The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Soldiering on in Changed times
As successful Army recruitment posters go, the sp lend id ly moustached Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener and his 1914 declaration “Your country needs you” still takes some beating.
Young men responded to the pointing finger of patriotism in their thousands, enlisting for the front line even as it became clear that death, catastrophic injury and mental ruin were all there in the small print.
Today they could be forgiven for stopping to ask: “For what, exactly?”
It’s a question that was posed this week as the role of the 21st Century soldier – and more specifically the select few who wear the red hackle – was thrust front and centre.
The Sun’s defence editor started the speculation on Monday when he revealed the former Black Watch infantry regiment, now a battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, could be in the firing line amid plans to shed up to 18,000 soldiers.
Its fate is becoming clearer after Thursday as the dust settles on Boris Johnson’s announcement of a £ 16 billion rise in defence spending . The prime minister insisted there was “absolutely no threat” to 3 Scots – although talk elsewhere of cyber force and space command says much about the increasingly technological nature of warfare and the usefulness of a bayonet against a password hacker in a Russian troll farm.
The phalanx of Scottish Conservatives, from party leader Douglas Ross down, demanding assurances on The Black Watch’s future from their Westminster colleagues suggested fights closer to home may have worked in the battalion’s favour for now.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Campbell was among those sounding the alarm publicly about constitutional pitfalls, warning: “Fighting an independence referendum off the back of disbanding famous S c o tt i s h units would be a very unwise political decision.”
Given the reaction to Boris’s recent comments on the “disaster” of devolution and the deepening divisions over Covid and Brexit, our Churchill- touting PM is probably wise to avoid opening up a rebellion on another front.
But concerns about hitting recruitment targets north of the border, which gave rise to the rumours, have not retreated.
Rising support for independence has been posited as one possible barrier to Scots’ desires to belong to a British Army.
Disbanding the infantry regiments to create the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006 has also been a factor, says Rob Scott, chairman of the Fife branch of The Black Wa t c h Association. The so-called “golden thread” which ran through generations of families in Tayside and Fife, the traditional recruiting ground, had been severed by amalgamation, he told us, and the loss of the name would be a tragedy.
Elsewhere, unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – their impact dramatised in the National Theatre of Scotland’s multiaward winning stage play Black Watch – made the slogan “Join the Army, see the world” sound more like a threat than a promise for a while. Throw in the fact that education and economics have opened up wider horizons – often b e tt e r paid – for the descendants of the farm labourers and miners’ sons who joined up because their other options all seemed to lead to dead ends and you start to see the challenges of recruitment are more complicated than a name game.
The SNP had a seemingly simple solution in its response to the review this week – make the job more appealing , with higher wages, better housing and
the option of career breaks.
It’s not rocket science but it would be a start and maybe so would a rethink of what we expect from our Army in peacetime and what it can bring to civil society.
One of the perks of the reporter’s job is the military press trip and I have spent time with Scottish forces from Basra to Camp Bastion, Kabul and Kandahar. To a man, and woman, the troops we met were well mannered, disciplined, decent, hard working and professional – a credit to their units and their communities.
Many said the Army had been the making of them. None of them gave a hoot for my concerns about their living conditions or daily dangers, insisting they relished the opportunity to finally put into practice what they had trained for their entire career.
The latest ad campaign, featuring the slogan “recruiting now and always”, harks back to Florence Nightingle and the Crimean war and highlights the work troops have put in this year, delivering PPE to the NHS, running mobile testing sites and constructing
Nightingale hospitals. It’s powerful and moving and speaks of an organisation that is agile, admirable and relevant to all of our lives. It’s the kind of work I might have jumped at as a school leaver, the kind we might need more of in the months ahead.
History matters but so does the here and now and presenting the Army less as a fighting machine and more as a force for good on the home front as we face the challenges of a changed world feels like a smart step if it wants to go on attracting the brightest and the best.