If you're a gamer - your country needs you, says Healey as he seeks more cyber recruits
Gamers and coders are being encouraged to join the Armed Forces as Defence Secretary John Healey unveiled his new plans to bolster the UK's cyber defence.
Mr Healey, who was speaking at the Labour Party conference, announced a fast-track route to get cyber-savvy recruits into the forces.
"If you’re a top gamer or a coder – your country needs you," he said.
The announcement was part of Mr Healey's wider plan to speed up applications to the Armed Forces and improve recruitment.
The Defence Secretary said over the last 10 years, three out of four who applied to join the military gave up during the process because it took several months and is "tied up in red tape".
He said he had scrapped 100 "outdated" policies that prevent people from joining and would create new targets to reject or make a conditional offer to a would-be recruit within 10 days, and provide a training start date within 30 days.
Ahead of his speech, Mr Healey said he wanted to fast-track recruits in cyber defence "to help face down Putin's online aggression".
The Sun reported that Russian elements had been caught trying to hack into Britain’s core defence structure 90,000 times over the past two years.
Wanted: a new type of pilot
Mr Healey told the paper that people who play Call of Duty in their bedrooms could be the ideal new recruit for drone warfare.
"We are short of drone pilots - you can see the changing nature of warfare in Ukraine, where the combination of artillery and drones is responsible for the large majority of all the casualties," he said.
"The sort of skills that drone pilots have are many of the same skills as some of our best console warriors."
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Defence officially recognised eSports as a military sport to extract the applicable skills to better equip the military for the ever-changing online world.
The MOD wants to utilise gamers' particular set of skills and turn what might seem like an outside-of-work hobby into a valid military resource.
The Deputy Commander for Strategic Command, Lieutenant General Tom Copinger-Symes, told BFBS Forces News in March: "We really want you to be playing these games.
"This isn't something just to be done out of work time, this is something that contributes massively to digital skills.
"We want to give [gamers] support doing it. We recognise the benefits it brings to defence."
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