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. But after all those years in Iraq and Afghanistan, how
does this latest form of unarmed yard work change public perceptions of the jobs
that soldiers are actually trained to do, at great expense to the taxpayer?
The army securing properties in Surrey following torrential rain in Feb 2014. Demotix/Maja Smiejkowska. All rights reserved.
We might have got used to seeing uniformed soldiers in public spaces.
But it’s still slightly jarring to watch troops of marines wading through floodwaters
on the Somerset Levels, or to read BBC
headlines like:
‘Military on the streets in Berkshire’. It’s not just sandbags at dawn either
either - the MoD has
offered the
expertise of army engineers to rebuild train track in the South West. And while
people are starting to wonder what soldiers will actually do when they are not
dispatched to far-off wars, a recent
Guardian
editorial asked
the question: ‘do we need to start thinking about our military establishment
less in terms of firepower and more in terms of a fire brigade, with war
somewhere in the middle, rather than right at the top, of the list of duties?’
Blurring
the lines
It is important to demystify the conditions under which military labour
is performed and to be reminded that it belongs to the wider realm of public
service, along with other tasks such as policing, fire-fighting, teaching and
nursing. But there is also a danger in blurring the lines between what is
military and what is civilian, a development that is becoming increasingly
common in the UK.
The armed forces sit uneasily in the public sector, estranged from other
public service organisations not least because their workers are trained to
kill people and to smash things up. I’m not being funny – this is the basis of
British Army doctrine as it has been defined in the late twentieth century. A key
document issued by the army secretariat in 1996, entitled ‘The Extent to which
the Army has a Right to be Different’, explains that:
‘The
fundamental and perhaps only difference of significance between military
service and other legitimate professions and occupations is that servicemen and
women must be prepared, at any time and in the service of others rather than
themselves, to participate in protracted and sometimes wholesale destruction
and violence, to kill and be killed for benign and politically justifiable
purposes.’
This unchanging characteristic of warfare and the ‘profession of arms’
can be distinguished from other professions, such as the police and fire
services – who also face death and injury – because ‘none face the potentially
devastating experience of taking life as a normal part of their roles’.
However, in the UK, as in many other countries they also occupy a
disproportionate amount of space as a unique institution that symbolises the
essence of the nation as a historical entity. As we are bound to be reminded in
this World War 1 anniversary year, military service is often cast as a form of
sacrifice that is drenched in the blood of those who have fallen in previous
wars in defence of the nation.
But nowadays working in military organisations is also a job like many
others, even though it might require a particular mindset and aptitude. It
involves training, career development, promotion paths and other mundane issues
such as pension schemes and work-related perks and benefits. Of course, this
does not include the right to belong to a trade union. But for a lot of people,
joining the army is regarded as an opportunity to gain qualifications,
prestige, experience and physical prowess. For many officer types, a spell in
the forces is a stepping stone to a lucrative career in the corporate world.
However, the process of attracting new recruits can be a fraught process for
military employers with their insatiable demand for mouldable minds and young,
fit bodies.
Blocked pipelines
One of the biggest problems faced by the armed forces in almost any
country that has abolished conscription is keeping the pipeline of suitable
young entrants flowing. While recruitment provides a focal point for examining
public attitudes to military work, there is surprisingly little discussion
about the factors that might entice or deter young people from applying. These
are issues that can become more intriguing by comparison between national
contexts.
In
Taiwan, for
example, where conscription is being replaced by an all-volunteer army, problems
of recruitment have arisen because of the army’s reputation for brutalising new
recruits. As a result, the government has been forced to reduce numbers of military
personnel from 215,000 to 170,000 over the next five years.
Up in Arms has reported before how
some European countries have opted to keep conscription and, in the case of
Norway, even make it gender neutral, rather than follow the trend to an all-volunteer
professional army.
Consider this list of reasons why Europe’s armed forces have struggled
with recruitment over the last few decades. Kings War Studies professor Christopher
Dandeker and his colleague David Mason recently summarised the problem of ‘how to secure an appropriate, consistent and
sustained level of voluntary enlistment’:
profound cultural changes, such as the decline of
deference and the rise of individualism; shifts in relationships between social
classes arising from the decline of the traditional working class and the rise
of an aspiring middle class; the emergence of new economic sectors in the
second half of the
twentieth century, such as those based on knowledge, marketing and service
provision; increasing levels of participation in higher education among members
of the military recruitment age group; and social changes relating to
population profiles and acceptable gender roles.
Add to this the more immediate issue of mass redundancies after an
extended period of wasteful, unpopular and exorbitant warfare, and the problems
can only increase.
The army is now given space in job centres to set up their own
recruitment
‘clinics’ in an
attempt to attract potential employees, both full time and reserves. Although
the mechanics of the recruitment process have been handed over to Capita, in
line with teachers and many other professions, catastrophic IT failures have
meant that soldiers have been pulled back into ‘front line’ roles, appearing at
jobs
fairs all over the country. The crisis in recruitment, appearing at a time of
substantial redundancies and cutbacks to the armed forces – the army in
particular – has received massive coverage, particularly from supporters in
high places.
