The Army is obsessed with safety

Last week, the new head of the Army, General Sir Roly Walker, warned that war may be much closer than we think. Is our military ready? Two years ago, a syndicate of young officers published an article on the extreme shortage of division and brigade-level training in the British Army. Since then, the amount of larger-scale training has improved somewhat, despite a general resource shortage, but a form-filling safety regime has developed in our armed forces in the past decade which makes our army less combat ready.

It’s worth first understanding how safety works in the British Army. In recent years, several fatal accidents have been reported in its operations. Statistics are no comfort to a grieving family, but, since withdrawal from Afghanistan, the armed forces have become a significantly safer environment than the civilian world. Service personnel are 56 per cent less likely to die each year than their civilian peers.