Over 13,500 British Personnel Not Medically Fit for Deployment
The British Under-Secretary of State for Veterans and People Al Carns has revealed that across the British armed forces 13,522 personnel are ‘not medically deployable’. The news comes in the wake of a recent parliamentary question that revealed the statistics. 99,560 personnel are medically deployable and 14,350 have limited deployability. Broken down the 13,522 medically undeployable personnel consists of 2,922 from the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force 3,721 and 6,879 from the Army. A Ministry of Defence official remarked on the findings:
‘The vast majority of our service personnel – around 90% – are deployable at any point, with most of the remaining members of our armed forces employed in wider military roles…We are committed to providing world-class medical treatment to ensure personnel can return to duty where possible or to support their transition to civilian life.’
Deployable armed forces personnel are defined as those who are able to be deployed on operations, those who do not meet the requirement to be able to be deployed are downgraded to allow for medical treatment and can be referred to a medical board for examination and review to allow their status to be determined.
This news comes in the wake of the announcement of the upcoming Strategic Defence Review which was launched in July 2024, its findings are due to be published in 2025, along with the news that in April 2024 the Army fell below its target size for the first time since it was set. The army being 1% short of its target, the Royal Navy by 5% and the Royal Air Force by 10%. The Army is over 5,000 personnel below its target. These findings also come after the earlier news, from January 2024, that recruitment targets for the Army had fallen short of their expected target numbers every year since 2010.