Quote:
Originally Posted by natehale1971
Does the British Armed Forces still recruit from the Commonwealth nations? not recuirt troops to the Canadian Army, or Austrialian Army or Kenyan Army... but recruit them for the British Army itself?
the reason I am asking, is that we know that the British recruits the Ghurkhas... couldn't the British also be using a similar program to recruit from the Commonwealth states?
Recruits would gain dual citizenship status (Citizenship from their home country and British Citizenship) for their service?
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Quick answer: No
The Ghurkas are a special case, it's a hold-over from the days of the British East India Company and just as much a reward for Ghurka loyalty as it is for any military benefit to the UK.
As I understand it, the UK does not actively seek recruits from former British Commonwealth nations but they are not discouraged from applying.
Any personnel recruited from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Fiji, Kenya, Hong Kong or any other former British Empire nation/protectorate for the British military would join as a member of the British forces but as individuals joining the British military, not as large groups and certainly not as distinct units like the Ghurkas do.
Like New Zealand, Australia would be very unlikely to take over from British Far East and Near East formations. We simply do not have the manpower.
We had less than 20 million people as of 2006 for a standing army of approximately 30,000 personnel with approximately 17,000 reservists. So from that 47,000 you're probably realistically looking at approximately 12,000 actual combat personnel.
Unless there was a direct (and directly Australian) military/political
need for Australian forces to relieve British forces in the Far East/Near East, it would be highly unlikely to occur no matter what else was happening on the world stage - we have too small a military with too large a country and too small a population for raising the taxes required for such an expansion.
Recruiting to enlarge the military would face all the problems that are being discussed for the British military in this thread but Australia faces a worse situation because we have a far larger country to cover and one of the longest coastlines of any nation on the planet (we're ranked 7th in the world being beaten by Japan, the Philippines, Russia, Greenland, Indonesia and Canada in the number one position).
A lot of our revenue is raised from exports. Once worldwide trade is impacted by a global war and we can no longer safely make money from shipping goods to other countries, we would have drastically less money available for enlarging our military.
The military could be enlarged by aggressive recruiting but like any Western nation, there are too many needs for personnel in civilian occupations and so the recruit base is going to be very small to start with and funding would have to come from elsewhere in the budget, something certain to make it unpopular with the civilian population. And with less money available we would have even less chance to build up the higher tech side of the military e.g. armoured, air defence and so on.