Sign up Your country needs… someone Britain’s forces call on women and foreigners to ease troop shortages

Recruiting foreign folk who have never lived within the country’s borders is unusual, says Jack Watling of RUSI, a defence think-tank. Other European countries seeking to bolster their ranks are turning to conscription, which has been reintroduced in Sweden and Lithuania amid heightening tensions with Russia. Some countries recruit foreigners directly from overseas, but they are usually put in segregated units like France’s Foreign Legion. In Britain they will join mainstream ones, with squaddies from Scunthorpe fighting alongside farmhands fresh from Fiji.