A Response to RUSI LWC24: A People Focused Perspective

Last week saw the Land Warfare Conference for 2024 (LWC24) from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).  The event had fantastic speeches from the new Defence Secretary, CDS and CGS through to academics such as Professor Anthony King and panellists from industry.  There were discussions about Combined Arms Warfare, how to exploit opportunities with multi-domain integration, how industry can support the Army and the importance of international partners both in terms of NATO and other partner forces around the world.

But there was a key piece missing – people.  Yes, the focus of LWC24 was about tech and was titled “Pulling the Future into the Present” so I understand the focus on the areas mentioned above.  But the lack of discussion about how we are going to recruit, train and retain the people required to enable and exploit this future technology struck me as an issue.

Yes, there has been significant, and I would say valid, criticism in the past that when the strapline “people are our greatest asset” is rolled out it is not accompanied by enough significant action, or even a plan to show how we are going to treat our people as a capability to be treasured and developed.  There was some recognition of course.  CGS started his speech highlighting the importance of our people and that they are our “competitive advantage”.¹  CDS recognised we have a “deficiency of people”.²  The Defence Secretary reiterated the Government’s commitment to appoint an Armed Forces Commissioner directed to improve service life.³

Well, if we are going to improve service life, we need to examine the data we already have on it, clarify the problem, understand the factors causing that problem, and consider the way forward.  That framework is how this article will articulate a possible approach.

Clarifying the People Problem

There has been an ongoing narrative for several years that the Armed Forces are losing too many people too quickly and that this failure to retain our people is a significant problem.  There are issues around recruitment as well, but this article will focus on retention ideas rather than recruitment ideas.

The MOD publishes personnel statistics every quarter.  This article will examine the latest published statistics, those published in April 2024⁴ (the next set will be October 2024).  The Apr 24 numbers show that the trend of a decrease in the number of Full Time Trained Strength (FTTS) is continuing, although this must be caveated against a shrinking overall headcount aiming marker.  As the workforce continues to shrink (as planned) the number of people is measured against the aiming marker set for each Service.

The latest numbers show the Army at 91%, RN/RM at 89%, and RAF at 92.1%.  At first glance these numbers look good, if not great! But the devil is in the details.  The statistics go into intake and outflow for each service (the RN and RM are combined in these published statistics).  The Outflow/Intake graphs seem to show some positive signs, but we won’t know how stable those positive trends are for a year or so.  Trends need lots of data over time to be confidently used and there is no guarantee a trend that looks positive now will continue.

The statistics show that overall, there were around 12,000 recruits into the forces, with around 16,000 people leaving.  Giving a net 4,000 people loss each year across all Services and with every Service seeing more outflow than intake.  With the current total headcount all together is around 125,000 people.  With the intake/outflow graphs as published and knowing the current personnel numbers, we can extrapolate a scenario based upon if there was no change to the intake/outflow – this is a projection, not a prediction.

A thought exercise

Please humour me here.  The RAF are recruiting 1,800 a year and losing 3,000.  With their current workforce at 28,360 they are projected to cease to exist in 2048.  Last in, first out. 

The RN/RM recruit 2,600 a year but lose 3,300.  From their current workforce of 28,470 the Senior Service will lose their final sailor in 2065.  Four years before the Queen Elizabeth class carriers are expected to leave service.⁵

For the Army, they recruit around 7,500 a year and lose 9,700.  With a current FTTS of 68,520, it will be 2055 when there are no more soldiers at all.

These dates feel like a long time away, but we need to properly consider retention now before it gets too far along or gets worse.  The headline remains as it has for a while (less during COVID) –

more people are leaving the Armed Forces than are joining.

Other significant statistics published include that the Voluntary Outflow (VO) rate in the 12 months to 31 March 2024, was 5.2% for Officers and 6.7% for Other Ranks.

There are more detailed statistics published that breakdown into further specific groups, but the above should emphasise the point – retention is an issue, particularly when we are unable to recruit the numbers we need to.⁶  The problem is worse than the pure numbers when we consider that, as a bottom-fed organisation, we cannot recruit experience; we have to train it from the ground up.  For every new entrant, it will take years and in some cases decades to replace the valuable trained and experienced people who are leaving.

If the problem simplifies down to “too much out, not enough in” we need to understand why our people are leaving.  For that, we can turn to the Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey (AFCAS). 

