In a co-signed letter to the Guardian, Dr Bryan Mabee backs a Scottish National party youth campaign to raise the minimum recruitment age to the army to 18: “Some 2,250 minors were recruited into the armed forces in the past 12 months. The army alone enlisted 1,000 16-year-olds. This makes 16-year-olds the single biggest age group entering the army. The army states that it uses the recruitment of minors as ‘an opportunity to mitigate standard entry shortfalls, particularly for the infantry’. This is worrying because the infantry has the highest fatality and injury rate of any branch of the armed forces.”More »