The Army is Recruiting!

I have watched the steady decline of service numbers for many years now. As a former professional soldier my heart will always be with the services because I understand the culture and the hardships. The culture remains with me today and I rue the lack of honest discipline within modern society.

Youngsters growing up in the modern society appear to have been well educated in maintaining their rights but know little about their responsibilities. They know how to bully but do not know how to administer fair and firm discipline and this lack of knowledge is harming our industry.  Our justice system illustrates this tendency admirably when it has now been reported that the thug that supplied the gun to the killer of 11 year old Rhys Jones in Liverpool will be walking the streets after only 4 years of a 12 year sentence!

The same unfair system is now being perpetrated on the services. There appears to be a concerted effort to sack service people before they qualify for their military pension. For example I read that 8000 service people are soon to be made redundant.  OK it is plain daft but if it is fair across the board then I will have to understand but then, on the television, comes the advert...'The Army is Recruiting'. How can the army be recruiting when they are sacking trained personnel many of whom already have combat experience?

It is this skewed thinking which seems to drive on the Home Office and the UK Border Force. Time after time non UK citizens are targetted for deportation if they have served with our forces! We have a miscellany of dodgy foreign crooks of many nationalities serving time for villainy and yet we never hear of them being deported.

There is little doubt that any association with the military is regarded in some quarters as being akin to treason.  The reason for this is that the military is almost the last bastion of honesty and decency where old fashioned values like, loyalty, compassion, discipline and organisation are still taught not despised.  It has been watered down but it still exists even though it is constantly under attack from a despicable Political Class.

The army should not be recruiting, it should be maintaining its skilled and trained personnel.  It should also be ensuring that those who have come through the military experience are then fed into civilian jobs where they can utilise their experience.