technical experts needed by British Army to help combat ISIS

Hardly secret after that! I think that is a red white and blue herring myself!!

Now that has been publicised on the DM, perhaps they will get a lot of closet IS sympathisers. If MI6 (or whoever the relevant department is these days) are on the ball, they will look VERY closely at all the candidates - and possibly feed them some dummy info to trip them up.

In reality, it probably needs to recruit a lot of teenagers.

And sounds like the pay needs to be a lot better.

Up till now they have recruited from within their own ranks - you needed to be serving in the UK forces before doing intelligence training - that is why I question the story -

Agreed, Bez!

Would the general public know that the British Army need IT specialists of that nature?
Is it a new phenomenen?

Military intelligence has always used and exploited whatever was the latest technology of the period. As a rule informing the British public was not a priority or even a consideration.

DS, currently at Uni, was hauled off last summer to have a series of 'private meetings' with Army Intelligence (he had been head-hunted as a likely candidate), and he wasn't allowed to tell us where he was going. He was gone for two weeks. He is in the OTC in Cambridge. He said that not only did it look very boring, he was also advised by the younger soldiers already there not to do it, as even when you gave advice, the Army ignored you and did what it wanted to anyway. He was very surprised to learn that it had been 'outsourced'. So, as a soldier, it got you nowhere, and as a civilian, it was a boring job with no job satisfaction.

A strange thing to "outsource".
But there again, I get the impression that "war" has somewhat changed in nature nowadays. Well the IS war.
It feels and sounds like to me, that the British army is somewhat behind the times. And must be a bit desperate for recruitment for a brigadier to write such a letter.

It reminds me of Bletchley Park and the people selected to work on Enigma. A neighbour, now in his 90's was a book keeper at age 17 and selected to work at Bletchley Park. He was told to pack up and go without telling his parents anything about the work he was to do. He never spoke of it, but is working on a memoir.