Putting Serco in charge of officer selection spells doom for our Armed Forces
PATRICK BENHAM-CROSSWELL
THE Ministry of Defence is fast becoming an exemplar of all that is broken in the government. Its latest lunacy, not mentioned in the risible Strategic Defence Review, is to outsource officer selection and merge the processes for the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force. This will deliver nugatory financial savings while wrecking leadership selection. The decision makes no sense and should be reversed immediately.
As Euripides wrote around 450 BC, ‘Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.’ Most modern armies devote significant effort to the selection and training of their leaders. Top of that list is the British Army, whose officer training establishment, the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, was founded in 1802 – as, by coincidence, were the French and American military academies at St Cyr and West Point.
Sandhurst has built a formidable reputation for producing decent, capable and tough junior officers. That’s not bombast (disclosure: I once taught there and a few years prior to that was trained there). Many foreign armies pay handsomely to send trainee officers to Sandhurst. Some become generals, some become heads of state. Some of them, like Prince William, are future monarchs. One of the first things the (still) Soviet Army did when the Wall came down was to visit Sandhurst to see how professional officers were trained to lead professional soldiers.
The current Sandhurst syllabus and methodology was adopted before the Second World War, with the occasional tweak, some of which were substantial. Essentially the course combines basic soldier training and some advanced soldier training overlaid with a whole slew of military command and leadership lessons. A significant part of the course is spent in the field, putting theory into practice.
This is expensive, so it is important that effort is not wasted on those who won’t pass. While the role of an instructor is to train cadets, there are milestones that must be passed and behavioural breaches which can result in near-instant dismissal. The overall pass rate is around 95 per cent. Some 85 per cent pass through Sandhurst first time, others retake a term. The Army is pretty darned good at selecting officer material.
The Army Officer Selection Board (AOSB) does what it says on the tin. Its three-and-a-half day assessment format is pretty much unchanged from when it first set up shop in 1949, adopting a similar format to the War Office Selection Board established in 1942. AOSB is an unparalleled success. In addition to countless foreign armies, including American, most of Europe and many Asian ones seeking to emulate or franchise it, industry has flocked to its door to understand how it manages to be so effective at identifying and selecting those with leadership potential.
AOSB has a staff (civilian and military) of about 30 and is set in a country house in Wiltshire. It costs about £5million a year to run (equivalent to about one day’s military aid to Ukraine or about one Boxer APC). That’s value for money in anyone’s book.
Correction: in almost anyone’s book.
Morons in the MoD have decided to place Serco in charge of the armed forces recruitment and selection, including officers. While sacking Capita, who mismanaged Armed Forces recruitment for a decade, is welcome, the new Armed Forces Recruitment Services contract (worth £1.5billion over ten years) will amalgamate AOSB with its Royal Navy and RAF equivalents.
Rather than AOSB’s three-and-a-half days of observed testing, it seems the new joint version will be based on the RAF one-day assessment format. The details are being worked out now apparently. That’s odd. One would have thought that the feasibility of the proposed selection process would have been specified and agreed before the contract was awarded. But then the MoD is rotten at procuring stuff.
Leadership in the Army, where everyone must be able to fight as infantry, is different from leadership in the other armed forces. Almost any soldier can opt out of combat at any time simply by lying down and refusing to advance. Lying down and staying down massively reduces the chance of being killed by enemy fire. An officer’s job is to stop them lying down.
A sailor may decline to work their complicated weapon system, but while they don’t they’re still sharing the risks of combat in their warship – unless they jump overboard. The junior naval officer’s job is to keep them working in synchronisation for as long as it takes. The RAF is completely different again – only aircrew are routinely involved in combat and only about 6 per cent of the RAF are aircrew. Much of the RAF’s operations involve management of engineering and logistics.
Clearly the armed forces all have different leadership requirements. They therefore train their leaders differently and they select people differently. There are long-established and world-leading selection processes for each armed service, and they work. Why amalgamate them?
It can’t really be to save much money. In the big scheme of things the £150million-a-year Serco contract isn’t much in a defence budget of around £60billion. Saving (say) £10million a year (less than 0.016 per cent of the defence budget) will change nothing. Recruiting the wrong people to become officers is disastrous. They probably won’t get through officer training, thereby wasting our money and leaving gaps in the command structure. Those gaps will inexorably lead to poorer leadership in the aggregate which will result in more service personnel leaving the armed forces. Retention is already a major problem.
Logically there are four possibilities.
The change could have been included by Serco – whose bid also includes a new computer system to make recruitment more efficient than it was under Capita (low baseline) – and the MoD just accepted it. That seems unlikely, unless the basis of Serco’s commercial advantage was that its bid was offering more for less than the propositions advanced by its competitors.
It could have been included by the Armed Forces themselves, with the Navy, Army and Air Force all deciding that outsourcing the recruitment of their most important entrants was a stroke of genius, and homogenising the selection process made perfect sense. There is a huge, largely self-imposed, desire in the uniformed parts of the MoD to be ‘joint’ – by which they mean multi-service. Joint became a thing in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in staff jobs. However, given the fundamental differences in what the various armed services require of their officers it’s almost inconceivable that this merger came from them. (If it did, we have a very serious problem with the quality of the Armed Forces senior leadership, which would explain a lot.)
It is possible that this lunacy was instigated outside the MoD, either in the Treasury of by some misguided political adviser. If that’s the case, why have the service chiefs not spoken out? Notwithstanding the long-standing craven reluctance of senior officers to resign whenever unconscionable cuts are imposed, it’s hard to believe that none of them opposed such a crass decision. Does the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Dame Sharon Nesmith DCB ADC, whose bailiwick this is, even know about it? (I asked, but the MoD press office declined to comment.)
The final option is that the MoD stuffed up and is now pretending that everything is fine. After all this is an organisation that can email classified personal information to the Taliban and spend nigh on £1billion rectifying its incompetence while applying for court orders to hide the mistake. Perhaps officials didn’t read the Serco small print. Perhaps the relevant desk officers were rotating to another job (as happens almost all the time for both uniformed and civil staff) and this idiocy fell between the cracks.
Whatever, it’s in the public domain now.
Badly led armed forces don’t win wars and they don’t deter anyone. If we’re going to go to the expense of having them, we need them to be feared. That means they need decent equipment, well trained and superb soldiers and brilliant leadership. The proposed outsourcing and restructuring of officer selection imperils the latter, rendering our defence spending a waste of money.
If you think that’s a bad thing you might want to write to your MP about it. You can find their name and contact details here. Alternatively you can download a Russian language course here.
This article (Putting Serco in charge of officer selection spells doom for our Armed Forces) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Patrick Bentham-Crosswell
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