Young Territorials do not deserve ‘second class’ treatment

Bob Stewart, in his Saturday Essay (Yorkshire Post, May 4) expresses serious misgivings about a reliance on the present Territorial Army to bolster our much-reduced (and reducing) regular force.

He is right to do so. Sadly the TA has too often, and for many years, endured a reputation of being a none too serious organisation with ‘Saturday Night Soldiers’, ‘Dads’ Army’ and other less flattering sobriquets often being applied.

Unfair? Yes. The TA turned out as formed bodies early on in both world wars. Elements of it even served in the Boer War as volunteers. Many TA people were sacrificed in those major conflicts. No one differentiated between regular and TA (or conscript) then!

In recent years, any operational deployment (doing the job ‘for real’) has essentially been on a voluntary basis. But make no mistake, there have been gallantry and exceptional service awards aplenty to those who have elected to go a stage further and put their skills to the test and sadly with more than a few casualties – both fatal and serious injuries – sustained for their trouble. They have undoubtedly put the best side of the TA ‘on the map’.

And yet the old mentality of a weekend and two-week annual period of training commitment – too often with third rate kit – has been hard to shake off. I respectfully suggest that it still exists in some quarters.

The attitude that “it won’t come to war and if it does I’ll just not turn up” or “my wife/girlfriend/employer won’t allow me to go on operations” is a serious aspect and not to be lightly disregarded.

The former Colonel Stewart asserts that ‘small and medium enterprises are always concerned that a key member of their team might be called up’. Let that not be an inference that larger organisations – in particular Her Majesty’s Government – are necessarily happy about it either. I know of instances where government departments have made life difficult for TA members wishing to deploy.

I disagree with Mr Stewart’s assertion that the ‘MoD fully recognises these problems’. At best, if it understands them it disregards them and publicises sheer rubbish that there will be “30,000 deployable Army reservists by 2018”. Not from the TA, I think they will find!

My concluding message is that it is merely a “paper figure” both numerically and in assumed attitudes of those people forming the ranks of that figure.

Just how is cohesiveness 
and an esprit de corps to be achieved when the criminally deliberate, wanton, disbandment of many famous local regiments has gone on for years – and, in spite of serious shortfalls, continues?

The bottom line is, do we really think that young people will flock to join an organisation which still treats its members as second-class and yet asks them to deploy to the detriment of home life and job to dubious operational commitments like Afghanistan, with a high risk of death or horrendous life-changing injury and certainty of no pensions? I think not.