THE news that the number of soldiers leaving the army with PSTD has reached its highest level in five years is a reminder that even the well-trained armed combatants of the technologically superior imperial armies pay a price for the foreign expeditions on which their superiors dispatch them.

The necessity for an effective programme to help servicemen and women recover from the physical and psychological effects of combat is something that a Labour government must make a priority.

The present problems demonstrate the rank hypocrisy of the governments which sent them into danger and neglect them now.

Labour might start by addressing the delays to their treatment, fixing a health service that is inadequately funded and organised to deal with the particular needs of veterans, and the scandal of servicemen and women facing unemployment, mental distress and homelessness.

The scale of the problem is greater than is apparent from the number of ex-servicemen homeless on our high streets. Plaid Cymru squeezed the figures from the government last year and there is little evidence to show that things have improved much since then.

Thousands of ex-military people are homeless or suffering mental health problems.

Fifty thousand are struggling with mental health issues, while 10,000 are in prison, on parole or on probation and 60,000 have no permanent address.

These are human problems, but they are also a class issue. The army, which is the service most caught up in the battlefield conditions in which produce this trauma, targets its recruitment efforts at working-class areas where unemployment and the lack of decent, well-paid and skilled jobs offering a more or less secure future is a powerful driver for recruitment.

The military markets itself as the route to the acquisition of valuable skills that have a wide civilian application and it is true that today’s technologically advanced weapons systems allow the military to confront largely civilian populations with a technological superiority that mitigates some of the risk associated with killing people.

But the wars that Britain is involved in typically entail a confrontation with people who, if they are less well-equipped, are likely to be highly motivated by ideology or patriotism, angry at the presence of foreign invaders and able to count on the support of their families and communities.

Even experienced combatants know that the best combination of training, experience and instinct is no guarantee that a bullet, a bomb or even a well aimed rock can cause the kind of injury that is fatal, life-threatening or life-changing.

Infantry regiments are not made up exclusively of highly trained “masters of the universe.” They include substantial numbers of young, relatively inexperienced working-class men and women who lack the education, psychological preparation and political insights to understand why they are in some far-off country confronting people with a level of mutual incomprehension that is bound to engender in their minds fantasy and horror in equal measure.

Add in the real prospect that they will see friends become casualties, stand a statistically significant chance that this might happen to them, factor in the consequences when this actually happens and we have a physical, social and psychological time bomb, the dimensions of which have already been revealed.

An ethical foreign policy and end to imperial wars is the best basis for tackling these problems in the long run. This approach is more popular in ex-military circles than the forced patriotism and chauvinism which surrounds much of the empty political rhetoric about our “our heroes” might suggest, but today the scale of the human problem demands practical solutions.