Your country needs you – shame about the poor pay and toxic culture

The UK's strategic defence review has a lot to say about military hardware.

- Steve Bloomfield

There are 50 mentions of weapons, submarines appear on 30 occasions, drones crop up 26 times, while there are several references to carriers (16), jets (seven) and tanks (six).

The word “soldier”, though, appears just twice — and the first is in the introduction describing one of the report's authors.

The omission highlights a problem facing militaries all over the world: governments want to spend more on defence, but not enough people want to be soldiers. In Britain, the number has fallen from 80,000 regular forces in 2022 to below 73,000 today; in the US, it’s dropped from 2.1 million at the end of the cold war to 1.3 million today.

It’s true that part of the reason for falling numbers is falling budgets; true, too, that “personnel” gets more mentions in the UK report than “soldier”. But the fact remains: faced with the rising threat of Russia, central and eastern European nations are desperately trying to boost their numbers.

In Australia, meanwhile, the government is offering A$40,000 bonuses for army personnel, and in the US the problem is so acute that a course has been created in its Future Soldier initiative that allows overweight teenagers to sign up.