British youth now too soft and corrupted to fight?

With "old-fashioned" ideals of courage and manliness mocked and "cradle to the grave" nannying by the State, it's not too suprising

"The [British] Army has stopped actively recruiting Commonwealth and foreign soldiers because the numbers joining up have risen by nearly 3,000 per cent in seven years. Imposing a cap on the number of Commonwealth and foreign soldiers allowed to serve in each infantry regiment has been discussed by army chiefs. “It is after all supposed to be the British Army, not the Commonwealth Army,” one defence source said.

However, in recent years, many regiments would not have survived without the influx of recruits from the Commonwealth, particularly from Fiji, Jamaica, South Africa and Ghana, because of drastic manpower shortages. Soldiers from overseas now account for 6 per cent of the Army’s strength, rising to 9 per cent if the 3,000 Gurkhas recruited from Nepal are taken into account.

Last year the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment had 116 overseas and Commonwealth citizens serving in its ranks, representing about 20 per cent of the total strength. The Black Watch had 31 Commonwealth soldiers, most of them Fijian.

The overseas recruits are regarded as high-quality soldiers who have played an increasingly important role in operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many have won gallantry medals: Private Johnson Beharry, 25, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for saving the lives of his comrades in Iraq in 2003, was born in Grenada and was one of the 116 Commonwealth soldiers who joined the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.

The problem for army chiefs is that the number of applicants from the Commonwealth has risen dramatically at the same time as recruits from within the United Kingdom have dropped significantly. General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, revealed yesterday that in the last financial year recruitment had fallen 7 per cent short of the target.

Yet the Commonwealth figures show that numbers have risen from 205 in 1998 to about 6,000 this year. There are currently 5,500 Commonwealth and overseas soldiers serving in the UK Field Army and another 700 recruits are under training ..."

(Excerpt from The Times).

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