Defence, diversity and disbelief

The Sunday Telegraph yesterday reported that Britain’s armed forces are bending themselves out of shape in order to conform to a woke tyranny of language and behaviour. This comes hard on the heels of a House of Commons Defence Committee report that stated military recruitment and retention was in crisis. Taken together, these accounts have had a predictable response. Pearls have been clutched in Tunbridge Wells, apoplectic majors have turned a deeper shade of varicose purple and respected commentators have declared it the end of the British martial tradition.

And they have a point. For the Government to claim it is preparing for a war of continental or even global dimensions while, at the same time, introducing a woke tick list of ascending absurdity is beyond parody. Soon, no doubt, the Wokerati will chip in with formulaic charges of institutional racism, sexism and a string of words that end with the suffix phobia and the debate will descend into the unedifying brawl that characterises so much of what passes for public discourse. So let’s call time out, take a step back and try to establish how the profession of arms and diversity have found an accommodation over time.

The obvious place to start is the classical world and the first thing to note is that the libidinous Greeks, for example, would find fixed definitions of sexual proclivity a little confusing. The love of Alexander the Great’s life was probably his long-time companion Hephaestion, following the mythic example of Achilles and Patroclus, rather than any of his three wives. Alexander and his sexually omnivorous contemporaries would have found today’s obsession with tightly defined identities curiously limiting, and rather provincial. Whether for procreation or lust, the martial heroes of the ancient world were nothing if not sexually diverse. And curious, as is evidenced by Alexander’s attraction to the beautiful Persian eunuch Bogoas; gender ambiguity is most certainly not a 21^st century invention.

Profile statue of Alexander the Great (Shutterstock)

When Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, defeated the Athenian and Theban alliance at Chaeronea in 338 BC, the fiercest resistance he had to overcome came from the Theban Sacred Band. The Sacred Band gained a reputation for invincibility that started at the Battle of Leuctra and ended the traditional Spartan domination of the 4th century BC Greek battlefield. The Band comprised 150 pairs of male partners who were selected purely on merit and who fought with conspicuous gallantry for their city state and, above all, for each other. None survived the battle.

Returning to Alexander and his wives, his second marriage – to the Persian noblewoman Stateira – took place at  Susa in 324 BC during a mass ceremony involving his highest-ranking officers and women drawn from the Persian aristocracy. The event was intended to mark the union of Hellenistic and Persian cultures and was emblematic of Alexander’s universalist world view. He would die at Babylon in 323 BC just before embarking on a planned invasion of the Arabian Peninsula with an army that was to comprise a Greek core, Persian cavalry and Indian war elephants in an eclectic multicultural mix.

Alexander’s Macedonian veterans were appalled at what they judged would be a dilution of fighting power and their disenchanted mutterings provided the background noise to his final days. Despite that, and taking the long view, Alexander might not only sit in the pantheon of Great Captains, but he is also amongst the most successful secular globalists in history and a testament to the recurring combination of military ends and diverse means.

It’s a big jump from classical Greece to Edwardian England, but some themes endure. Siegfried Sassoon was part of a wealthy Baghdadi Jewish merchant dynasty, but was personally disinherited after his father married outside the faith. His exotic background seemed no barrier to social access and he moved at ease between the country houses of southern England during a leisurely decade before the First World War, where hunting, cricket and privately published verse were his diversions.

Siegfried Sassoon by George Charles Beresford (1915)

Sassoon would not publish Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man until 1928 and it is unclear if the homosexual infatuations that litter the book were obvious to his contemporaries at the time. Neither is it clear if his sexual predilections became obvious in the enforced intimacy of trench warfare in the First World War. But the point is that it simply didn’t matter. The officer who became known as “Mad Jack” for his reckless bravery and who won an outstanding Military Cross was judged on his merits as a leader in war; anything else was irrelevant. And this in an atmosphere of straitened moral conformity with none of the licence of Alexander’s time.

