https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/19/gen-z-submariners-cant-use-phones-first-sea-lord-royal-navy/
The Royal Navy is struggling to recruit submariners because Generation Z do not want to be cut off from their smartphones, the First Sea Lord has admitted...Speaking to The House magazine, Admiral Sir Ben Key said that while the Navy he had joined had 75,000 members, there were now about 36,000 in the service and that it was a struggle to recruit submariners.
“We are effectively in a war for talent in this country – there is no great secret in that,” he said, adding that there were “very few people who have got direct experience of coming from a naval family. Whereas if you track back 100 years, a lot of people had experience of a military family or a naval family.”
He said that younger recruits expected a greater level of contact with their friends and families, so that the experience of living on a submarine with limited connectivity was less attractive.
He once returned home from a six-month trip to find that one of his children did not recognise him, whereas nowadays, “expectations of contact with people you love are changing… and the ability for near permanent connectivity cannot be met if you are in a submarine.”
“I’m not going to sit there and say that we are awash with people,” he added.
A Royal Navy source told The Telegraph that “when you’re underwater you effectively go cold turkey so my team would be effectively without the ability to talk to our families for months on end”.
