The UK’s defence posture has changed fundamentally in recent years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and conflicts in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region have resulted in increased commitment to NATO, shaped in no small part by the unpredictability of the current inhabitant of the White House, and a renewed emphasis on European war‑fighting readiness. Recent years have seen a steady stream of headlines warning that the UK military lacks enough deployable personnel. Media coverage and political debate have fixated on how many soldiers are medically fit, immediately available, and able to deploy at short notice.
In this context, it is not surprising that journalists have seized on statistics about deployable personnel. Numbers suggesting there are not enough soldiers immediately available make for powerful headlines. One of the most striking features of this deployability debate is how rarely it is contextualised against anticipated workforce patterns. In the wider UK working‑age population, approximately 2% of working women are pregnant at any given time. Pregnancy is temporary, socially necessary, and reproductive labour is economically vital – even though it is rarely treated as such in workforce planning, and can result in stigma and disruption for female personnel (see p.47 in the conference proceedings). Additionally, around 2% of working‑age adults are absent from work due to illness at any given time, due to both short‑term sickness and long‑term health conditions.
These numbers illustrate how workforces cannot function at 100% – irrespective of aspiration. This is what human labour looks like. People are not interchangeable units, endlessly available for work. We are complex organisms split across several social worlds with bodies that change day to day, year to year. We have changing health needs, changing responsibilities, changing abilities – while often retaining important organisational knowledge and skills that are of use to our employers. A workforce that genuinely includes women, older workers, disabled people, and those managing long-term health conditions cannot assume total, continuous availability. Those that do will find that their organisational assumptions collide with reality.
The armed forces make this tension particularly visible because of the nature of the work undertaken, which can be extremely dangerous, with implications for national security. In addition to ordinary patterns of sickness and life events, military service involves:
- High physical demands
- Intensive training schedules
- Elevated exposure to occupational risk
Approximately one in fourteen service personnel experiences a reportable occupational injury each year, excluding combat. Military personnel are 4-7 times more likely to be injured at work than civilian employees. This is not necessarily evidence of recklessness or institutional failure. Training, exercises, and physical conditioning are considered essential to military effectiveness. Injury, and resulting temporary non‑deployability, is a consequence of preparing bodies for extreme tasks. What is problematic is not that these limitations to deployability exist, but the expectation that they should or could somehow disappear with government intervention, improved recruitment or workforce development.
Expectations that all, or nearly all service personnel should be ready for deployment speaks to Acker’s conceptualisation of the ideal worker norm: a shared assumption we hold that workers should always be available, unencumbered by care responsibilities, unaffected by illness, and able to prioritise work above all else. The ideal worker is not pregnant, not ill, has no caring obligations – nor does the ideal soldier. Although organisations might publicly embrace diversity, many still design jobs, standards, and performance metrics that don’t. In the military context, the ideal worker appears to be imagined as perpetually fit, endlessly resilient, and fully deployable – a model that sits uneasily alongside commitments to gender integration and inclusion.
The Ministry of Defence, like many major employers, has invested in Diversity and Inclusion strategies over recent years. These explicitly aim to broaden participation, improve representation, and retain people historically excluded from military service, ostensibly including women, racially minoritised groups, carers, and those with health needs. However, this looks like another example of what Sara Ahmed has coined performative non‑performativity: saying the right things about equality in ways that do not result in substantive organisational change. Aspirational policies signal commitment, while core structures around availability, productivity, and readiness, remain unchanged and workplace experiences do not improve.
A genuinely diverse workforce will include people with varied health profiles; women experiencing pregnancy and gynaecological health conditions, and will accommodate the changeable needs of ageing, disabled, and caring workers. If workforce planning does not change accordingly, organisations become stuck in contradiction: celebrating diversity rhetorically while measuring success using models designed for a narrower, more homogenous workforce.
Many large employers rely on hidden buffers to resolve this tension: unpaid overtime, presenteeism, informal cover, and the expectation that workers will push through illness or exhaustion. The cost‑of‑living crisis, rising ill‑health, and demographic change are making those buffers increasingly fragile.
The armed forces cannot rely on such informal fixes in the same way. Deployability is explicit, measured, and publicly scrutinised. Rather than asking whether current deployability figures represent a crisis, it may be more useful to reflect on whether our expectations of availability reflect the workforce we actually have. This question remains relevant even for those who hold deep reservations about militarisation, defence spending, or overseas intervention. We can hold complex, ambivalent, or critical views about whether the military should exist, how it should be used, or whether particular interventions are justified, while still recognising a more basic reality – that all workforces, including military ones, are made up of human beings.
If expectations of constant readiness and availability rest on assumptions that deny pregnancy, illness, injury, ageing, and care, then the issue is not simply one of defence policy but of organisational design. Our challenge becomes how to rethink organisational resilience in ways that honestly account for human limits while still confronting required organisational outcomes – which, in the military’s case, are distinct and contested, but nonetheless real.
