DAD'S ARMY WANTED

The Forces should

ACCORDING to the army's new gender- free physical fitness tests — which I took recently — I'm as fit as a fiddle and quite able to be a combat infantry soldier or a gunner, or hold any other job in the army I want. Perhaps I should be: I ran the Lon- don Marathon a few months ago. But even if I were Superman they wouldn't let me in.

At 52 I'm not proposing to start all over again as a trainee private, but even if I were just over half my age — 28 — I'd still be considered too old to be a combat sol- dier. Although it has a shortage of almost 5,000 troops, mostly in infantry and armour, the army still insists on an upper age limit of 27 to join its 'teeth arms', rising only to 30 for such `soft' jobs as postal and courier operator or a place in the Royal Logistics Corps.

In the US army the maximum entry limit for combat soldiering is 35. For recruits to the Metropolitan Police it is 45. Yet, in spite of the evidence of ever fewer 18- and 19-year-olds in the population, and ever more young people going into higher edu- cation and thinking about their careers later, the army has yet to even consider taking on people over 30.

`It's a perfectly reasonable question. We should look at it,' said Brigadier Andy Craig, director of army recruiting. 'But my priority has been attracting more ethnic minorities and women to the army. In terms of getting recruits, I think they will allow us to close the gap.'

Blatant age discrimination. But even the most fervent pro-youth advocates inside the army concede that arguments for main- taining such young cut-off dates are increasingly invalid in a military that in 1998 has far more complex, individualistic, technical and mature demands than it did 20 or 40 years ago.

`Look at our TV commercials. There's one that shows a soldier's-eye view of a Bosnia-type situation where a village has just been attacked,' said one lieutenant colonel. 'The soldier sees a petrified `He didn't want a last cigarette.' woman who's just been raped and you hear a female voice saying, "It's all right. You're safe now." That's supposed to say there's a place for women in the army, but to me it also says we need soldiers with a bit of maturity, somebody with a bit of experi- ence of the world.'

What the army wants, however, is younger recruits, inexperienced 16-year- olds it can train to its own ideas, free from external `civvy' influences. If it wants spe- cialist civilian expertise, it considers, it will get it from the Territorial Army.

But that's not the view of the US army, which is increasingly dependent on older soldiers and reservists. The percentage of recruits aged between 28 and 35 has risen from 4.75 per cent in 1993 to 7.15 per cent last year, and is likely to continue growing. A Pentagon spokesman said more than one third went straight into combat forces.

`The US army is primarily for young peo- ple — our peak recruitment age is 19 but we value the few older people who want to join,' said a US army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Sullivan. 'They give units a bit more balance and maturity. We've never had any problem with it.'

While the British army in April did nod to changing demographics by increasing the upper age limit for combat troops from 26 to 27, it is focused much more on attracting 16- to 17-year-olds into its new foundation college, to be opened next month in Harro- gate.

`We want high-calibre people of the right age in order to get the correct balance of youth and experience required to maintain operational effectiveness,' said an army spokesman trying to justify the low upper age limit. 'The vigorous nature of combat demands that the armed forces are manned predominantly by young personnel, gener- ally between 16 and 40, although some can continue to 55.'

Added Brigadier Freddie Viggers, direc- tor of manning for the army: 'By focusing at the young end we have a chance to bring them on the way we want, to give high- quality young people transferable skills into a full army career structure . . . A recruit joining at 18 is out by 42, unless he gets higher rank. You can't expect 40- or 50- year-old privates to be running around with teenagers.'

Indeed, a 32-year-old doing the same training as a 17-year-old does present gen- erational differences and also challenges to unit cohesion and thus arguably to opera- tional effectiveness. But the 'unit cohesion' argument has been used privately to exclude ethnic minorities, and is currently being used to exclude women from combat forces. Times change, however, and having just increased the percentage of jobs open to women from 43 per cent to 70 per cent the army is anticipating pressure to bring women into the 'front line' within a few years. I will concede there are relatively few men over 27 or 30 who would want, or expect, a full army career, but in a world where people increasingly change careers, get divorced, stay fitter for longer, have youthful attitudes and spend more time deciding what they want to do than ever before, I'm certain the army will have an appeal for some such people, even as a short career.

Yet the army appears once again to be operating according to its own perceived criteria, and not to those of the wider world in which opinion polls show the public sees it by its `squaddie' image: 'young, not very bright, tough and gets drunk', according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph.

These are stereotypes amplified by an increasingly militarily-ignorant media which seizes on almost every incident of bad behaviour. As one who has felt obliged to watch over teenage sailors getting drunk in a bar full of pimps and prostitutes in Lis- bon, and watched young soldiers struggle to deal with Muslim families caught in fighting in Bosnia, I've long concluded that the services miss something by discourag- ing older, more mature men.

Old-timers will remember the passed- over corporals or 'busted' older soldiers who were always somewhere around to offer worldly advice to the youngsters of their platoon during the second world war or national service days. Today, wouldn't a 32-year-old private who can hold his liquor and has a certain worldly-wise maturity have a sobering value with the lads in a bar in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, or help a young squaddie with girlfriend problems in bar- racks at Aldershot, let alone be the 'older brother' keeping the others going on the battlefield without regard to rank?

If the army is expected to do more peacekeeping, then is the recruiting experi- ence of the police not of some value? And if civilian employers are increasingly find- ing it good business to remove age discrim- ination, is it not time for the army to reconsider before it is forced to do so, either by example, law, threat or demo- graphics, as it has had to do with the recruitment of women and ethnic minori- ties?

I am not arguing for drastic change, just an adjustment at the margins. Moving the upper age limit for combat troops to 35 might add only 7 or 8 per cent to the recruit- ing intake. But at a time when the Strategic Defence Review wants an extra 3,500 per- sonnel it might be just enough to resolve many of the recruiting shortfalls, save mil- lions in advertising campaigns and produce a more mature armed force, better emotion- ally equipped to deal with the varied chal- lenges of the modern British military.

The author is the former defence correspon- dent of the Daily Telegraph and is now a freelance defence writer.