Military relaxes rules on appearance to recruit long-haired computer experts as 'cyber warriors'

Cyber warfare recruits have previously been exempted from fitness tests, reports say

A participant sits with a laptop computer as he attends the annual Chaos Communication Congress of the Chaos Computer Club at the Berlin Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Chaos Computer Club is Europe's biggest network of computer hackers and its annual congress draws up to 3,000 participants. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The military is relaxing some of its regulations on appearance in order to attract long-haired computer experts to its cyber warfare division.

As reported by The Telegraph, the Ministry of Defence is giving special waivers to recruits specialising in computers, to exempt them from certain parts of The Queen's Regulations, which demand that the hair of male soldiers needs to be "well cut and trimmed."

The idea is that the country's top digital minds typically have long hair or unkempt beards, and if the UK wants to build up a strong cyber defence force, it may have to broaden its strict rules.

Recruits in the 'cyber reserve' are also reportedly being exempted from fitness tests, and have been told they will not be deployed abroad or given weapons, a Telegraph story claimed.

The best computer experts don't exactly find it difficult to get prestigious and well-paid jobs in the private sector, so the changing of the strict regulations has been deemed necessary if the UK is to be defended from foreign cyber-attacks.

As century-old regulations bump up against the realities of the modern world, the military finds itself in a similar situation to the FBI. In 2014, the bureau's director James Comey said he was struggling to recruit cybersecurity experts, due to the conflict between their penchant for smoking cannabis and the FBI's strict drug testing policies.

As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, Comey said: "I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals, and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview."

Rumours that the FBI was going to formally relax its position on drugs followed, but Comey later took back his remarks, saying: "I am absolutely dead set against using marijuana."