COMMENT: NATO is creaking, our foes are flexing their muscles… and the top brass’s response? A letter soaked in HR babble telling soldiers to steer clear of men-only clubs

There are times when a nation’s decline is best measured by its grades, not its enemies.

A superpower disappears with a whimper, a bureaucracy dies in minutes, and a once-great army loses its soul by writing about inclusivity.

Last week, Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General David Eastman MBE sent a circular to British Army officers instructing them to review their “associations” with private members’ clubs to ensure these respected institutions did not infringe on their “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 commitments reflect the values ​​we stand for.’

One almost drowns in words. Not because equality is wrong, but because of the sheer tragicomic absurdity of seeing the British Army survive, the same organization that once attacked the Somme.

The haemorrhage in El Alamein and Helmand comes down to Human Resources (HR) language. Marshal Montgomery should have drank some strong gin before throwing the letter away.

You can picture this: in a conference room, a group of generals and civil servants are foaming soy lattes on a table, seriously discussing whether membership rules and gender balance at clubs like White’s or The Cavalry & Guards (whether they’re still all-male clubs or clubs that now accept women) are compatible with Army values.

God, imagine the realization that the Cavalry and Guards Club, with its incredibly affordable food and drink, could be the sort of place where Guardsmen, Hussars and other sections of the military might hold an event or gather on an evening off while in London.

Meanwhile, as we ponder such earth-shattering priorities, the world beyond the PowerPoint slides has become hostile and multipolar. NATO is creaking. Americans are tired.

Russia, China, Iran and others are testing the nerves of Western power, and the British Army’s contribution to this new Cold War is now the gender policing of the pool hall.

This is beggarly belief. In terms of style and diction, the letter may have been prepared by the Business Ethics Department or the John Lewis Partnership.

He is polite, polished, and paralyzed by the moral arrogance that is the new lingua franca of officialdom.

The modern Army now speaks in the HR department’s treatment register: ‘engagement’, ‘cohesion’, ‘values’, ‘dialogue’. Words that avoid responsibility.

Hazelnut latte and words that smell of compromise.

But the tragedy here is not a single act of bureaucratic madness, but what it represents: the complete psychological domestication of a military once defined by earthly realism.

The army existed outside the polite concerns of peacetime Britain; It was an institution established for dirty and necessary work.

Senior officers now speak like awareness coaches.

The whole show is self-indulgent and a little funny; It is a moral display of power that has forgotten what it is for.

We replaced discipline with diversity, command with consensus, and purpose with the language of policy.

This is not modernization, this is self-sterilization. A power obsessed with optics cannot win wars.

What is surprising about Eastman’s letter is not its sentimentality but its sincerity.

It was clearly written in good faith by an intelligent man who believes that the military should reflect the society it defends. I see this as the main problem.

Officers asked to ‘advocate change’ and reflect a modern Army (file image)

The army is not a society. It’s the fence around it. Its purpose is not to reflect the national mood, but to resist it, to remain tough where the country is soft, and determined where the nation is indecisive.

If the military becomes as executive and apologetic as the institutions it serves, then when war comes we will discover (as it always has) that we have soldiers fluent in empathy but rusty with weapons.

Unlike society, 10 percent of the army is women. To avoid being misunderstood, let me be very clear: Women are an important part of the modern military, and I welcome their participation.

But the idea that we should all socialize together while adhering to a set of pre-approved woke diktats is tantamount to running into a bureaucratic dead end. This is HR chatter disguised as moral progress.

Garrick, the Freemasons or the MCC are not the problem; just like women-only clubs like Fiena, The University Women’s Club, The AllBright or The Sorority.

Servicewomen and soldiers earn equality through merit, not which club they choose to join in their spare time.

And herein lies a deeper hypocrisy. Very senior civil servants frequently talk, dine and enjoy being photographed at gentlemen’s clubs, which they now claim to find problematic; not the ones with a mast in the main room, but the old premises of Pall Mall and St James’s, where port and glamor flow in equal measure.

When they retire, they will happily lunch there and serve as popes, undisturbed by their ‘values ​​of equality and respect’.

Berating the serving ranks for their connections while polishing their own silver at Buck’s or Garrick’s is moral theater of the most English kind: serious in public, relaxed in private.

Britain’s enemies will not care whether our regiments have various golf memberships.

They will care about how quickly we can mobilize, how many rounds we can fire, and whether we still have the will to fight.

Recruits undergo physical training at the Royal Marines Commando Training Center in Lympstone in November

The true measure of inclusivity in the military is simple: Will the person next to you pull you out of a trench under fire? Everything else is just vanity.

The letter is symptomatic of a class of officers afraid of being seen as behind the moral curve. They want to be liked, civilized, ‘seen’.

But an army that wants to be liked is already half defeated. His job is not to be admired, but to be feared by his enemies and respected by his allies.

The greatest irony is that the rank and file still understand this perfectly.

The only people who seem to have forgotten this are the senior managers (arrogant, committee-trained, politically educated).

The important thing is that what is lost is seriousness, not cruelty.

When institutions start talking like NGOs, they start thinking like them, constantly scrutinizing, advising and apologizing while the rest of the world faces the facts.

And so, as global order breaks down, the British Army engages in cultural cleansing.

It is difficult to decide which is more dangerous: the cynicism of our enemies or the selfishness of our leaders.

An army that can no longer understand the difference between morale and morality risks becoming irrelevant in both war and peace.