A lengthy recruitment process and apathy by politicians are to blame for chronic lack of personnel in the armed forces, a defence analyst has claimed.
Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford told GB News: “The Army for example, my former employer, hasn't fulfilled its recruiting figures since 2010 - that’s an appalling indictment of the way things are being run.
“As you know, it has been contracted out to Capita who are useless at it, I mean, just useless and there's no two bones about it.
“I haven't found anybody who has a good thing to say about them in that capacity. So that's the story of where we've just taken our eye off the ball.”
In a discussion with Martin Daubney, he said: “The short answer to your question of how did this happen is that we have had a series of elected representatives and Prime Ministers are not really interested in defence because they're usually in peacetime and there aren’t any votes in it.
“That has been exacerbated by a series over the same time period of weak and timid military senior leaders who have, for whatever reason, either been unwilling or unable to represent the services properly in the political arena.
“And so we end up with armed forces, which in my opinion, are not really a fit for role, certainly not in any scale whatsoever.”
He added: “There's no doubt that the recruitment process takes far too long. I think it's perfectly acceptable to have a three or possibly four-month hiatus between applying and attending selection.
“But anecdotally, I've heard from people who have [waited for] 18 months…young people are not going to wait that long to get into regular employment. I wouldn't wait that long to get into regular employment.”
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