CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Regiment of Fusiliers for abuse of Iraqi prisoners, came at a time when there was
already public disquiet over several high profile enquiries into allegations of bullying at
training depots. Although it is difficult to quantify – and in particular to isolate
individual factors – those closely involved with Army recruiting were quite clear that
there was a negative impact 204 . Anecdotally, neither issue seemed to register so much
with the potential recruits themselves but with the ‘gatekeepers’ – parents, friends and
teachers. For a while, at least, pride in joining the Army was diminished.
The impact at the individual level, and particularly on the morale of soldiers, if there is a
lack of conviction in the justification for a conflict will be considered in the next
section. However, a related factor that plays essentially at the national level is that of
recruiting and retention, of the reserve forces especially. The impact on the reserve
forces is the more noticeable because among the many inter-acting motivational factors
for regular soldiers it has to be remembered that they are first and foremost professional
soldiers; the military is their career and livelihood is soldiering so though there may be
impact – as the next section will examine – there are unlikely to be mass resignations.
Such is the complex nexus of factors that comprise a soldier’s motivation that from
personal experience the author knows of a great number of servicemen who on the one
hand were ill at ease with the justification for the 2003 Iraq War (and many adamantly
opposed) who nevertheless wanted to be personally involved. Some of these factors
play with reservists too, but one key factor is different; only for very few is their
livelihood dependent on military service. It is no surprise, therefore, that there should
be a greater impact on reserve force recruiting and retention. It cannot be argued that
this is solely down to moral objection. Indeed some down turn had been seen to reserve
force recruiting and retention during the Bosnian intervention, which was not generally
subject to moral objection. 205 The Iraq War placed a huge strain on Britain’s reserve
forces (as, indeed it did on those of the US). In part the recruiting and retention down-
turn will result from the loss of those who did not expect their part-time service to result
in call-up – or at least not for anything less than defence of the UK homeland. As
Andrew Murrison MP put it in a parliamentary debate on the reserve forces:
Would he (Desmond Swayne MP) agree … that a large number of reservists join
the Territorials, the Royal Naval Reserve or the Air Force Reserve to defend the
homeland? That is implicit in the term ‘territorial”. A small but significant
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