The Armed Forces can never represent society

SIR – The new Defence Secretary states that he wants to see the Armed Forces “properly represent” modern society.

I welcome him warmly, but in my own service, the Royal Marines, we refuse entry to members of the Communist Party, the middle-aged, the deaf, the blind, the mentally ill, the physically deformed, the drug addicted, the short, the fat, the infirm and the uneducated.

We recruit people whom we gauge, through rigorous admission tests, to be capable of reaching a state of supreme mental and physical fitness. We train them to kill with their bare hands, to handle lethal weapons, to live for long periods away from home, and to survive in arduous conditions. We train them to fight and go to war.

That is not the job description of a normal, all-inclusive employer, or representative of modern society. Lt-col Ewen Southby-tailyour

Ermington, Devon SIR – With the greatest respect to Admiral Lord West (Letters, October 11), Bay-class vessels do not belong to the Royal Navy – they are owned by the MOD and manned by the Merchant Navy, my former employer.

He is also wrong to suggest that operations beyond our shores are dependent on strike carriers and amphibious forces.

Almost every soldier who fought in the liberation of the Falkland Islands got there courtesy of the Merchant Navy, in ships manned by British and Commonwealth seafarers.

Though we still have a Merchant Navy, British-flagged ships are no longer required to be manned by a British captain and crew.

With most British-flagged ships now foreign-owned and manned, we would struggle to land troops at Calais, let alone fight a war in the South Atlantic. Peter J Newton

Chellaston, Derbyshire