I am a former RAF Officer and in a past life was a navigator on the Tornado GR1/1A/4, with a bit of time on the Buccaneer and Phantom. The world has changed since then and there is an enormous rush to be politically correct and ensure no one feels left out. Regarding recruitment, you can take the example of the Israelis where they overtly state, 'Only the best for the cockpit'. Life has taught them hard lessons that you need the absolute creme de la creme flying any aircraft, but particularly fast jets. Their air-to-air results speak for themselves. They start screening future pilots at age 8, look again at age 12 and by age 18 the survivors of that process are in a vicious competition for a rare spot in pilot training. Only the best of the best succeed. Then we come to the UK where we are faced with 2 possible ways of recruiting. Option 1 - Regardless of the demographic, you only take the best and do not care if that does not reflect the population at large. Option 2 - Make the flying community look like the rest of the UK, where 80 per cent of the population are white British, 6.8% are Asian(Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, others), black groups make up 3.4% and the rest are a melting pot of Chinese, Arab etc. Then you have to ensure a certain percentage of women, LGBTQ+ etc lest anyone feel let down. That is all very nice, but we have to ask the question of what we want from those who are tasked with taking on the best of other nations - do we want someone there because they reflect society or because they will beat the best of other nations? I would humbly suggest that we take the best of the best (black, white, men, women etc) and let anyone be offended who feels they should be. In the meantime, just ensure we have the very best people in our cockpits that our recruitment system could find - our future enemies are absolutely cast-iron guaranteed to have done the same thing, and will be absolutely delighted we did not.