Female, foreign and too fat to fight – how wokery is defeating the British Army
BRUCE NEWSOME
BRITAIN is not ready to defend itself from attack, says the Commons Defence Committee. Their report details the lack of missile defence, a Royal Navy depleted of ships and available submarines, an Army shrunk to its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars with only slightly more than 70,000 fully trained soldiers, not enough even to protect some of the UK’s most sensitive military bases.
The question that needs answering is why? Why has the armed forces ability to defend our country crumbled? Why are more personnel leaving than joining, and why do those left behind over-represent the lowest-capacity personnel?
Neither the scale nor the nature of the problem should be underestimated.
As of April 1 this year, UK armed forces officially operated at 8,590 fewer personnel (6 per cent) than their target. The Government’s announced increased target for applications is only to fill current shortfalls, not to grow the strength.
The Navy has similarly failed to meet its recruitment goals each year since 2010. Recently, it has achieved only 60 per cent of its target. As of this April the Navy employed 33,000 sailors and Marines, equating to a shortfall of 8 per cent.
The RAF, with 32,000 personnel, has a shortfall of 13 per cent. It is particularly short of pilots (quite a problem for an air force), and is employing Indians to train the few that it has.
The Army, more than halved in strength since 1975, counted fewer than 71,000 soldiers this June. The current target of 73,000 is hardly ambitious. Worse, most soldiers are simply not ready for deployment as combatants. Recent estimates suggest the Army ‘might be able to generate a single division of about 30,000 troops for a one-off intervention’.
Compare this with Germany’s growing army which sustains two armoured divisions in peacetime (Britain doesn’t sustain one). As Britain’s army shrinks, Germany plans for 460,000 active and reserve personnel by 2035. By contrast British forces held just 181,890 active and reserve personnel at the start of this fiscal year. While Germany aims to add 80,000 personnel to their strength, Britain’s vision is to add a few thousand.
Germany is closer to Russia, but Britain has deployed along Russia’s borders, and has more international obligations. Yet in advance of the imminent (but overdue) Budget, the Government isn’t talking about increasing authorised strength. Instead it blames military shortfalls on legacy resourcing and (incredibly) a strengthening civilian job market.
What it doesn’t admit is that years of woke messaging and mismanagement have repelled personnel and accelerated the departure of Britain’s finest. What went wrong? Lt Gen Jonathon Riley detailed some of the critical ‘cultural’ problems in this TCW essay calling for moral rearmament.
It is for these very ‘cultural’ reasons that the military has diminished in size and reputation – more contractual and less personal, woker, slower, fatter, more foreign, more female, more emotionally sensitive and less combative.
The MoD’s decision to pass most recruiting, training and education to contractors relegates the branches and regiments and makes today’s military look boringly uniform. Contracts are delivered carelessly and inauthentically, replacing military ethos and tradition.It goes back to 2012 when the Army passed recruiting to Capita. Ten years later, Parliament was to find that Capita’s performance was ‘abysmal’ while the Army’s management was weak. The Government now tells us that by 2027 recruitment for all the armed forces would be handled by a single contracted service. In theory, centralisation offers efficiencies but historically, it has led to more expense and less effectiveness than local recruiting.
The British military has also been subject to woke capture. Traditionally it advertised for people who want a challenge, to travel, and to defend Britain and its allies and dependencies. By the early 2010s, adverts invited applicants to ‘be the best’. From the mid-2010s onwards recruitment adverts were captioned with ‘this is belonging’ amid images of uniformed personnel getting in touch with their feelings.
The actors used overwhelmingly are not white men. In one earlier advert, a patrol stops for a Muslim soldier to pray – with a prayer rug and a prayer cap, no less. Everybody else is depicted sitting around, exposed and unready. This is an unnecessary, unprofessional, and dangerous concession: the Koran suspends religious obligations during military operations.
In the 2020s, Capita changed ‘this is belonging’ to ‘you belong here’. Not much of a change for a failing campaign. Capita claims it is appealing to the majority who don’t think the Army is for them. Clearly, it hasn’t worked.
Outsourced contracting has also proved slower and less personal for the applicant who, in the process, may find civilian work or realise that joining the military is a lesson in mismanagement. From 2014 to 2023, three-quarters of all applicants withdrew. Of this extraordinary number of 827,000 people, 165,549 waited more than six months before withdrawing. The latest report shows that the median wait for the year through July was more than eight months (the Government aims to set a training date within 30 days, but that doesn’t mean training begins sooner.) In 2023, fewer than one in ten applicants to the armed forces ended up serving. Most (74,000, or 54 per cent) withdrew their applications.