Deployment and Diversity
by Jen Remnant May 20, 2026The UK’s defence posture has changed fundamentally in recent years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and conflicts in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region have resulted in increased commitment to NATO, shaped in no small part by the unpredictability of the current inhabitant of the White House, and a renewed emphasis on European war‑fighting readiness. Recent years have seen a steady stream of headlines warning that the UK military lacks enough deployable personnel. Media coverage and political debate have fixated on how many soldiers are medically fit, immediately available, and able to deploy at short notice.
In this context, it is not surprising that journalists have seized on statistics about deployable personnel. Numbers suggesting there are not enough soldiers immediately available make for powerful headlines. One of the most striking features of this deployability debate is how rarely it is contextualised against anticipated workforce patterns. In the wider UK working‑age population, approximately 2% of working women are pregnant at any given time. Pregnancy is temporary, socially necessary, and reproductive labour is economically vital – even though it is rarely treated as such in workforce planning, and can result in stigma and disruption for female personnel (see p.47 in the conference proceedings). Additionally, around 2% of working‑age adults are absent from work due to illness at any given time, due to both short‑term sickness and long‑term health conditions.
These numbers illustrate how workforces cannot function at 100% – irrespective of aspiration. This is what human labour looks like. People are not interchangeable units, endlessly available for work. We are complex organisms split across several social worlds with bodies that change day to day, year to year. We have changing health needs, changing responsibilities, changing abilities – while often retaining important organisational knowledge and skills that are of use to our employers. A workforce that genuinely includes women, older workers, disabled people, and those managing long-term health conditions cannot assume total, continuous availability. Those that do will find that their organisational assumptions collide with reality.
The armed forces make this tension particularly visible because of the nature of the work undertaken, which can be extremely dangerous, with implications for national security. In addition to ordinary patterns of sickness and life events, military service involves:
Approximately one in fourteen service personnel experiences a reportable occupational injury each year, excluding combat. Military personnel are 4-7 times more likely to be injured at work than civilian employees. This is not necessarily evidence of recklessness or institutional failure. Training, exercises, and physical conditioning are considered essential to military effectiveness. Injury, and resulting temporary non‑deployability, is a consequence of preparing bodies for extreme tasks. What is problematic is not that these limitations to deployability exist, but the expectation that they should or could somehow disappear with government intervention, improved recruitment or workforce development.
Expectations that all, or nearly all service personnel should be ready for deployment speaks to Acker’s conceptualisation of the ideal worker norm: a shared assumption we hold that workers should always be available, unencumbered by care responsibilities, unaffected by illness, and able to prioritise work above all else. The ideal worker is not pregnant, not ill, has no caring obligations – nor does the ideal soldier. Although organisations might publicly embrace diversity, many still design jobs, standards, and performance metrics that don’t. In the military context, the ideal worker appears to be imagined as perpetually fit, endlessly resilient, and fully deployable – a model that sits uneasily alongside commitments to gender integration and inclusion.
The Ministry of Defence, like many major employers, has invested in Diversity and Inclusion strategies over recent years. These explicitly aim to broaden participation, improve representation, and retain people historically excluded from military service, ostensibly including women, racially minoritised groups, carers, and those with health needs. However, this looks like another example of what Sara Ahmed has coined performative non‑performativity: saying the right things about equality in ways that do not result in substantive organisational change. Aspirational policies signal commitment, while core structures around availability, productivity, and readiness, remain unchanged and workplace experiences do not improve.
A genuinely diverse workforce will include people with varied health profiles; women experiencing pregnancy and gynaecological health conditions, and will accommodate the changeable needs of ageing, disabled, and caring workers. If workforce planning does not change accordingly, organisations become stuck in contradiction: celebrating diversity rhetorically while measuring success using models designed for a narrower, more homogenous workforce.
Many large employers rely on hidden buffers to resolve this tension: unpaid overtime, presenteeism, informal cover, and the expectation that workers will push through illness or exhaustion. The cost‑of‑living crisis, rising ill‑health, and demographic change are making those buffers increasingly fragile.
The armed forces cannot rely on such informal fixes in the same way. Deployability is explicit, measured, and publicly scrutinised. Rather than asking whether current deployability figures represent a crisis, it may be more useful to reflect on whether our expectations of availability reflect the workforce we actually have. This question remains relevant even for those who hold deep reservations about militarisation, defence spending, or overseas intervention. We can hold complex, ambivalent, or critical views about whether the military should exist, how it should be used, or whether particular interventions are justified, while still recognising a more basic reality – that all workforces, including military ones, are made up of human beings.
If expectations of constant readiness and availability rest on assumptions that deny pregnancy, illness, injury, ageing, and care, then the issue is not simply one of defence policy but of organisational design. Our challenge becomes how to rethink organisational resilience in ways that honestly account for human limits while still confronting required organisational outcomes – which, in the military’s case, are distinct and contested, but nonetheless real.