Useless White Male Pilots

After the Battle of Britain, Churchill said of Fighter Command's pilots "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Now the RAF owes their successors justice.

Clockwise from top left: RAF pilots wait for a Spitfire to be rearmed during the Battle of Britain; Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC and fellow aircrew from 617 Sqn; the aircrew and ground crew of a pathfinder Mosquito; the crew of Vulcan 607 after the Black Buck 1 raid on Port Stanley airfield.

In a recent article for the Daily Telegraph Colonel Tim Collins, who achieved global fame with his inspiring yet compassionate eve of battle speech before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has finally said the bleeding obvious about the Ministry of Defence’s obsession with diversity. If we want to fix the damage decades of cuts and political meddling have done to our armed forces, says Collins, there’s a simple solution - “Recruit more white men”.

This is heresy, of course. After all, why would His Majesty’s Armed Forces want to recruit white men when a whole spectrum of other people are available, in every colour of the rainbow and every gender of the imagination? Nevertheless, Colonel Collins makes a persuasive case. Pointing out the terrifying fact that the MoD now has more diversity networks (92) than operational tanks, and adding that our taxes are paying to keep more asylum seekers in hotels than soldiers in barracks, he highlighted the collapse of recruiting under Capita’s mismanagement and the serious damage that’s doing to the Armed Forces.

Our Forces Are Falling Apart

Two frigates have been disposed of, years before their replacements arrive, because the Royal Navy can’t find enough sailors to crew them - even though we’ve been desperately short of frigates for decades now. Nine of the Army’s 16 infantry regiments are more than 20% understrength; the worst, the Scots Guards, is missing 42% of the soldiers it should have.

At 42% understrength an infantry battalion is not combat effective. The Scots Guards should be able to deploy three rifle companies, each of three platoons of one officer and around 30 men, and a support company with mortars, anti-tank weapons and other specialists, including a reconnaissance platoon and assault pioneers. With less than two-thirds of the soldiers it’s supposed to have the Scots Guards can’t do this. It’s faced with two choices, both of which are completely unacceptable.

A rifle platoon has a small headquarters and three sections, each of eight men. For the Scots Guards to retain its structure of three rifle companies, each of three platoons of three sections, while also keeping its support company and all the other essential parts of the battalion (logistics, administration and so on) it would have to reduce each section to four men. This won’t work. Currently each section is divided into a pair of four-man fire teams, and the way it fights is one team uses its weapons to suppress the enemy while the other advances. With only one fire team, as soon as they stop shooting and stand up to advance the enemy will simply pop back up and open fire. It can’t have four-man sections with two-man fire teams either, because two men can’t even carry, never mind use, all the weapons and equipment a fire team needs.

Alternatively the Scots Guards could consolidate down to two rifle companies, which would be only slightly understrength - but that won’t work either. With two companies it can either have them both up front, leaving it with no reserve (as any commander will tell you, this is a Very Bad Thing) or keep one in reserve but only have one up front, meaning it doesn’t have the combat power to carry out battalion-sized tasks.

Basically, with their current manpower problems, the Scots Guards can’t go to war. The battalion is simply too weak to do its job. It’s combat ineffective. And how many of the other eight badly understrength regiments are also combat ineffective? It’s somewhere between none of them and all of them, obviously - but I suspect the answer is closer to “all of them”.

It gets worse. The Army’s 16 infantry regiments currently contain 31 Regular infantry battalions plus two Gurkha battalions, but as I’ve mentioned before this is deceptive. Ten of those battalions - almost a third - are either Ranger, Special Forces Support or Specialist Infantry battalions, and they can’t operate as normal infantry units. They’re trained differently, they have different (and much lighter) equipment, and they’re simply far too small. A Regular infantry battalion at full strength should contain between 560 and 732 personnel depending on what type of battalion it is (although none of them except the Gurkhas are currently at full strength); a Specialist Infantry Battalion has just 267 men.

And it gets even worse than that. I mentioned before that a rifle company has three platoons. Well, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, in a sneaky move designed to slash Regular troop numbers without the political embarrassment of disbanding units, the Tories cut that to two platoons per company at peacetime establishment. When the battalion deploys on operations or mobilises for war, the plan is that each company will be brought up to strength with a third platoon from the Army Reserve (formerly the Territorial Army).

There are a number of problems with this. One is that, in a company, you’ll have two platoons of Regulars and one of reservists who spend less than a month a year in uniform and, with the best will in the world, will never reach the same standard of training as their Regular counterparts. A second is that two platoons who have lived, worked and trained together on a daily basis will be joined by a third - which hasn’t worked regularly with the two Regular platoons, may not have trained together as a platoon at all, and is very much an unknown quantity. Then of course the biggest problem of all is that Army Reserve recruitment is, if anything, in an even worse state than the Regular Army’s.

