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18-01-2025, 10:40 AM
This is UK thinking. Moreover, overseas recruitment is a long-established part of the British military tradition. The above-mentioned Brigade of Gurkhas is rightly cherished as one of our elite formations; beyond that, thousands of recruits from Ireland and the Commonwealth serve with distinction. Nor are we even the Western nation most radically invested in idea. France maintains the famous Foreign Legion, which to this day issues recruits with a new identity, asks no questions of anybody not wanted by Interpol, and holds out the promise of French citizenship to those who complete their term of service and achieve an honourable discharge.
Perhaps these could be written off as historical quirks, holdovers from the imperial era which, however useful, cannot be replicated in ‘the modern world’. Yet as so often, such thinking merely treats a fundamentally aesthetic belief about modernity as if it were a practical fact. The ongoing erosion of the post-Cold War order – not least Russia’s invasion itself – should put paid to such lazy end-of-history thinking.
The fact is that formations such as the Brigade of Gurkhas and the Foreign Legion clearly work, whilst if Commonwealth recruitment plays a seemingly residual role in our Armed Forces that is a result only of our own policy choices – last year it emerged that we have rejected 24,000 would-be Commonwealth recruits over just the previous five years, despite the manpower shortfall.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01...gn-legion/
Perhaps these could be written off as historical quirks, holdovers from the imperial era which, however useful, cannot be replicated in ‘the modern world’. Yet as so often, such thinking merely treats a fundamentally aesthetic belief about modernity as if it were a practical fact. The ongoing erosion of the post-Cold War order – not least Russia’s invasion itself – should put paid to such lazy end-of-history thinking.
The fact is that formations such as the Brigade of Gurkhas and the Foreign Legion clearly work, whilst if Commonwealth recruitment plays a seemingly residual role in our Armed Forces that is a result only of our own policy choices – last year it emerged that we have rejected 24,000 would-be Commonwealth recruits over just the previous five years, despite the manpower shortfall.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01...gn-legion/
