The St Athan Defence Training Academy: the future of British education?

latest SGR Newsletter : Autumn *2008*
The St Athan Defence Training Academy:
the future of British education?

Stuart Tannock discusses the disturbing implications of the Ministry of
Defence's new multi-billion pound training academy.

Britain's largest education and technology investment project in recent
memory has been developing quietly under the public's radar. It is time we
paid attention. In January 2007, the Ministry of Defence awarded an £11
billion contract to the private Metrix Consortium (see Box) to build a
massive new training centre for the British armed forces at the village of
St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales.

St Athan, which is expected to become one of the world's biggest military
training establishments when it opens in 2013, will provide specialist
training in engineering, communications and information systems technology
to all three services of the British military. For the first time, it will
centralise in one location military training that is currently done in sites
across the country.

Supporters of St Athan emphasise that the Academy will use state-of-the-art
technology and training methods such as neurolinguistic programming,
e-learning technologies, computer-based training, computer-aided
instruction, emulation, simulation and Web-based systems. St Athan, they
claim, "breathes life into the classroom of the future model which for many
years now has been anticipated by futurologists and thought leaders in the
education community." St Athan represents a "model for training in this
country" that will enable Britain to realise Lord Leitch's vision of gaining
"world leadership in skills."

Why should any of this worry us? There is the fundamental question of why we
should support such a massive outlay of taxpayer money on a military that is
still involved in fighting an illegal war in Iraq – and in a country,
Britain, that already boasts the world's second-largest military budget.
Beyond this, St Athan represents three developments which should be
attracting extended public and political debate, but which instead have
received little attention, beyond a small, local campaign against the
Academy that sprung up in Wales after the project was first announced.

First, St Athan is part of a political project of privatising the British
armed forces, and turns over responsibility for military training to a
private, for-profit consortium. At a time when, across the Atlantic, US
Congress is holding investigations into abuses perpetrated by private
military companies such as Blackwater in Iraq, Britain is rushing headlong
down the same path of military privatisation that the USA has gone down
before. This privatisation, moreover, makes the British government a direct
partner of one of the world's largest and most controversial arms dealers,
Raytheon, which is a core member of the St Athan Metrix Consortium.

Second, St Athan represents a major leap forward in Britain's participation
in the global arms trade. The Metrix business model for maximising profits
at St Athan is to maximise the amount of training it provides, through
serving not just the British military but militaries from around the world.
Between 2002 and 2005, the Ministry of Defence provided military training to
more than 12,000 personnel from 137 countries, many with poor human rights
records.  With St Athan, this trade promises only to increase.

Third, St Athan represents another step up in the ongoing militarisation of
British education. The Open University – whose Vice-Chancellor, Brenda
Gourley, claims that universities should be "beacons that reflect the very
best of which the human spirit is capable"  – is a direct partner in the
Metrix Consortium. Schools around the Vale of Glamorgan are making plans to
train local youth for jobs at the St Athan Academy, while colleges and
universities across South Wales, which have already been extensively
militarised over the past decade, are exploring new Academy contract
tie-ins.  Indeed, one reason why we shouldn't expect Cardiff University, the
premier institution of research and learning in the region, to lead any
critical investigation into the St Athan project is that, in 2005, it signed
a long-term strategic research partnership with QinetiQ, another core member
of the Metrix Consortium.

Promoters of the St Athan Defence Training Academy claim that it
represents the future of education in Britain. Without public
investigation, debate and critique of St Athan and other military
research and education projects across the country, there is a
strong possibility that this will come true.
If it does, it will not be for the better of Britain or anywhere
else in the world.

Action

•    To find out more about the issue or to join the Stop the St Athan
Academy campaign, see http://www.cynefinywerin.org.uk or
http://www.no2militaryacademy.com 

http://www.antimetrix.org