The Royal Navy is redeploying marines and sailors to become diversity and inclusion officers to enhance the ‘lived experience’ of personnel amid recruitment shortages for its ships.
According to The Telegraph, three internal Navy job advertisements seek serving sailors and marines to work on diversity policy at Navy Command HQ [NCHQ] in Portsmouth.
In the year to March 2023, the Navy and the Marines missed their recruitment targets by 27%, a shortfall of 1,037. They have failed to meet recruitment targets every year since 2011.
A Navy source said: ‘At a time when we’re massively undermanned, why does NCHQ want yet more people to concentrate on diversity and inclusion? You can imagine the sort of power-hungry social justice warriors this will attract too. We’re already inclusive; diversity will increase in time with the population’.
Lord West, the First Sea Lord from 2002 to 2006, said: ‘Taking people from key and important roles to focus on diversity is nonsense. The Royal Navy has lost the plot’.
‘Obsessing over diversity and inclusion actually leads to recruitment issues. One needs just to look at the RAF’s positive discrimination schemes, which led to the exclusion of some white men. These diversity roles should be scrapped immediately.’
Diversity and inclusion officer training is reserved for those ranked Lieutenant Commander or Captain in the Royal Marines. Petty officers, chief petty officers, sergeants or colour sergeants are going to senior diversity and inclusion policy positions. Marines and able seamen can be appointed in the ‘climate assessment team’.
Two warships (HMS Westminster and HMS Argyll) had to be decommissioned to staff a new class of frigates. Calls for the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to be sent to the Red Sea, to respond to attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen, were denied due to staff shortages.
[Photo: X @RNRMC]