It Could Be Said #53 Whistle While Sunak Makes You Work...

Will talks to Dr Luke Middup about Rishi Sunak's proposal to bring back national service

The Tory Party revealed its first policy, announcing to the Sunday newspapers that if Rishi Sunak is re-elected as Prime Minister, he will bring back national service. Not only does it mirror the second House of Cards series, where Francis Urquhart announced the same policy as he fought from behind to secure a fifth term in office for the Tories in what was the first election of the new King’s reign, and confusion over opinion polling right out of Yes Prime Minister.

I decided to take the opportunity to talk to one of my closest friends, Dr Luke Middup of the University of St Andrews about the implications of the policy. Middup is not only one of my long-suffering cohosts on the It Could Be Said podcast but an international relations researcher with a particular interest in civilian-military relations. He is currently finishing his second book, which will be on the Iraq War.

“What's striking, looking at social media, is the people that are defending this policy are defending it on the basis of it being good social policy” pointed out Middup. “It’s about getting young people of different regional, ethnic, religious, backgrounds together to integrate some sense of shared values and common identity. Or alternatively it’s going to give young people skills. I haven't seen a single person actually defend this on the grounds of military utility”.

And it’s striking that that ever since national service ended in 1960, advocates for it to be brought back have grappled for a clear rationale. The aforementioned fictional versions of the policy placed the emphasis on addressing youth unemployment, something that is no longer an issue. Ironically it was labour shortages that led to the policy being introduced in the first place.

“A whole variety of different wars and security missions really spread out on what could still be accurately described as the British Empire. The UK did send conscripts to fight in many of those conflicts – there were conscripts in Cyprus and Malaya. But the average conscript spent their time with the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany”. Britain was maintaining a large standing army in peacetime for the first time in its history, and so conscription was the best way to maintain the flow of bodies that the army needed, without undermining key trades. It was however a marriage of convenience. “The army never liked conscription, but it was the only way it could see of meeting the manpower requirements that it had. It has always liked to see itself as small, plucky and professional; ready to go anywhere and do anything short notice. The British Army, even in its modern, post-imperial incarnation, still sees itself as an expeditionary force”.

It was as Britain’s withdraws from Empire, and German rearmament gathered apace, that these manpower pressures eased sufficiently to allow for the end of national service in 1960. There was another reason why even countries where conscription is a longstanding part of the culture, there has been a move away from it – the complexity of war. “In the modern era, for the conscripts to be of any value of any military value, you need them to be conscripted for at least 24 months. Because it's going to take six months to turn a raw recruit into a basically competent soldier. Then it will take you another six months to train them in any kind of specialty. So, if you make national service only a 12-month period, by the time you've got something useful at the other end of it, they're leaving”. And indeed, countries that still have conscription tend to compel people to serve longer, and engage in refresher activities thereafter, to ensure they retain the skills they’ve trained so that they can be called up from the reserve at a moment of crisis.

Whilst more open to using conscription to build up a reserve than many analysts, Middup doubts it’s the right priority. “I would prefer an extra 30,000 regulars and I also want the reserve to be expanded and reorganised. If you want to solve the recruitment crisis in the armed forces, you they need to raise the basic rate of pay. You need to provide better amenities, particularly housing. There are other things we can do to make our military life more attractive; you could expand the cadet corps; so if you sign up for three years in the military, we will make sure that you don't pay any tuition fees on your university degree. Or if you sign up for so many years, we will pay you a lump sum at the end of it, which could be a deposit on your first house”.

The reason for this is that should Britain ever again need to mobilise a mass army, the experience of both the German and ourselves in the Second World War, suggests that such a crash mobilisation is easier to achieve if you have a highly professionalised core of regulars, that has all the skills needed to train, organise, and lead the raw recruits. Instead, regulars will be confronted with finding busywork for 30,000 raw recruits, some of whom may not even want to be there, and even the most enthusiastic will only have a limited amount of time to grow into the role.

A curious aspect of Sunak’s proposal is the talk that the recruits would not be trained to be frontline troops, but instead be sent to more specialised units such as cyber-defence or logistics. Middup doubts this makes sense. “The inclusion of logistics in there as one of the potential pathways was interesting because at its most basic, it's driving trucks, it's taking freight deliveries. But a well-trained logistics is also about working out how much stuff you have to take from point A to point B, how much stuff you have to order from manufacturers, how long will it take to arrive, how long will it need to be stored, where will it be stored, etc. It’s actually one of the most complicated roles within the military, and so it's not just going be giving a load of 18-year-olds HGV licences”.

I can’t help but escape the conclusion that much like his recent speech announcing that Britain would spend 2.5% of GDP on defence primarily through expanding military R&D spending, that Sunak threw in the references to cyber defence and logistics because these are issues that most interest him. Indeed, Sunak continues to be seemingly indifferent to the urgent need for Britain and other Western nations to rebuild our defence industries so that we can develop the necessary equipment stores to sustain through another mass war. It has been clear since the opening exchanges of the War in Ukraine that previous estimates about how much artillery is needed in modern warfare, were far too optimistic. And in any case, we have given a lot of our previous kit to the Ukranians. Ironically, if Sunak had greenlit the building of new factories and big defence production orders back in 2022, the Tory Party would surely be in better shape today.

When I put it to Middup that Sunak has the wrong priorities on defence, he chuckles. “Well, no to me, it's not that coherent. It's just an obvious political ploy to try to win Reform-minded voters”. He then tries to get me to discuss the civilian placements, only for it to be my turn to get the giggles as I dismissed the civilian placements as a sticking plaster to hide the fact that they know they can’t afford enough genuine placements in the military.

Perhaps more tellingly was the response of my sixteen year old stepson when I told him about the breaking news the day before. His eyes grew wide, and he intensely asked, “they can’t really do that, can they?”. We adults can cynically laugh, but I’m not sure the nation’s teenagers will take the news so calmly.