-Nazification.

The conclusion is that the West cannot defeat Islamism by military means and even the local benefits of our military actions are likely to be nugatory, despite the enormous expense required to minimise casualties to a point where they are tolerated at all. I suggest a more appropriate strategy would be to set up an analogue to 'Radio Free Europe'; some kind of 'Radio Atheist Middle East', but more subtle than that. The military battle cannot be won without first winning the ideological battle.

Well sacking 20 000 is not a good start to the day. Neither is the cuts to the Ghurkhas, the best recruiting brigade in the entire British Army. Another good start would be having recruiting run by..... recruiting sergeants, not some jumped up private recruitment firm with 17k a year employees guiding young men and women on their future. Face to face guidance with a man who has actually been in for 10 - 15 years and who know the forces inside out is the way forward. This along with more targeted recruitment at 6 form colleges, in the inner city's/ ex industrial towns, and not bloody cinema adverts especially, will drive up recruitment. It pisses me off when I see this **** in the cinema wedged in between the hobbit trailer and the new 300 movie, and the new adverts are just patronising and **** anyway, it's not a ****ing war film

The entire recruitment area is a shambles, and needs a good look at. It took me 5 bloody months just to get a confirmation for my medical when I joined. This is where the problems arise. Who is going to wait 5 months and deny other decent job offers, just to go for a medical which one may not even pass? I know my best friend basically rang up and told the guy at the end of the line to go **** himself because his AOSB briefing took so ****ing long to get a confirmed date due to the company dithering around, and he decided to get a higher apprenticeship someplace else.

That's even before we get onto pay.

I agree TV adverts generally are a bad idea for any career, they suggest the recruiter us desperate and/or the job's ****, after all they may advertise teaching and the Army but you never see 'Become a doctor' or 'How about Goldman?' adverts. But every other profession does the thing with careers advisors, you don't see 15 years qualified solicitors being brought in to promote the profession, I think it's just a case of training them well. The Kaw Soc has some that go round schools and unis who are reasonably knowledgeable and doubt they're topping 20k.

Recruitment could probably be streamlined a lot but i'm genuinely lost as to where do you find good recruitment people. Even the chinnies in my sector, some of whom will pull in 6 figures and all of whom earn decent money seem like they couldn't organise the proverbial distillery based drinking session, and they're presumably the top end.

With pay I suppose it's the same conflict as any public service work, do you want people who are just in it for the money and if so where do you find it? After all most high paid jobs generate the money themselves, there is that opportunity for mercenaries but the Army are public sector, maybe do like hospital consultants and allow people to work part of their time for the Army and part of their time in private sector? What they could scrap is tying clearly non-operational staff to a rank based salary. I looked into Army Legal Services and the message was 'You're paid by rank but the rank will be whatever's necessary to be competitive with the going rate for private practice lawyers at the time', which seems needlessly rigid and not in keeping with the idea you earn rank.

I don't really have time to go into this. But that is just naivety.

Armies are not there to just stop invasion. I don't even know where to begin with this. It's like I have just confronted a toddler.

And no we won't have other nations backing if we ourselves do not have an army. You give something to gain it. That's how international politics works.

This guy is right.

The army is not there just to stop invasions.

It must also fulfill its role of being America's lapdog and following it around the world to every last wretched illegal immoral war.

I'm not persuaded that pay/wages is the problem here, if you look at the pay structure for soldiers, (not officers), it is quite reasonable, especially given that a significant proportion of those joining would not of done well at school, and the only other realistic options are building work, mechanic, labouring etc etc (real working class jobs, not that they are bad, I am just making an observation). Within 5-6 years you will be earning around the average wage, so if you join at 18, by the time you are 22 and say you got promoted to lance corporal (normal timescale), you will be on 21k which is about the average wage. It's more than many graduates are on anyway. So I don't think pay is to much of the problem. Maybe a rise by a few % would be nice, but I don't think it is the underlying problem. http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.army.mod.uk%2Fdocuments%2Fgeneral%2FRates_of_pay_Soldier.pdf&ei=M-M2U96ADpOrhQfwn4CACg&usg=AFQjCNEK1utWf8_slfdhswDLK1Ph3l5OBA&bvm=bv.63808443,d.bGQ - rates of pay pdf document

"Back in the good old day", recruitment was done by a recruiting sergeant, who was at near the end of the career, and was the dogs *******s about information around the Armed Forces. I honestly believe giving the recruitment responsibilities to civvies is where we have gone drastically wrong. The IT system does not work, they take eons to process personal information and are not organised. Nobody is going to wait around a year from starting the application to getting a confirmed date of basic training whilst there are other decent job offers going. No rational or normal person would do that. There are bills to pay, mouths to feed.

That and the way the Armed Forces is run by politicians.

Sorry, I largely agree on wages, thought you were suggeting they were too low abd was wonderibg how you'd go about increasing them. Though for officers maybe different, it's hard to stop the siren call of the City/liberal professions without some kind of danger money. After all as a document processing desk jockey in a nice, warm office in the centre of one of the world's biggest and most desirable cities I'll earn 10k more than my mate who went through OTC, whereas my mate on the rigs (still considerably less dangerous than Afghanistan) is making double what I will.

But surely you'd still need a central administration system to process all the info still once the recruiting sergeant has persuaded them to join up? You might get more apllying but the slow processing of applications would still be there.

Good ground breaking new argument right there. you should do your PHD on the subject

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Ever used the A2? Nothing wrong with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I personally don't think the senior NCO's get paid enough along with the proffesionally qualified and the officers in the REME, rather than the junior ranks. I think they get paid well, but personally I would increase it by a few thousand just so we keep them/ get better engineering graduates. Overall, however i think the pay is good for both officers and other ranks. Though it's always nice to get a pay rise, and I dont think anybody will complain

Yes you would need the central administration system, but it can be run far more effectively than it is now. Most of the time people are just forgotton about and you keep on having to ring them to get anything done.

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Yes I have used the A2(extensively) , it's serviceable but barely.
Even the SLR was practically a better weapon, certainly more reliable.

If it wasn't broke major figures in the Military wouldn't be calling (for the third time) for it's removal from service.