One of the most recent and
widely reported was former US defence secretary Robert Gates who promoted his
new book in the UK with the argument that Britain would no long be able to be a
full partner to the US because of the drastic cuts to its defence budget.
What he didn’t say was that
the Department of Defense in his own country was also being forced to make
stringent cuts and that comparable arguments about the feasibility of a large
standing military continue to make headlines over there too. US Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel has recently outlined
plans to
shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since 1940. The new
spending proposal was described by ‘officials’ as the first Pentagon budget
aggressively to push the military off the war footing that was adopted after
September 2001. This has been met by a predictably angry response, not just
from certain Congress members who oppose substantial cuts to numbers as well as
hardware but also from groups like the National Guard
Association, an advocacy group for reservists, which fears that their members
will be affected.
Flood
fighters
Elsewhere the
Telegraph has been waging a vociferous
campaign against the MoD plan to supplement full time soldiers with part-time
ones. A recent article highlighted the fact that Simon
Weston, survivor of the Falklands War, explains why he wouldn’t join the army
now if he was young. ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t sign up now. There have just been
cuts after cuts after cuts, and the Army has been left a shadow of its former
self.’
This coverage
is in stark contrast with the fate of other public sector organizations
undergoing cuts and restructuring. Firefighters, for example,
perform a dangerous job which entails risking their own lives to protect and
save members of the public. Yet their services are being cut back and their facilities
sold off like there’s no tomorrow. January saw 10 fire stations
closed in
London, including the UK’s oldest station in Clerkenwell. A total of 552 jobs
are also being slashed and the number of fire engines is being reduced by 14.
In the north, the
Tyne and
Wear Fire Authority voted to
close three fire stations, cut 131 firefighter jobs and axe six fire appliances
(with two more being ‘stood down’ at night). Meanwhile members of the Fire
Brigades Union have been staging strikes in protest at government
proposals to
increase pension contributions.
The absence of a public
outcry over these cuts and closures reflects the relatively low profile of
firefighters as a particular category of public servants.
Guardian columnist Suzanne
Moore was one
of the few to spell out what these cuts mean, pouring scorn on ‘this brave new world where we can somehow have more
health and safety with fewer people taking care of us.’ She pointed out that
the ‘savings’ were all the more reckless since firefighters were also proving
indispensible in current flooding emergencies. In such extreme and unpredictable
weather it seemed utterly bizarre to reduce the services that are trained to
respond.
The army outside a house in Surrey following the flooding. Demotix/Maja Smiejkowska. All rights reserved.
When the flood waters
started to rise back in January, few expected that the regular emergency
workers would be replaced or augmented by Marines and army engineers trained to
build bridges in hostile environments. Perhaps the
Guardian editorial was correct in predicting that soldiers would adopt the role of fire-fighters as their war duties appeared
to diminish. That scenario is entirely in keeping with their extraordinary
claim
that Britain is about to enjoy ‘peace’ after 100 years of constant conflict. If
only it was that simple. As Seumas Milne
pointed
out in response, ‘For the political and commercial elite, British warmaking
under the wing of Washington is about state prestige, corporate profits and the
protection of a system of global economic privilege’.
Defending public service
A few weeks
ago, armed forces chief General Nick
Houghton publicly voiced his unease about the organisation
being severely affected in the interests of saving money. He warned that
Britain’s military would become a ‘hollow force’ with state-of-the-art
equipment but no one to operate it unless manpower budgets increased:
‘Unattended
our current course leads to a strategically incoherent force structure:
exquisite equipment, but insufficient resources to man that equipment or train
on it.’
Yet there’s a
version of this ‘hollowing out’ that has been gradually destroying all the UK’s
national institutions, whether they deal with education, healthcare, public
safety or even broadcasting. It’s part of the process of gradual privatization
which entails replacing the ideal of public service with a string of corporate
values and vacuous mission statements, and reinforcing the associations between
public, cheap but inferior, and
private, costly but invariably better.
One argument repeatedly
used in connection with the armed forces is that, once an organization so steeped
in tradition has been dismantled, it is impossible to grow it back. In the case
of the army, the chipping away of the regimental system with its strong
geographical and historical roots began decades ago. Countering Houghton’s
lament, the same
Guardian editorial asked: Is the twenty-first century, in general, so
unpredictably dangerous that we need to maintain state of the art militaries on
the basis that if we let the skills, traditions and supporting industries die
it will be impossible to revive them?
One response to this line of reasoning is that the country’s military
institutions must not be seen as exceptional or deserving of special consideration.
This is a logic that must be applied to all public institutions, not least the
ones that deal with health, education and social welfare. 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.
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