Your country needs the caring, sharing you

Ethereal choral music accompanies a succession of images - the first, a social worker talking intently to a brittle, old-aged couple, whose terraced house is disintegrating around them. Cut to tower blocks, then to a football manager lashed by rain as he shouts from the touchline, then to a woman lecturing an audience in a room of Orwellian bleakness. This, one might think, is the opening shot in a campaign to raise awareness about the Samaritans or, perhaps, the Salvation Army.

In fact, there's no salvation about it: the 60-second ad, to be screened at cinemas from Friday, is a recruitment commercial for the Army, seeking would-be officers.

As a taster, it is interesting. It can't be accused of spurious glamour, nor the brutish swagger of the campaigns which inspired the T-shirt tribute "Join the Army: travel the world, go to exotic, distant lands, meet new, interesting people - and kill them".

But the determinedly nonmilitaristic tone - only jolted when the words, "People aren't easily led", crunch onto the screen, followed by "www.armyofficer.co.uk" - suggests a crisis of indecision, not at Saatchi & Saatchi, still less within the Army, but among those who control the military: is it to be an overseas branch of the social services or an organisation whose raison d'être continues to be the defence of the realm?

It may take some time before the question is resolved. The remoteness of the Army from most people's lives, coupled with its diminishing strength - more people are employed by Boots the chemist than now serve in the ranks - create a gulf which is hard to bridge.

The new ad, according to the Army press release, is aiming to rebrand a life in the forces as "a modern dynamic career choice", and aims to dispel the "common misconception that skills learned through an Army career are not transferable to civilian life". But if the ad ends up recruiting applicants in search of some kind of soupedup management-training course, they may be in for a big shock.