Between university and joining the Regular Army I spent a year or so in my local TA infantry battalion. When I decided to join I simply called the unit’s admin office one afternoon and, the next Friday, was on a selection weekend at Walcheren Barracks in Maryhill. On the Sunday they told me I’d passed. The following Tuesday I was in uniform and on parade with my new unit (E Company, 1st Battalion, 52nd Lowland Volunteers, in case you’re interested - a descendant of the Territorial battalion of the Highland Light Infantry with which my great-grandfather went to France in 1914).

Now, thanks to the Army’s new streamlined, high-tech internet-based recruitment system, it takes an average of a year to get through the process of joining the Army Reserve and actually starting training. Unsurprisingly, over 85% of the people who apply to the Army Reserve get fed up with the endless delays and end up not joining. The situation isn’t any better for the other services, either. Last year almost 27,000 people applied to join the reserves across the Royal Navy, Army and RAF. Just 3,780 were recruited. Meanwhile 5,580 reservists left. The Army Reserve, just like the Regular Army, is bleeding to death because its broken recruitment system can’t bring in enough people to replace those who are leaving. So don’t count on all those third platoons from the Army Reserve actually being available when they’re needed.

Can White Men Save The Day?

The MoD has been arguing for years that by focusing on diversity - for example opening all combat roles in the Armed Forces to women, encouraging ethnic minorities to join and publicly celebrating male soldiers who have their plums chopped off and start parading in a skirt - our military can be brought up to strength, benefit from all sorts of different perspectives and better represent modern British society. Well, let’s dispose of the last argument first: The Armed Forces aren’t supposed to “represent” British society. They’re supposed to defend it, ultimately by killing people and breaking their stuff. So we can get rid of the second argument too, because any perspective that doesn’t boil down to putting Britain’s enemies in the sights of a weapon is completely irrelevant.

So that leaves the argument that by concentrating on diversity the Armed Forces can exploit a vast pool of previously untapped personpower and bring themselves up to strength that way. Recent recruitment campaigns have focused heavily on women and ethnic minorities. Clearly, these recruitment campaigns aren’t working; otherwise the Army wouldn’t be so disastrously understrength. Even worse, as Colonel Collins points out, there’s now overwhelming evidence that while failing to recruit the desired number of ethnic minorities, women and genderqueers, current recruitment efforts are also actively deterring white men from joining. And why wouldn’t they? If you’re a young white man in Britain today, why would you think military recruitment adverts are aimed at you? Almost every face you see in them is either female or minority. If white men do appear in a recruitment video, such as the notorious “This is belonging” series from 2018, they’re probably just meekly waiting while a muslim soldier selfishly stops to pray in the middle of a patrol.

Recent British Army recruitment videos on YouTube. Not very welcoming to white men, are they?

Collins slams the MoD’s diversity strategy as “ridiculously aggressive”. Accurately pointing out that white men are “the core group which is likely to join the military” and “the only group which is at all likely, realistically, to solve our personnel crisis by joining up in sufficient numbers” he calls for the focus on diversity and inclusion to be suspended until the recruitment crisis has been solved. And he’s right, although I (and probably he) would much rather see it binned for good.

Unfortunately, that won’t be enough. The attitude of the MoD - and, appallingly, of some officers in the Armed Forces themselves - towards white men goes beyond neglect and has crossed the line into actual discrimination.

The RAF Imposed Racist And Sexist Policies

In August 2022 Group Captain Elizabeth Nicholl, the RAF’s head of recruitment, resigned in protest at being asked to carry out an unlawful order. That order related to the diversity of pilot candidates entering RAF training. The RAF’s leadership, determined to boost its diversity numbers, had ordered her to pause the recruitment of white men and focus on women and ethnic minorities. Believing this to be illegal discrimination, Gp Capt Nicholl took legal advice then told her superiors that their policies violated anti-discrimination laws. When they insisted she enforced the policy anyway she did what every officer has a duty to do when given an unlawful order; she refused. When the RAF still didn’t change its policies she resigned her commission.

Shortly after Nicholl resigned, Tory Armed Forces Minister James Heappey denied that the RAF was discriminating against white men. He claimed the RAF was pausing all recruitment of pilots while it looked at legal ways to boost diversity. We’ll come back to that - but, anyway, it turned out to be untrue.

Someone inside the RAF’s recruitment branch, clearly not too happy with how things were going, leaked a collection of emails to the media. One of them, from a squadron leader in the branch, asked a subordinate for a breakdown of candidates for aircrew selection boards by sex and ethnic group. The squadron leader continued, “I noted that the boards have recently been predominantly white male heavy, if we don't have enough BAME and female to board then we need to make the decision to pause boarding and seek more BAME and female [from recruiters].” He went on, “I don't really need to see loads of useless white male pilots, lets [sic] get a [sic] focussed as possible, I am more than happy to reduce boarding if needed to have a balanced BAME/female/Male board.”

