Over 14,600 people applied to join the British Army in January 2019, after the launch of the ‘Your Army Needs You’ recruiting campaign, a 105% increase compared to the previous month.

The new campaign was launched on 13 January 2019, and was heavily criticised at the time. In an interview on Good Morning Britain, Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, said: “I’m not sure these ads are going to work. Young people identify as all sorts of things nowadays, but no one identifies as a snowflake.”

The British Army's new recruitment campaign targets "snowflakes," "phone zombies," and "selfie addicts" – What do people think? 🤔 [Tap to expand] https://t.co/FJcp2Xb8PZ pic.twitter.com/WuSZJeJM8p — BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) January 3, 2019

Figures obtained by the UK Defence Journal show that 14,640 people applied to become either an Army Regular or Reservist in January 2019. By comparison, the number that applied in January 2018 was 9,360.

Over the 12 month period after January 2018, over 91,700 people applied to become a full-time Regular. In that same period, just 34,000 people actually enlisted. Meanwhile, 47,335 personnel left the Army.

Latest @DefenceHQ data from my FOI – more on @UKDefJournal later today. Between Jan 18 and Jan 19, 123,210 applied to join the British Army (Regular & Reserve). How many of those have now enlisted? pic.twitter.com/GVVVK8aIIs — Henry Jones (@hthjones) May 24, 2019

In separate data obtained by The Telegraph, it was revealed that over 2,700 applications were received in the five days directly after the campaign was launched.

Despite the influx in applications to join, the Army remains critically below its personnel target. As of April 2019, there are just 75,070 full-time trained personnel, well below the 82,000 target intended to be achieved by 2020.