For a variety of historical reasons, and unlike our Continental neighbours, Britain’s armed forces rely on a tradition of voluntary enlistment. We only turn to conscription in times of dire national emergency and even the army committed to battle on the Somme in 1916 was made up of volunteers. As a result, they have sometimes displayed the characteristics of an enclosed order with its own socio-cultural mores. That has taken on the form of what we are now required to describe as toxic masculinity on an occasional and well-documented basis. Less closely observed is the fact that diversity of thought and behaviour has sometimes enjoyed greater tolerance, often protection, within the armed forces than within society at large — so long as the soldier, sailor or airman pulled their professional weight.

For evidence of diversity of thought look no further than the entire canon of First World War poetry. Also, when in 1917, Sassoon published A Soldier’s Declaration denouncing the British conduct of the war, he was condemned publicly as a traitor while the Army quietly declared him a neurasthenic and placed him under the care of the inspirational WHR Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital, along with Wilfred Owen. Both were subsequently returned to duty. Diversity of behaviour was captured pithily in the phrase, attributed to Churchill, of rum, sodomy and the lash as the defining characteristics of life in the Royal Navy. A more detailed – and laugh-out-loud funny – account of life in the naval Service is contained in George Melly’s picaresque memoir Rum, Bum and Concertina, published at a time when a homosexual act was still a criminal offence.

At which point the defence case rests on the assertion that any characterisation of the profession of arms as an unreconstructed sump of recidivist social and cultural prejudices is ahistorical and bears little scrutiny. So let’s turn to the more proximate issue of the crisis in military recruitment and retention and whether it can be fixed by a quick blast of social justice sermonising.

No need to go too deep and philosophical. Francis Fukuyama has saved us the trouble by pointing out in Liberalism and its Discontents that the radical progressive authors of the woke handbook have — by the substitution of the group for the individual, “lived experience” for scientific method and contempt for the identities, history and cultures that have made Western societies cohere — abandoned liberalism in its traditional form and replaced it with a deeply illiberal ideology that demands a wholesale “deconstruction” of society as the only path to righteousness. So how is that going to go down with the main recruitment catchment?

The largest market for volunteers for the armed forces has traditionally been 18 – 24 years old, white, working-class males looking for a fight. That will change as elements of warfare become more remote and female and minority recruitment improves. But, for now, it’s the pool within which the recruiting sergeant has to fish. As Matthew Goodwin points out in his meticulously researched Values, Voice and Virtue, this group enjoys few conspicuous advantages in the major indices of health, education or employment in contemporary society. All of which is a ringing endorsement of Britain’s egalitarian credentials, but also suggests that lectures to this group on unconscious bias may not go down a storm.

Anecdotal reports also tell of officer cadets at Sandhurst being bawled out for referring to guardsmen and manpower. Even a passing acquaintance with the typical senior non-commissioned officer instructor at Sandhurst will suggest an individual not necessarily in thrall to the linguistic nuances of the radical progressive agenda. It is difficult therefore to imagine who will have experienced the greater sense of dissonance: the SNCO contemplating the finer points of battlefield gender etiquette or the officer cadet who could have sworn he joined to defend his country rather than the conventions of politically correct syntax. Whether the loyalty of either party to an army that requires them to go through these contortions survives remains to be seen.

Then there’s the clever wheeze to relax the criteria for security clearance in order to increase the recruitment pool to include those with unrecorded personal histories. The Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement with the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is a glue which consolidates traditional partners but has a renewed significance in the age of the AUKUS alliance. The quickest way to lose access to the invaluable intelligence product of the group is to play fast and loose with the security that protects it. Alternatively, we could ration national access to only those with the highest clearances, in which case what would be the point of having the intelligence in the first place? There’s something so token, so superficial, so fundamentally unserious about this proposal that it’s only possible to conclude that it’s designed to catch the eye of the onlooking commentariat rather than to make a contribution to a national debate.

It is difficult to record all this without suspending a sense of disbelief — of entering a parallel universe. If you want to fix a recruiting and retention problem, maybe try a competitive wage, habitable accommodation, decent equipment and realistic training as a starting point. Instead of that, a Secretary of State for Defence who has recently caught the headlines by speaking of a pre-war world seems content to preside over an organisation that is increasingly preoccupied with the iniquities of microaggression. Perhaps he should pay a little more attention to the potentially existential implications of the macroaggression he himself has forecast.

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