PUTTEN, THE NETHERLANDS – Six years before the First World War, British military planners launched a scheme to train university students as army officers. This was intended to create a pipeline of new officers in case of war, and forge connections between the next generation of elites and the army.
The new University Officer Training Corps (UOTC) swiftly proved its worth, training 20,000 officers to lead soldiers on the front lines of the First World War. The Corps trained a further 30,000-50,000 more during the Second World War.
More than a century on, around 1,400 students join the scheme each year. But a multimillion-pound price tag and a long-standing agreement that graduates can’t be called up has raised questions over its future.
Dozens of universities are involved with the UOTC, which has 15 units across 27 training locations. The i Paper joined one cohort for a recent training exercise in The Netherlands.
The UOTC contribution to British security is not easily quantified. But, as in the World Wars, its strongest suit may be the leaders it could offer the military in wartime.
Army officers are trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, but just 1,000 or so cadets graduate each year. There are plans to expand the facility, but it could still struggle to fulfil the requirements of a large-scale war.
Lieutenant Colonel Simon Pollitt, who leads the Yorkshire UOTC, said his unit could offer the Army the ability to scale up at pace.
“We know that during conventional warfare, the standing Army is going to have a high attrition rate in the opening few months or weeks, and so it’s about how we generate the next wave,” he said.
“The UOTC was set up to generate a cohort of people where we’ve already invested in and their education that could be commissioned in a national emergency. By running this constant cadence, we know what we’re doing if we need to.”
A student learns urban warfare in The Netherlands. Army officers are trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (Photo: Molly Blackall)But there’s a catch. Under their contracts, the university officer cadets don’t have any commitments to the military and can’t be called up unless they join a reservist or regular military unit. Last year, just 45 Army Reserve officers were commissioned through the UOTC.
Call-ups would only be issued in the case of a widespread mobilisation of soldiers. In that scenario, Pollitt believes they would be well placed for leadership roles.
“If we’re going into a large-scale war, there will be some changes in policy, and there might be some form of conscription or similar. The point is that we’ve already invested a level of training in them, and that they’re already at a state that could mobilise,” he said.
In wartime, UOTC graduates could also become leaders in non-military sectors.
“There are also people that we need to run industry and other areas of defence that aren’t deploying,” Pollitt said. “A lot of my students from Sheffield are in technical degrees, and they may end up being critical to the war effort in a different way than deploying.”
The Corps also recruits officers in peacetime, with around 40 per cent of the course participants going on to join the regulars or reserves. Most trainees who spoke to The i Paper said they were at least considering a career in the military.
More than 200 University Officer Cadets, supported by 40 instructors, trained alongside Dutch counterparts bolstering their front line warfighting skills during a two-week training exercise in The Netherlands (Photo: Mark Owens/British Army/MoD Crown)The UOTC was also designed to strengthen the relationship between the military and universities, to endear young people to the military and upskill the population as part of “a general national resilience”, Pollitt said.
Supporters argue it is one of the cheaper military programmes, but it still requires staff and funding. The scheme is run by more than 400 military staff on part-time contracts, as well as more than 100 military and civil full-time employees.
Students are also paid for their training; roughly £50 to £63 per day of training, equating to around £1,600 per academic year. With 1,400 cadets recruited each year, the costs run well into the millions.
At a time of strained defence spending – when Andy Burnham’s new Government is scrambling to fill a £4.7bn black hole in military funding and hospital, train line and housing projects facing the chop to fund defence – the UOTC faces questions over the value it offers.
But Sir Julian Brazier, a former minister for the reserves and reservist officer, believes that the scheme is vital to the UK’s ability to sustain a long-term fight.
“If you are preparing for a national war, rather than a war of choice like Iraq or Afghanistan, the essence of sustainability is the ability to expand,” he told The i Paper. “As the last chief of general staff put it: professional armies start wars, citizen armies finish them.”
The greater challenge for expansion is producing officers rather than soldiers, he adds. “You can train a soldier in basic skills in a very short space of time. In Ukraine, they take as little as eight weeks. But producing officers is much more difficult.”
Allies that don’t have conscription models such as Australia and the US have more training options for officers than the UK, which is reliant on Sandhurst, said Brazier.
“The whole of the expansion of the British Army, in the event of war, has a single point of potential failure, which is Sandhurst,” he said.
The former minister does not believe contracts for the students should be changed to allow them to be called up. He believes that many will find their way into the forces anyway.
At a time of strained defence spending, the UOTC faces questions over the value it offers (Photo: Mark Owens British Army/ MoD Crown)“Subjecting them to the idea that you can call them out for an operation short of total war, I think, is a bad idea,” he said. “I think if there was a war, almost all of the good ones would volunteer anyway.”
Paul O’Neill, a former RAF officer and Ministry of Defence official with responsibility for recruitment, now a senior associate fellow at defence think-tank Rusi, said that the scheme was popular within the military – but one of its core ideas might be out of date.
The UOTC was intended to build connections between the military and the nation’s future leaders. When it was created in the 1900s, just 5 per cent of the population went to university, so they were likely to make up the future elites. Today, the figure is around 50 per cent.
“If you’re lobbying for funding, having a group of influential people who believe in what you’re trying to achieve and who understand the threats that are being faced [is useful],” O’Neill said. “It was very much about creating a favourable environment amongst those who would eventually go on to become elites within society and that, I don’t think, is any longer true.
The UOTC still creates that societal awareness among the scheme’s participants and their networks, O’Neill said and could “play an important role in creating this whole of society approach and understanding of the role of defence and the risks facing the nation”.
It also “generates talent and the nation’s human capital” – even if the youngsters never join the military.
But the scheme may need a clearer objective. To make the UOTC more useful today, O’Neill suggests it could give a broader education with less of the expensive military-specific training, with the money saved used to increase the number of participants.
“There is a potential role within this idea of homeland defence for the university units, which may or may not require them in uniform, but would give you a valuable role and potentially a better return on the investment,” he said.
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