SASLess, at the risk of thread drift, buoyant recruiting to meet the persent danger is one thing. Retention of the boys and girls to face a future, unknown threat, is something else again.
One of your war plans in the not too distant past was to fight your closest ally. Later you were eyeball to eyball with us and that only 50 years ago.
Would you have fired?
We were eyeball to eyeball with our traditional enemy and they woul dnot back down. We fired and we won but it did not mean that we liked it. Had it not been to deny the Germans a lot of very useful warships then there may well have been a few who would not have fired.