Will the new Armed Forces Recruitment Service deliver what the nation requires?
The announcement today of a new and improved recruitment process, the Armed Forces Recruitment Service (AFRS), is welcome and long overdue.
The current system, especially for the Army, is bonkers – and has been for a long time, with most of the talented entrants giving up long before they get near any Army kit.
Of concern is that the AFRS start date is not until 2027, and the announcement is full of the civilian "business speak" that seems to spew out of most of the Government ministries at the moment, and does not harbour well for a military recruitment system.
There is rather a lot of talk about efficiencies and value for money for the taxpayers which, if I remember correctly, is why the current dreadful scheme was bought in to replace the "inefficient" one, which had provided the forces with excellent people for generations.
Joining the Armed Forces is like no other job. In fact, it is not a job, but a vocation.
It is the only employment where your employer, the state, may require you to lay down your life for comrades and your nation.
The main fault of the current system is not all Capita's, or the people who wrote the direction for Capita to follow, but that it is an almost entirely objective process.
The main advantage of the old system is that it was mostly a subjective process, with real soldiers, sailors and aviators at the heart of the recruitment process.
These are the people who actually know who will make a good soldier, who know who they would follow into battle, and who know who will fit in and those who won't.
It is clear that no computer programme, even swimming in AI, can do this – yet!
The AFRS does mention that serving personnel will once again be part of the process, which is to be applauded.
But in the same breath, it states that the new scheme will mimic the Cabinet Office standard model, which throws up so many red cards as to be a terrifying prospect.
It may well be terrifying working in the Cabinet Office, but it cannot be further from the reality of having to fix bayonets and charge the enemy.
Different people and different skills required, so surely not the same process?!
Allied to this is the focus on the brightest brains and cyber warriors as the answer to all the Army's problems is a horrifying prospect, if that is what the politicians and bureaucrats think who are now running the MOD.
They obviously do not read my column in the Daily Telegraph about how the war is being conducted in Ukraine, which is the benchmark our Armed Forces need to meet at the moment.
Why not pay extra money to drone operators rather than cyber specialists for instance? Ukraine also shows us that mass is as important today as it was in the First World War, and technology is not the complete answer.
The plan to lump all the Armed Forces recruiting together is another huge concern to me as a serviceman of over 37 years and still counting – just.
Soldiers, sailors and those who join the Royal Air Force are not the same. We are all different beasts.
Outwardly, we all hate the other services, inwardly we love them, but would never want to be one of them.
Steering a ship is not the same as driving a tank or flying a fighter jet, and to try to recruit these special people the same way will definitely not be value for the taxpayer.
The AFRS will be an improvement on the current shambles, but why wait for another two years?
Why can't we go back to the old system of having recruitment offices up and down the country, with the real warriors of today recruiting the warriors of tomorrow?
No doubt the people who are devising this scheme to save the taxpayers money appear to know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
And you cannot solely put a monetary value on the warfighters of tomorrow if you want an effective Armed Forces to combat the ever-growing threats to this nation today and in the future.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former Colonel and Commanding Officer of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Regiment, asks in his most recent opinion piece for BFBS Forces News whether the Armed Forces Recruitment Service will fix the current 'bonkers' recruitment system.
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