Understanding the Why

AFCAS is an incredible piece of work that is not given enough credit.  Detail on the background is published,⁷ but for this article the key thing to know is that it is a yearly report which tracks statistics over the course of years.  It has been running as a tri-service model since 2007, and single service data goes back much further.

AFCAS 24 has just been published.⁸  The data, as ever, is fascinating and provides an incredible insight into what our people think about Armed Forces life. It also critically highlights pull factors keeping people in service, and push factors which drive people to leave the Services. There are positive and negatives to service life, and AFCAS draws out how our people feel over time. It can give as an insght into which factors have always been there, and which are getting better or worse. Here are some key extracts to think about:

• 24% OFs (Officers) and 41% ORs (Other Ranks)⁹ intend to stay serving.  Are we as an organisation content that 3/4 of our Officers are looking to leave and over half of our Other Ranks?
• The percentage of people who would recommend the Armed Forces as something to join is now at only 57% of OFs and 49% of ORs.  If only half of our workforce are advocates for people to join the Army, we have a significant issue.  Ideally every service person would be a recruiter.  In effect we currently have only 50% the number of people advocating for a career in the Armed Forces.
• The percentage of those rating morale as high has dropped to 4% of OFs and 15% of ORs.  Before you cry that we need to consider not “high” but just positive vs negative morale, the figure for OFs/ORs who rate Army morale as “low” hit 51%.  This equals the lowest recorded levels of high morale amongst Officers recorded (2013¹⁰ – a year in which compulsory redundancy was in force for over 11,000 service people).  Over half of our workforce feel that the Army has low morale.  Is it any wonder our people vote with their feet?

AFCAS has incredible data on the pull/push factors keeping people in or pushing people out of the Army.  What it lacks is a Part 2, an AFCAS Action Plan.  Where are the reports on “what has been done” and whether efforts have been effective? Or “what is being done” with timelines of when people can see improvement? Without these aspects our people don’t believe they are being listened too, or that the issues simply aren’t a priority for the Army as an organisation.

AFCAS repeatedly highlights that the impact of service life on both family/personal life and spouse/partner careers are two of the biggest factors pushing people to leave.  How can we work on improving these issues?  In defence of MOD, the Wrap Around Childcare provision has been a very significant improvement in both policy provision, execution and communication – it should be a model of where MOD can identify an issue, plan to help relieve it, and then follow through.  All whilst communicating effectively with both service people and their families.

AFCAS also highlights the parts of The Offer that keep people serving and are most highly valued.  Over a number of years now the primary “pull” factors have been Defence medical services, dental services and job security.  Are there ways we can capitalise on where we are doing well?  Almost certainly, if we are willing to resource a plan to do so.

Do we need even more Data?

Yes.  AFCAS provides an excellent foundation and identification of trends, and its findings must be exploited.  But there are more opportunities that would give even more data that would help us better understand the Retention issue, and in much more detail.  We also already have some of the mechanisms for this.  This article will very briefly cover just one.

The Army Exit Survey was introduced in January 2021.  It is still mostly unknown and as such the potential data it could harvest is being missed and so cannot be exploited.  In April 2024 Soldier Magazine stated that there was a mere 8-13% response rate.  It is unclear if that is a percentage of all those who have been leaving the Army, or just those who have been explicitly sent the survey.  A Freedom of Information request¹¹ from February 2024 seems to show an 8.8% response rate with only 1,154 out of the 13,097 who have left the Army since the Exit Survey launched completing it.  

The Army Exit Survey should be prioritised as a mechanism to obtain valuable data on why our people are leaving. It isn’t completed by the Chain of Command and can give people an opportunity to honestly express their reasons for ceasing to serve beyond a JPA tick list of reasons. Our people will almost certainly also be able to offer ideas and solutions that could be put into action.

Once we better understand why our people are leaving, we can better create potential solutions to keep people retained as a way to solve our people problem.

A Way Forward

Whilst we need more data to produce plans to enact hopefully successful solutions, we already know enough to consider some projects we could “get after” straight away.  The below are a scattergun list of potential ideas.  All will have their drawbacks, but it may well be that some of them are worthwhile trialling.  Or they may spark off conversations that produce other, better, more realistic ideas.

