Like many Western nations, Australia is experiencing a recruitment crisis in the armed forces. So is the UK. This is no abstract hand wringing: we’re constantly told, and we can see for ourselves, that we are living in perhaps the most dangerous global times since the 1930s. Russia is openly threatening military action against Britain. China has its fingers in the war between the US and Iran, besides rattling its sabres at Taiwan and not to mention the rest of the Pacific.
If it comes to a shooting match, Britain is in an even deeper pile of doo-doo than in 1939. Back then, with a much smaller population, Britain had four divisions at full strength. That was with a population of 48 million. Today, the UK population is nearly 70 million, but the army has just two divisions.
Why is the British – like the Australian – army in such a parlous state, despite its massive population increase? Part of the problem is that a large portion of that population growth consists of people who are more likely to join a war against Britain than fight for it. But even if they were so inclined, why would young Britons today bother signing up to defend a nation whose leadership won’t defend them?
As Australian war hero Ben Roberts-Smith has found, the Australian establishment, from the politicians down to his own commanders, will move hell and high water to punish the average soldier. Even before the dubious ‘war crimes’ charges were levelled against Roberts-Smith, decades after the shooting stopped, he and his former comrades-in-arms were threatened with collective punishment without even a single court-martial.
Forget the old maxim that justice delayed is justice denied: if the establishment has to wait 20 years to take down a hero, it’s more than willing.
But if 20 years seems an unconscionably long delay, try 50. The British establishment is perfectly happy to dredge up events from half a century ago to punish the young men it gave the orders to.
We ask young men and women to join our Armed Forces, obey orders, go where politicians send them and, when necessary, kill Britain’s enemies.
Then, decades afterwards, we reserve the right to haul them back before lawyers and investigators and judge decisions made in seconds on the battlefield through the very different standards of another age.
That’s the upshot of a new Policy Exchange report into the Special Air Service’s role in Northern Ireland. Elderly veterans face the prospect of being hauled before woke star chambers. Any soldier who does their job will have to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders, waiting for the bureaucrats and their pet lawyers to swoop.
No matter that memories fade, witnesses die (or lie) and files vanish. The winds of fashionable politics change and the law mutates. What does not change is the two seconds the soldier had to decide whether the figure in front of him was about to kill someone.
This is not about holding an Einsatzgruppen commander or Khmer Rouge mass murderer to account. Nobody seriously argues that a soldier who deliberately murders, tortures or commits a genuine crime should walk free. That’s not what happened in Ireland half a century ago.
These were not mercenaries roaming Ulster doing as they pleased. They were British servicemen sent there by British governments.
They operated in support of the police, under rules of engagement and the ordinary criminal law. Policy Exchange says every use of lethal force by the SAS was investigated at the time.
The issue is endless re-litigation of decisions already investigated, under fire, under the rules that applied at the time. Call it lawfare, judicialisation or the great retrospective moral hobby of the age. The result is the same: a generation of soldiers who hesitate not because they fear the enemy, but because they fear the silk who will reconstruct their two seconds in 2066.
That is potentially lethal.
A soldier cannot operate effectively with a barrister sitting metaphorically on his shoulder.
Imagine being 23-years-old, in darkness, frightened, exhausted and carrying a loaded weapon. Intelligence tells you that armed terrorists are nearby. Something happens. You have perhaps two seconds to decide.
Shoot or don’t shoot.
Get it wrong one way and an innocent person might die.
Get it wrong the other and you, your comrades or civilians might die.
Now add another calculation.
How will this look in court in 2066?
Russia’s conscripts will not be running that calculation. Neither will the IRA’s heirs, nor Beijing’s. So we gift ourselves a lethal asymmetry: enemies who fight to win while our soldiers fight wondering whether they’ll be facing a lawsuit from their own country in 50 years.
The state asks extraordinary things of its troops: surrender civilian freedoms, go where they are sent and possibly die. In return it is supposed to stand behind them when they have acted lawfully. If that compact is junked, why serve?
You cannot tell a 19-year-old: thank you for your service… we’ll let you know in 40 years whether we think you did anything wrong.
Once it was straightforward: Am I prepared to die for my country?
We are in danger of adding another question:
Am I prepared to be prosecuted by it for the rest of my life?
And then we wonder why we have a recruitment crisis.
