There are times when a nation’s decline is best measured not by its enemies but by its memos.
A superpower fades with a whimper, a bureaucracy dies in minutes and a once‑great army loses its soul by writing about inclusivity.
Last week, Lieutenant General David Eastman MBE, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, sent a circular to the officers of the British Army instructing them to review their ‘affiliations’ with private members’ clubs, lest these august institutions offend the ‘values of equality and respect’.
He wrote: ‘The British Army continues to evolve into a modern, inclusive and forward-thinking organisation.
‘It is imperative that our practices, partnerships and affiliations reflect the values we uphold.’
One almost chokes on the words. Not because equality is wrong, but because of the sheer tragi-comic absurdity of seeing the British Army, the same organisation that once stormed the Somme, held
El Alamein and bled in Helmand, descend into the language of Human Resources (HR). Field Marshal Montgomery would have needed a stiff gin, before throwing the missive in the bin.
You can picture it: a clutch of generals and civil servants in a conference room, soy latte foam drying on the table, earnestly debating whether membership rules and gender balance within clubs such as White’s or The Cavalry & Guards – be they still all- male clubs or those that now admit women – align with Army values.
Lieutenant General David Eastman MBE, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, sent a circular to the officers of the British Army instructing them to review their ‘affiliations’ with private members’ clubs (file image)
Gosh, imagine the reality dawning that The Cavalry & Guards Club, with its incredibly good-value food and drink, might be the kind of place where the Guards and Cavalry and other flavours of the military might hold a function or gather on their evenings off when in London?
Meanwhile, as they ponder such earth-shattering priorities, the world beyond their PowerPoint slides has turned hostile and multipolar. Nato is creaking. The Americans are tired.
Russia, China, Iran and the rest are testing the sinews of Western strength, and the British Army’s contribution to this new Cold War is now a gender audit of the billiards room.
This beggars belief. The letter, in tone and diction, could have been drafted by the Department for Business Ethics or the John Lewis Partnership.
It is polite, polished and paralysed by moral vanity, the new lingua franca of officialdom.
The modern Army now speaks in the therapeutic register of the HR department: ‘engagement,’ ‘alignment,’ ‘values,’ ‘dialogue’. Words that evade responsibility.
Words that smell of a hazelnut latte and compromise.
The tragedy here, however, is not a single act of bureaucratic folly but what it represents: the complete psychological domestication of a military once defined by its earthy realism.
The Army used to exist outside the polite anxieties of peacetime Britain; it was an institution built for dirty, necessary work.
Now its senior officers sound like mindfulness coaches.
The whole performance is self-important and faintly comic, the moral preening of a force that has forgotten what it is for.
We have replaced discipline with diversity, command with consensus and purpose with policy language.
This is not modernisation, it is self-neutering. A force obsessed with optics cannot win wars.
What is astonishing about the Eastman letter is not its sentiment but its earnestness.
It was clearly written in good faith by an intelligent man who believes the Army must mirror the society it defends. I see that as the key problem.
Officers were urged to ‘advocate for change’ and reflect a modern Army (file image)
The Army is not society. It is the fence around it. Its purpose is not to reflect the national mood but to resist it, to remain hard where the country is soft, decisive where the nation dithers.
If the military becomes as performative and apologetic as the institutions it serves, then when war comes (as it always does) we will discover we have soldiers fluent in empathy but rusty in arms.
The Army is, unlike society, 10 per cent female. And lest I’m misunderstood, let me be very clear: women are an essential part of the modern military and I welcome their inclusion.
But this idea that we must all socialise together, in a pre-sanctioned location that adheres to an approved set of woke diktats, is tantamount to entering a bureaucratic cul-de-sac. It’s HR babble-speak dressed up as moral progress.
The Garrick, the Freemasons or the MCC are not the problem, any more than women-only clubs such as Fiena, The University Women’s Club, The AllBright or The Sorority are.
Servicewomen and servicemen earn equality through merit, not which clubs they choose to be members of in their off-time.
And here lies the deeper hypocrisy. Very senior officers frequently speak at, dine at and are delighted to be photographed at the very gentlemen’s clubs they now pretend to find problematic – not the ones where there’s a pole in the main room, but the old establishments of Pall Mall and St James’s, where port and pomposity flow in equal measure.
In retirement, they will lunch and pontificate there happily, untroubled by the ‘values of equality and respect’.
To scold the serving ranks for affiliations while polishing their own silver at Buck’s or the Garrick is moral theatre of the most English kind: prim in public, comfortable in private.
Britain’s enemies will not care whether our regiments have diverse golf memberships.
They will care how fast we can mobilise, how many shells we can fire and whether we still have the will to fight.
Recruits undergo physical training at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines on November in Lympstone
The real measure of inclusivity in the Army is simple: will the person next to you pull you out of a ditch under fire? Everything else is pageantry.
The letter is the symptom of a class of officer terrified of appearing behind the moral curve. They wish to be liked, to be civilised, to be ‘seen’.
But an army that wants to be liked is already half-beaten. Its job is not to be admired but to be feared by its enemies and respected by its allies.
The great irony is that the rank and file still understand this perfectly.
It is only the top brass – cosseted, committee-bred, politically house-trained – who seem to have forgotten.
What is key is that it isn’t cruelty that has gone missing, it is seriousness.
When institutions begin to talk like NGOs, they begin to think like them, endlessly reviewing, consulting and apologising while the rest of the world gets on with reality.
And so, as the global order fractures, the British Army busies itself with cultural housekeeping.
It is difficult to decide which is more dangerous: the cynicism of our enemies or the self-absorption of our leaders.
A military that can no longer tell the difference between morale and morality is one that risks being irrelevant in both war and peace.
