THE Deputy Chief of the General Staff, number two in British Army, Lieutenant General David Eastman MBE, has inadvertently demonstrated why it is in such a mess. He has written an extraordinary and graceless letter to the Colonels of Corps and Regiments in which he states that it has ‘come to his attention’ that some Corps and Regiments maintain ‘informal relations’ with clubs ‘whose rules, policies, or cultural practices may not align with the Army’s commitment to inclusivity’. He goes on to instruct them to get the clubs to change their rules or to sever such ties.
Translating the Army speak: Regiments are organisations of about 600 to 2,000 soldiers, all of whom live, train and fight together. Corps are larger and have many units within them. Their members move from unit to unit every two to three years. Corps are inevitably less cohesive as an organisation. All Regiments and Corps have a Colonel of The Regiment who is almost invariably a retired officer.
The role of a Colonel is to be a custodian of the Corps or Regiment’s history, reputation, ethos, chattels, property (which can be quite extensive) and museum. They supervise the regimental associations (which comprises the regiment’s veterans), raise and distribute money to fund welfare and opportunities for both serving soldiers and veterans. Finally they seek recruits (on top of Capita’s efforts) and liaise with the regiment’s Colonel in Chief (a member of the Royal Family). The job is complex, demanding and unpaid. Whether Regimental Colonels, most of whom are retired senior officers from the regiment or corps, answer to Army Command is moot.
The General is probably referring to the ancient London clubs that abound in and around Pall Mall. His concern is the admission of women on an equal basis and he’s been misinformed. The most military of the London clubs, (The Cavalry and Guards, the Army and Navy, The Special Forces and the Naval and Military) allow any officer of either sex to become a member, subject to service in a relevant regiment. Their admission criteria are therefore identical to the Army’s and the General need not fret.
There remain several clubs, including the Travellers Club, the Savile Club, the Beefsteak Club, Boodle’s, Buck’s, Brooks’s, the East India Club and White’s, which do not admit women as members. Some of the clubs don’t admit women at all. White’s has allowed a female guest to enter its building only twice; the woman was Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
Regimental celebrations are intended to increase cohesion between serving officers and between the serving and the veterans. It would be a foolish Colonel who arranged an event that precluded the attendance of serving and retired females as it would fundamentally undermine the very cohesion that makes a regiment. Soldiers ‘fight for the soldier on their left and they fight for the soldier on their right’ as the film The Four Feathers didn’t quite put it.
Veterans and regimental associations are free agents. It’s entirely possible that a bunch of veterans might organise an event at one of the non-admitting clubs. So what? If it were an official function it would be held elsewhere. The General’s concern is hypothetical.
Which prompts the question of why he wrote the letter in the first place. He says the British Army, of which he is not quite the head, ‘continues to evolve into a modern, inclusive, and forward-thinking organisation’. Really? In 2021 it stipulated that by 2030 30 per cent of new entrants to the armed forces should be female. The current figure is 11.4 per cent. Trebling that proportion in five years is unlikely, so the general is on track to miss the ridiculous target.
The 30 per cent target itself came from the response to the shocking 2021 Atherton Report which revealed appalling levels of discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment and assault endured by more than half of the women then serving in the armed forces.
The most recent case involved a Warrant Officer (a very senior soldier), Michael Webber, who in 2021 sexually assaulted a private female soldier, Jaysley Beck. Beck was within Webber’s command on an exercise. Following an evening of drinking, Webber pinned Beck to the floor and kissed her.
Beck reported the offence and filed a complaint, even though the chain of command – in the shape of a Captain James Hook – attempted to dissuade her. Rather than a court martial, Hook implemented a minor administrative action, which resulted in Webber simply having to write a letter of apology. Both Webber and Hook were subsequently promoted. Beck committed suicide a few months later.
At the inquest into Beck’s death, Colonel Samantha Shepherd stated that the Webber incident was considered ‘unwelcome attention, inappropriate contact’. She added, ‘I know now that it constitutes a sexual assault, but I didn’t know it at the time.’
Seriously?
A senior female officer can’t tell the difference between inappropriate contact and sexual assault?
Following the coroner’s inquiry Beck’s family approached Wiltshire Police, who instituted an investigation for sexual assault. Webber was jailed for six months last week, more than four years after the assault and only because of the intervention of family. The chain of command, a concept sacrosanct in the armed forces for good reason, failed utterly because it lacked the moral courage to do the right thing.
Moral courage is one of the fundamental principles of military leadership. It means asking the difficult questions and acting immediately and decisively when there are problems. It means admitting mistakes and expediting mitigation, not covering them up. It means doing your job as a military leader.
Rather than a confront this uncomfortable reality, the (almost) leader of the entire Army has decided that the problem lies in clubland. In doing so he demonstrates that the senior leadership of the army is detached from the reality of its troops’ lives. That can happen to senior officers who solely inhabit the MoD or Army Command headquarters, sliding their way up the greasy pole while flitting from job to job every couple of years, as General Eastman has for almost a decade.
General Eastman should be addressing the practicalities of protecting the female soldiers under his (deputy) command. He should be questioning how bullies are promoted to positions where they are able to abuse their soldiers. He should be asking how it is that those bullies’ commanders are not aware of what is going on. He should be taking robust action against those who cover abuse up.
In 2022 the Army created the Defence Serious Crime Command to enable soldiers to report offences outside their chain of command. Is it working? Certainly there’s lots of compensation still being paid out. The data is that in 2024 there were almost 200 prosecutions for sexual assaults on females in the Armed Forces. That’s almost one per working day and excludes the unreported. It’s a disgrace.
The General should be asking the real question: why are the Armed Forces still failing to protect female soldiers from sexual assault? The supplementary question must be if the Armed Forces can’t guarantee the safety of female service personnel, why does the MoD intend to put more women in jeopardy by recruiting an ever-higher proportion? Such questions could be career-ending, but for a Lieutenant General that’s no great hardship.
Blaming the leadership problems and toxic culture of the Army on a few arcane and possibly archaic London clubs shows that the senior echelons of the Army are out of their depth. That in turn probably explains why we have so many generals delivering so little combat power at so much cost. It also destroys the myth that the problems of the Army are caused by a lack of funds and by Civil Service bureaucracy. Those may be contributing factors, but the primary cause is that the army lacks decent military leadership.
If General Eastman wants to know where the Army’s leadership failings are he should take a long, hard look in the mirror.
A longer version of this article appeared in Views from my Cab on November 1, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
