ABSTRACT

In our contribution to the earlier volume Managing Diversity in the Armed Forces, we drew attention to an evolving policy agenda focused on the need to make the armed forces more representative of the society they served. This agenda had its clearest expression in the then recently published Strategic Defence Review White Paper (SDR)2 and entailed a particular emphasis on the apparent under-representation of Britain’s citizens of ethnic minority descent when compared with their presence in the population as a whole. In this revised discussion we first revisit our analysis of the arguments that underpinned the SDR commitments. Against this background we consider what progress has been made in meeting the targets set, and identify outstanding issues and emergent problems.