If you can play well, or perhaps code well, you can serve your country – that’s the view of John Healey, Britain’s Secretary of State for Defense!

In Liverpool, the Labour Party held a conference at which Healey spoke. He talked about the army’s current problem: they are not very good at recruiting people. In the last ten years, 750,000 of the 1 million applicants have given up because it took them months to apply or they did not meet the requirements. Healey announced that he would eliminate 100 rules that he called obsolete, and he wants gamers, programmers, and geeks to serve in the nation’s military.

He lays out a direct path for those who sign up for his cyber army. He wants an armed force made up of some of Britain’s most talented people. More fit to fight and more reflective of the country they are defending. Under the new rules, you don’t have to be ripped, and certain medical conditions (hay fever, eczema, acne) won’t be disqualifying factors. Incidentally, Healey also chatted with The Sun about how he thinks the change around restrictions will allow tech gurus to help with clicks or even handling drones: “You can see the changing nature of warfare in Ukraine, where the combination of artillery and drones is responsible for the vast majority of casualties. The kind of skills that drone pilots have are many of the same skills that some of our best console warriors have in civilian life,” Hayley said.

You can see why Hayley does what he does: it’s not just traditional warfare that needs to be focused on, and as he said, we’re seeing something really different in Ukraine (for example, the use of drones is an innovation). It is not only the open field that is considered a battlefield, but there is also computer warfare, and that is what the UK is (also) looking for people to do.

The only question is how successful they will be, because someone who is good at hacking (white hat hacking = doing things ethically, legally), for example, may not have to run a mile…

Source: PCGamer, The Daily Mail