In Europe, politicians eye Gen Z — to fight
Relatively few Gen Z Europeans have ever donned camouflage or trained to fight for their country. The surprising thing is that, in many places, an impressive share say they would.
But saying and doing are very different things. It’s a safe bet that across the continent, where drafting recruits survives in just a handful of countries, resurrecting conscription would be roughly as popular as resuming pandemic lockdowns.
That poses a rising challenge for Europe, where brawny Cold War-era militaries have been downsized to mini-me versions of their former selves — highly professional, armed with the latest weaponry, but almost comically undermanned. In France, which boasts one of the most formidable forces, critics refer to its “bonsai army,” well equipped for specialized and short-term missions but unable to sustain high-intensity conflict for long.
Rebuilding capacity
A reckoning is now at hand, prompted by the rising threat from a neo-imperial Russia. In countries that said good riddance to compulsory military service in recent decades, calls for a conscription comeback are becoming a crescendo.
“Nobody wants to fight,” Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics told the Financial Times in March. “But the problem is that nobody wants to be invaded as well. And nobody wants to see Ukraine happening here.”
Latvia, a tiny country bordering Russia, reinstated the draft this year. Denmark, which is already conscripting men, will broaden the draft to include women, and extend the length of service, starting in 2026.
A telling shift is underway in Germany, where the most popular politician, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, has raised the need for conscripts repeatedly; he said it was “a mistake” for Berlin to end the draft in 2011.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected the idea, perhaps mindful that most young Germans — unlike their contemporaries in Scandinavia, Britain, France, Poland and elsewhere — tell pollsters they’re not interested in fighting for the Fatherland.
Yet the main opposition party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voted this month to put a gradual return to mandatory military service in its platform. And given the extreme unpopularity of Scholz’s governing coalition, the CDU is in pole position to regain power in next year’s elections.
Meanwhile the Bundeswehr, the German army, has been losing soldiers even as the government pursues a recruitment drive to increase its ranks by 10%, to 203,000, by 2031.
A ‘pre-war world’
No doubt, reinstating most kinds of compulsory military service would be politically risky, perhaps suicidal, in some countries.
Rich countries with relatively low unemployment rates offer many young people a choice of jobs with fatter salaries and cushier benefits than they’d get by living in army barracks and slogging through muddy fields with heavy packs. Little wonder so many countries’ armed forces are struggling with retention and recruitment.
That’s why it’s remarkable that the idea of compulsory military service is gaining traction in major European capitals, even in ones where the word “conscription” remains anathema.
In Britain, where the armed forces have fallen short of annual recruitment targets for more than a decade, officials have avoided or denied outright any consideration of reviving the draft.
But alarms are ringing about a British military that has shrunk to its smallest size in two centuries even as threats multiply. And the rhetoric from senior politicians — Defense Secretary Grant Shapps says the country is shifting from “a post-war to prewar world” — has forced a public discussion about standing up a “citizen army.”
The trick facing politicians weighing the idea is how to make military service attractive to a generation for which romantic references to heroism — or geewhiz gadgetry and adventure — hold limited appeal.
The Swedish model
A template might be found in Sweden, which ditched the draft in 2010 but revived it in 2018 as its efforts to recruit volunteers fell flat, and the menace from Moscow became more urgent.
The Swedish model, which is similar to Norway’s, has been a success partly because it is a clever hybrid. It is at once universal and highly selective, and has managed to elevate compulsory military service to a career-enhancing badge of achievement.
Sweden threaded that needle by requiring screening for all young people at age 18, a cohort of about 100,000, but then selecting only the best and the brightest, roughly 5,000, who serve as conscripts for nine to 12 months.
The program has proved popular among many young Swedes who have been through it; they then also expand the ranks of reservists after their service. In Germany, Pistorius cited the approach as a possible example for Berlin to follow.
In a perfect world, most top military brass would prefer maintaining the status quo, meaning armed forces manned with highly trained, volunteer professional soldiers. The problem is that Ukraine has proven that size also matters, especially in confronting an enemy on Russia’s scale. Drones, air defense and artillery shells are indispensable. So is a critical mass of soldiers ready to fight.
Lee Hockstader has been The Post’s European Affairs columnist, based in Paris, since 2023.