The British military meanwhile developed a penchant for favouring foreign recruits because they are easier to satisfy with pay and benefits and because they added to the ‘diversity’ quotient demanded by the Government. Today about 12,000 foreigners serve in the armed forces, more than one in ten. In the past, almost all foreign recruits were Anglophones with British heritage, or Gurkhas and Fijians whose recruiting pipeline is well-established, who integrate easily, and who are more competitive. Now, I’m told, most foreign recruits can’t speak English adequately, are purely economically motivated, or are trying to stay in Britain before their work or study visas expire.
In 2009 the MoD set a cap of 15 per cent for the proportion of foreigners per unit, but in London Central Garrison the proportion is 35 per cent. Of the foreigners, some 40 per cent do not speak enough English to be employable in support of the police in an emergency, such as a terrorist attack.
In June 2024, non-commissioned officers (mostly Guards) at the Infantry Training Centre wrote to the commander of the Household Division to warn that some foreigners do not speak English well enough to be considered safe on live-fire ranges. Too many have ‘half-hearted allegiances to King and country’. Too many join ‘to secure visa extensions in order to provide for their families back home’. In response, an Army ‘spokesperson’ accused the NCOs of ‘falling short of the Army’s values and standards’, and doubled down on diversity.
Add to this the fact that a fifth of military personnel today are female. Of course there are plenty of roles women carry out as well as men, particularly given the mechanisation of tasks. In some, women have advantages, such as tolerating G-forces. I have long argued for the principle that women should compete with men for the same position to the same standards. But Britain’s armed forces, like the police, over-promise on the capacity of women to take on physical roles, then lower the standards for women to allow for this, which inevitably lower the standards for men too.
In 2016, David Cameron’s administration opened all military roles to women, and the ban on women in close ground combat was lifted in 2018. The Government first planned to raise the proportion of women in the armed forces to 15 per cent by 2020. By that year, the actual proportion was around 12 per cent. In 2021, the MOD increased its target for female representation from 15 per cent to 30 per cent of military personnel by 2030. The result is lower standards for women, more resentment, bullying, and harassment of women by men, and (most perversely) lower standards for men.
More contractualism, wokery, less personal processing, and more desperation to raise the proportion of foreigners and women have lowered the standards for everybody. Physical fitness is illustrative. By 2019, British soldiers were posting memes of obese women in uniform lecturing other soldiers on health. A quarter of military personnel were rated too fat to fight in 2023 and 2025.
Personnel are bombarded with woke messaging – warnings against high expectations, offensive national symbols (and regimental mascots, pets, flags, and battle honours that Muslims might find offensive), hurty words, gendered language, and unconscious biases. By 2020, the MoD employed 44 DEI officers. They are not the forgotten fringe: they set the bar for promotions and retentions. Last month the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General David Eastman, wrote a letter to the colonels of all corps and regiments, calling for them to ‘disassociate’ from clubs whose ‘rules, policies or cultural practices may not align with the army’s commitment to inclusivity’. Eastman’s proximate concern was his discovery (how could he have been unaware?) that Boodle’s club in London has rooms for men only. Eastman wrote that leveraging the Army to achieve ‘positive change beyond the Army’ is ‘a strategic necessity’.
What sort of personnel stay in a military whose ‘strategic necessity’ is making civilian society more ‘inclusive’? Overly emotional, self-obsessed snowflakes. The most motivated and skilled personnel are driven out of the military by this.
Finally, combat personnel are driven out of the military by the legal risks. Soldiers are aware that they might be sent into future conflicts that lawyers retrospectively decide are illegal, even if the Government claims a Status of Forces Agreement at the time.
Additionally, they face civil and criminal prosecution for violating the human right to life even if they obey rules of engagement. The risks are highest for Special Forces, who deploy most. A former SAS Regimental Sergeant Major says that ‘service with the regiment is maybe ten or 15 years – and the rest of your life is being chased by lawyers’. The SAS Regimental Association’s first step initiating legal action against the Government over Labour’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is detailed elsewhere in these pages today.
On Armistice Day this month, nine four-star Generals signed an open letter ‘to warn that the government’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, and the legal activism surrounding it, risk weakening the moral foundations and operational effectiveness of the forces on which this nation depends’. They wrote: ‘Today every deployed member of the British Armed Forces must consider not only the enemy in front but the lawyer behind.’
Who is most incentivised to quit by such lawfare? Combatants.
Since 2022, leavers have increasingly outpaced joiners. By this fiscal year, about 300 more personnel were leaving than joining each month, a brigade’s worth each year.
In summary, the military ends up with fewer applicants and suitable personnel but with more foreigners, fatties and snowflakes totally unable to defend the country.
This article (Female, foreign and too fat to fight – how wokery is defeating the British Army) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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