S6E20: Preparing for War: Adaptable Forces and Societies

Thank you, and good morning, everyone.

In your book, Preparing for War, you touch on many of the problems of doing so within an alliance.

Can you tell us about different national ideologies which are possible obstacles to this coordination within alliances, national ideologies in Europe with regard to the recruitment of soldiers?

You're right that I emphasize the alliance dimension a lot, probably because I work and teach in a small state in which the belonging to an alliance dimension is actually quite important for defense planning, so that probably shapes my understanding of the situation.

I will start by saying that recruitment models are not technical choices only.

They are primarily sediments of political history and threat perceptions, and this is precisely why they are so hard to harmonize across Europe.

Recruitment is shaped by different civil-military configurations and not only labor market logic.

I'm French.

I'm going to use a very French example, but our national history regarding recruitment of soldiers is shaped by the Republican heritage and the model of the citizen soldier, right? As part of a republic, every citizen has a duty to contribute to the defense of the nation.

So when President Jacques Chirac in 1997 decided to suspend military service, the Ministry of Defense was opposed to it because it was perceived as a potential break with, uh, longstanding Republican tradition, and the ministry preferred a mixed model of some professionalized forces and some conscript forces.

Of course, the UK has a very different relationship with all-volunteer professional forces, again, because of different historical reasons.

We are not going to go across all of Europe because we have different models, right? But I think the deeper point is that recruitment is downstream of the relationship between armed forces and civil society.

Fundamental.

And we see different ways across the world to manage that relationship.

In the book, I'm quoting the Indian model where the armed forces are ethnic but non-denomina-national units, and the officers are expected to hide their religiosity so that it does not undermine cohesion.

Of course, in an alliance framework, recruitment models drive everything else.

They drive readiness because it's not the same thing when you have volunteer or conscript forces.

They drive reserve mobilization, but they also drive military strategy.

If you have a brigade which is made up primarily of conscripts, it probably cannot fulfill the same functions as a professional brigade, especially when you think in terms of NATO, in terms of potential defending against Russia.

The type of volunteer brigades that Finland is deploying is not the same thing as a conscript brigade, and they probably have different tasks.

So this kind of capability-based approach where you list, "I need X number of brigades, I need X number of divisions," that actually is much more complicated than that because not all brigades and divisions are created equal.