August 21,2008:
Britain is having a hard time
recruiting new troops and officers. It's been coming up about ten percent short
of qualified students for its 44 week officers course at Sandhurst (where new
army officers are trained). In the United States, officer training is run differently.
A free college education is offered at government run academies like West Point
(for the army), along with college based training and schools for training
enlisted personnel to be officers. Most Sandhurst students enter there as
recent university graduates. The U.S. Army equivalent of Sandhurst is a three
month Officers Candidate School, followed by up to a year of schools that show
the new officer how to lead and manage the troops he will be in charge of.
Britain is
also having trouble recruiting enough troops. For half a century, the British
have been relying on volunteers. Until the 1990s, there were few problems
attracting sufficient new recruits. But after the Cold War ended in 1991, the
budget cuts just kept on coming. Personnel strength was cut 40 percent (from
300,000, to the current 180,000). While Britain is able to barely recruit and
maintain three professional military personnel per thousand Britons, the United
States manages to recruit five per thousand. After the Cold War ended, the U.S.
military was only cut 30 percent (from two million to 1.4 million). The U.S. and Britain both spend about the
same per military personnel ($387,000 a year for the U.S., and $367,000 a year
for Britain), but the British media manages to make it seem like British troops
are being constantly starved and deprived of essential equipment. That, and the
general unpopularity of the war on terror in Britain (as in the rest of
Europe), especially operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, makes it hard to
recruit. As in the U.S., multiple trips to Iraq and Afghanistan have not been
popular, even though British troops have suffered far fewer casualties than the
Americans.
Britain
could probably reverse the recruiting problems by increasing pay (in only in
the form of bonuses directed at those spending the most time in combat zones),
but this is a contentious issue as well, with Britain currently suffering an
economic recession. Unfortunately, it's not enough of a recession to drive more
lads to join the military. All this has caused Britain to lean on their
European allies a bit more, to shoulder more of the burden of supplying troops
for Afghanistan.