IT IS becoming almost impossible to avoid the British Army’s aggressive new recruitment campaign. From traditional adverts plastered on the side of London buses to the You Belong Here clips being promoted on streaming services like 4oD or shared to the @armyjobs_ Instagram page, it seems that the Ministry of Defence is doing everything it can to promote careers in the military to our children and young people. This is, of course, entirely in keeping with the plans set out in the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) from earlier this year.

Since my previous articles on these plans, there have been a number of key developments. Most notably, Keir Starmer’s government has now released its Defence Industrial Strategy. This more recent document shows how the government intends to implement the goals outlined in the SDR.

According to the Defence Industrial Strategy, the government will “strengthen our national security” by creating a “strong industrial base” that will not only guarantee our safety but also support “economic prosperity” across all regions of the UK. To attain this, “defence-specific and defence-relevant training” has been listed as one of the Defence Industrial Strategy’s key metrics for success.

John Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, explains in the ministerial forward to the document that: “In order to ensure the UK can take advantage of the growth opportunities in defence, we must make sure we have the right skilled workforce.”

On this basis millions of pounds will be spent on trying to generate a workforce for the “defence industry.” In practice, this will mean encouraging children and young people to consider careers with the military or in the arms trade instead of the other options available to them.

In the Defence Industrial Strategy, the government reiterates its plans to “promote the benefits of a career in industry to school pupils and ensure more apprentices and graduates are taking up defence-related courses.”

This will involve “working with the Department [for] Education to promote understanding of the Armed Forces among young people in schools and expanding in-school and community-based cadet forces across the country by 30 per cent by 2030.” In the same vein, the government intends to “explore a partnership with the University and Colleges Admissions Services (Ucas).” They hope to create a “new Ucas defence portal” to “promote defence careers and routes into them.”

In a move that would majorly reform the landscape of post-16 education, the government is also proposing to introduce new “defence technical excellence colleges.” Supposedly, these will “directly align skills provision to employer need to ensure that demand is met.”

In this sense, these “DTECs” can be usefully compared to the University Technical Colleges (UTCs) introduced by the coalition government in the 2010s.

These sought to partner completely new educational institutes with local universities and regional employers in a bid to encourage certain pupils to pursue more vocational routes than mainstream schooling. Presumably, the DTECs would do the same, but with more explicit links to major arms companies such as BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, or Babcock International.

UTCs, which recruit children as young as 14, have been widely criticised on pedagogical grounds. For instance, it has been argued that UTCs force pupils to specialise at too early a stage in their education. UTCs have also been beleaguered by low levels of pupil recruitment. Therefore, they have often been perceived as “places of last resort” for children who have struggled with mainstream education and who tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

DTECs would likely encounter similar challenges, but with the added ethical implications of using young people to produce weapons.

As recorded in Demilitarise Education’s Universities & Arms Database, there are already links between 138 UK universities and arms companies.

In their open letter to university leaders, calling for an end to university war complicity, Demilitarise Education note that, since 2017, “over £2 billion has flowed into [academic] research and institutional partnerships” with both private weapons manufacturers and military bodies. This trend, which Demilitarise Education argue places universities in breach of human rights, environmental, and legal commitments, is now set to be massively exacerbated.

The Defence Industrial Strategy explicitly seeks to redefine academic institutions, “including apprenticeship providers, further education colleges and universities,” as part of the UK’s “defence industrial base.”

It also sets out the government’s plans to “establish a Defence Universities Alliance (DUA).” The impetus for embedding a more “strategic relationship between defence and the higher education sector” is largely justified by what is described as a need to pursue greater technological innovation within the defence sector.

This would mean trying to take advantage of advancements in artificial intelligence, biological engineering, and drone technology in order to increase the military’s “lethality” (ie, its ability to kill its designated targets more effectively).

It is striking that the Defence Industrial Strategy makes no mention of the ongoing crisis in the higher education sector. This is a crisis that has intensified since Labour came into office and has led to widespread redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the vast majority of UK universities.

In the Defence Industrial Strategy, Plymouth is even held up as a positive case study where a newly announced “defence growth deal” will help to “strengthen local skills initiatives” including via the local university. Plymouth is represented in the House of Commons by Luke Pollard, a Labour MP who also holds a position within the Ministry of Defence. Anyone who has visited Plymouth recently will have seen that the concentration of naval forces at HMS Devonport has done nothing to address the dire levels of local poverty or to rejuvenate the physically crumbling city centre and its broken infrastructure.

In reality, the decommissioned nuclear submarines at the base have been spewing radiation into the sea whilst swingeing cuts at the University of Plymouth have continued apace.

It is deeply disingenuous for the government to suggest that militarism can be used as an engine for jobs and economic growth.

The number of jobs that could be sustained by arms companies simply pales in comparison to the number of jobs that could be created by proper investment into areas such as health and social care.

The likelihood of being able to use investment in the arms trade in order to create a “defence dividend” is also undermined by the fact that weapons manufacturers overwhelmingly tend to be large corporate monopolies that invest their profits overseas rather than back into local economies.  

What, then, is the real purpose of the government’s ill-conceived plans? At the most transparent level, this specious emphasis on jobs creation is part of a wider attempt to legitimise the decision to increase military spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. This “historic commitment,” as it is referred to by the government, has to be seen in the context of Donald Trump’s belligerent crusade to force Nato states to pour more money into realising US war aims in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As such, Starmer’s government is more interested in signalling its support for US foreign policy than genuinely trying to improve the life outcomes of our children and young people.  

Beyond this, of course, it is likely that the government really does want to soften the public up to the prospect of future warfare.

Indeed, they have not been shy about this. Public support for military aggression and adventurism has remained exceedingly low since the joint US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003. More recently, since 2023, many individuals under the age of 25 have been actively organising and attending demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine.

Large numbers of young people from across the country have even participated in non-violent direct action or been arrested under the government’s authoritarian enforcement of terrorism legislation. Relatedly, vast swathes of younger voters are gravitating towards Zack Polanski’s Greens, or Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s nascent political formation. Unlike Labour, which will forever be tainted by its refusal to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Polanski, Corbyn and Sultana are all articulating a clear anti-war position.  

The government’s plans for schools and universities should be understood as an attempt to respond to these political conditions by trying to “manufacture consent” for the military. To date, all Labour administrations of the 21st century have pursued pro-war agendas, and all have been met with significant political opposition.

At this point, using the education system as a tool of indoctrination may seem like Labour’s best option if it wants to prolong its commitment to US imperialism and militarism without continuing to face such resistance.

There is every chance that the government’s desperately cynical move will be seen for what it is by students, parents, guardians, caregivers, and educators.

Nevertheless, as activists, we must do everything we can to denounce these plans in the strongest possible terms. We must also strive to build a broad-based anti-war movement that presents a better vision for the future than the one that Labour has put on offer to our children and young people. 

Join CND’s Stop the War Drive conference this Saturday at The Green House, Ethical Property, 244 – 254 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA. Register at https://cnduk.org/events/no-to-war-no-to-british-nuclear-expansion-invest-in-saving-lives-not-destroying-them-cnd-conference/