• Fund Medical and Dental training to enable more family practices.  Some of our locations already offer this with service families eligible for both GP and dentist appointments at military med/dental centres.  Where this isn’t offered our families suffer, often on waiting lists for years at a time¹².  For people who relocate every two years, their families may never reach the top of that waiting list and, as a result, the assignment system results in family members not being able to access health and dental care.
• Expand the Defence Co-working Hub Network.  These are in place at a number of sites where infrastructure that was not being used by military units has been repurposed for spouses/partners to use as a remote office.  This engages community spirit amongst service partners, as well as engaging them more in our day to day lives as they can work on a military base.

For both of the above proposals we must not forget that many families retain SFA in places other than a service persons duty station, or they may be at distance as weekly commuters.  Where service families are close to a MOD station which offers community and welfare support including medical/dental and co-working hubs, any local service family should be able to access them.  Even if their service person weekly commutes to another base.

• Consider “Stability Postings”.  The RAF currently offer to some trades a posting of 3-5 years.  The Army is working towards this with the news that senior Major postings will become three years rather than two after it was recognised that lack of stability is a key driver of a service family being disadvantaged.  Medical and dental has been discussed above, but even more important where the service family have children is school places.  The current system means that families are sometimes moved at such short notice and so often that children miss school application dates resulting in significant stress to the service family.  The current system of moving location every 18-24 months needs a re-think. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
• In addition to stability postings, consider completing appointment boards further in advance.  Currently a family/service person can move three months from an assignment board result being published.  Where a partner has to find new work or where a service child has to move school this is unrealistic.  We should push the Army Personnel Centre to forecast much, much further out to give full years notice to our people.  There will always be exceptions, and promotions will likely not give that much notice.  However, routine postings in the current system result in quick moves that can significantly negatively impact our people and their dependents.
• Supercharge the Army Exit Survey to get more data to meaningfully exploit.  Share reasons for people leaving and transparently act on them so that our people who are leaving understand that their response will be listened to, analysed, and acted on.

Summary

This article has outlined our problem with retention, explored some of the statistics which tell us the problem exists, and other statistics which can help us understand why the problem exists.

The new Defence Secretary in his speech to LWC24 stated that he is keen to pick up other people’s ideas.¹³  We could start as an Army by ensuring we truly understand why our people leave, and then act on that information by creating a Retention Plan at Army level targeted at those people we need, not want, to stay serving.

People are indeed our competitive advantage, our primary capability.  We need to listen to them and take action to keep more of them, and we need to do it now.

 

Feature image credit: MOD

1. CGS Speech to LWC24, https://www.army.mod.uk/news-and-events/news/2024/07/pulling-the-future-into-the-present-rusi-land-warfare-conference/
2. CDS Speech to LWC24,  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-the-defence-staff-speech-at-rusi-land-warfare-conference-2024
3. Defence Secretary Speech to LWC24, http://www.govwire.co.uk/news/ministry-of-defence/speech-defence-secretary-speech-at-rusi-land-warfare-conference-2024-96224
4. MOD Quarterly Personnel Statistics, Apr 24, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-2024/quarterly-service-personnel-statistics-1-april-2024
5. Lifespan of QE Carriers, https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/how-long-hms-queen-elizabeth-5500561
6. Bolt Buden Kemp, “The MOD’s recruitment crisis: What is going on?”, https://www.boltburdonkemp.co.uk/our-insights/posts/the-mods-recruitment-crisis-what-is-going-on/#:~:text=The%20Army%20has%20decreased%20from,while%20only%2012%2C000%20joined%20up.
7. AFCAS Background Report 2024, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/664c95c4b7249a4c6e9d38ad/Armed_Forces_Continuous_Attitude_Survey_2024_Background_Quality_Report.pdf
8. AFCAS 24 Summary, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/armed-forces-continuous-attitude-survey-summaries/armed-forces-continuous-attitude-survey-2024-summary
9. Authors Note: I dislike the term Other Ranks but use it to match AFCAS.
10. House of Commons paper on Armed Forces Redundancies, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05951/
11. Freedom of Information request on the Army Exit Survey, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/army_exit_survey/response/2567737/attach/html/3/20240130%20FOI02020%20Response.pdf.html
12. While anecdotal, and predominantly referring to officers, this is an area where more data is needed (and would be highly valuable) to understand the scale of the problem.
13. Defence Secretary Speech to LWC24, http://www.govwire.co.uk/news/ministry-of-defence/speech-defence-secretary-speech-at-rusi-land-warfare-conference-2024-96224