Meet judge, Major General Joe Fossey 

Major General J E Fossey OBE

Director Army Recruiting

Joe Fossey is the British Army’s Recruiting Director. A third generation “Sapper”, Major General Fossey commissioned into the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1997 after reading chemistry at Leicester University.

His military service encompasses warfighting, peacekeeping and capacity building roles including Operations AGRICOLA 1 and 7 in the Balkans, Operation BANNER in Northern Ireland, TELIC 1 in Iraq and HERRICK 8 in Afghanistan. He has commanded at troop, squadron, unit, and brigade level. More widely, he has trained in Germany, Kenya, Oman, Poland, and led on building military engineer capacity within NATO and across South Asia. At staff he has served in the Army Headquarters, the Pentagon, the UK Cabinet Office and most recently in the Ministry of Defence leading on future force design. Closer to home, he ran the military response to flood relief across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in 2014 and was HQ Standing Joint Commander’s lead planner during the military’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 before spearheading lateral flow testing in Liverpool.

Married to Helen, a dentist, with two children, he loves keeping fit and will dabble in any sport, although his passion is winter sports, specifically alpine skiing and ski mountaineering racing – aka SkiMo. Hobbies include reading, current affairs, watching films, and juggling badly. He likes playing darts though questions remain whether this is actually a sport at all.