Armed Forces Day began in 2009, when the UK renamed and widened Veterans’ Day, first held in 2006. The Ministry of Defence subsequently commissioned a Youth Engagement Review in July 2010. Its remit shows that the state was thinking in a structured way about how Defence should engage young people, including through cadets, awareness work, especially in schools, and with recruitment-related outcomes.
Veterans’ Day had centred on those who had already served, whereas Armed Forces Day shifted the focus to the whole military community, including current troops, reservists, cadets and service families. It became less an act of remembrance than a public display of support for the armed forces.
This day therefore became part of the wider plan to make military life more visible and more attractive, not least to young people. Official accounts stress pride, service, skill, fitness and team spirit. Events often use pageant, vehicles, uniforms, music, displays and hands-on activities – even with actual weapons. These can obviously thrill children and young people, however they do so before they have the means to judge the full cost of war.
The problem is NOT a lack of respect for service people. Many join the forces from a mix of duty, hope, limited choices, family stress, poor job prospects, or the search for status and a stable wage. The problem lies in a public culture which glorifies enlistment while giving little to no space to the death, injury, trauma, moral harm, family strain, and long-term mental and emotional tolls of military life.
Armed Forces Day also works at the level of public mood. By casting military force in warm, civic and heroic terms, it helps make armed action seem normal, noble, and often more credible than diplomacy. Its imagery often draws on a romantic version of the Second World War, with clear heroes, clear enemies and national unity. That story has deep resonance in Britain, but it prevents a fuller understanding of the far more complex causes and costs of conflict.
A more honest civic event would honour those who serve while also teaching the public, and children in particular, that war is a grave failure of politics and diplomacy, not a spectacle.
One personal experience
My grandfather, Horace Bartlett, dutifully did his national service in the RAF during the Second World War. He rarely, if ever, discussed it, said that there was nothing to be proud about it, and he resolutely did not celebrate it. To the best of my knowledge, he never took part in acts of Remembrance. I believe that he felt such ceremonies were intended to glorify war and to make heroes out of those who were really the victims of the establishment. As a young teenager, he lost his eldest brother, Percy, at Arras in April 1917. He never spoke about this to me, but my mother said that he felt that such a waste of so many lives could never be justified.