Really? Useless white male pilots? If this isn’t anti-white racism and blatant misandry, then what is it?

The squadron leader also revealed that “We have cancelled 2 x boards next week due to them having no female/BAME”. So the RAF would rather recruit no pilots than white male pilots. Now, let’s put this into context. That email was sent in 2021. Since at least 2016 the RAF has been suffering from a critical shortage of trained pilots. There’s been a lot of criticism of the slow delivery of F-35B stealth aircraft, but in fact we have more of the jets than we do people trained to fly them (although the RAF is now trying to hide this by borrowing pilots from the US Marine Corps and Royal Australian Air Force). We don’t have enough pilots for our fleet of Typhoons either, despite only 102 Typhoons remaining operational out of the 160 the RAF has bought. There is, in fact, a chronic shortage of pilots and other aircrew for all the aircraft types operated by the RAF - and yet they cancelled selection boards because too many of the candidates were white and male.

This is clear and undeniable evidence that the obsession with diversity is actively harming this country.

The RAF now says it’s reformed its recruitment procedures, and the new Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, has apologised to the white male candidates who were discriminated against - most of whom ended up abandoning their hopes of a career in the RAF, further exacerbating the pilot shortage. Thirty-one discrimination victims have each been paid £5,000 compensation by the RAF, which has acknowledged they were “unfairly disadvantaged” by the recruitment process enforced by ACM Knighton’s predecessor, ACM Sir Mike Wigston. Frankly, Wigston should be charged with sabotage; in leaked emails he told subordinates he was “prepared to bend the operational inflow requirement for the RAF out of shape for the next three years to meet diversity levels of ambition.” However, Knighton also said none of the people responsible for this discrimination would face any disciplinary action.

Positive Discrimination Must End - And Be Punished

Of course lack of accountability in the public sector is nothing new; it’s routine for the government’s employees to make the most appalling screw-ups and evade all consequences, often going on to be promoted. I’d always thought the Armed Forces were an exception to this, though. Well, apparently not anymore.

Air Chief Marshal Wigston admitted he was willing to sacrifice operational requirements to diversity, but was allowed to retire on full pension and got a flypast by the Red Arrows to mark his last day in uniform. He’s now a visiting professor at Kings College London. Air Vice Marshal Maria Byford, a former RAF dentist who acted as Wigston’s enforcer and pushed recruiting staff to prioritise diversity - she’s the one who gave Group Captain Nicholl the unlawful order - is also retired on full pension and is promoting herself on LinkedIn as an expert in diversity and inclusion. Gp Capt William Dole, Nicholl’s predecessor as head of recruitment and the man who set up the discriminatory processes she challenged, moved on to become Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for career management, managing the careers of all RAF aircrew; since then he’s been awarded an OBE, promoted to Air Commodore and put in charge of the service’s infrastructure. According to his LinkedIn profile his pronouns are “he/him”.

These people broke the law. They discriminated against potential pilots on the basis of their sex and skin colour, which is illegal - but they’re all getting away with it (and in Dole’s case continuing to be rewarded and promoted) because, in Knighton’s words, they “acted with the best of intentions”. Well, I don’t care about their intentions. They violated anti-discrimination legislation and, more importantly, worsened the RAF’s pilot shortage and damaged its operational effectiveness. But they’re facing no consequences whatsoever. In fact the only person who suffered (apart from all the “useless white male pilots” who were discriminated against, of course - let’s not forget about them) was Group Captain Nicholl, the only one in this entire stinking mess who did the right thing - and was forced out.

What sort of message does that send to white men who might be considering a military career?

This nonsense must end. The political situation in Europe is the most dangerous it’s been in decades. Russia, backed by its authoritarian friends in China, Iran and North Korea, is aggressively trying to expand its territory at the expense of its neighbours. Iranian proxies are setting the Middle East on fire, trying to provoke a regional war and threatening global trade routes. We need to rebuild our military, fast and effectively. The MoD’s efforts to promote diverse recruitment have failed, and we have no more time to waste on failed social engineering projects. Colonel Collins is right - only a return to traditional recruiting priorities can save the British Armed Forces now. But as the comments below his Telegraph article make very clear, the white men he wants to recruit don’t want to join anymore - because the MoD and rogue officers like Wigston, Byford and Dole have actively worked to make them feel unwelcome.

The civil servants and officers who created this mess must suffer real consequences, and must be seen to suffer. ACM Knighton’s standard whitewashing - “I’ve apologised”, “We will learn the lessons” and “The recommendations will be implemented in full” - just isn’t good enough anymore. Careers must end in disgrace. Those who ordered Gp Capt Nicholl to implement unlawful policies must face legal action. Only then will our military regain the trust of the men it’s relied on for centuries - and needs, more than ever, now.