Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
Germany needs to significantly expand its armed forces — and it’s concluding the only feasible way to do so is to introduce some form of national service.
Latvia recently did so; Sweden and Lithuania joined Europe’s ranks of national-service nations several years ago; and even the U.K., which ended military service long before the end of the Cold War, has floated the idea.
Teenagers, it seems, are in vogue. But rather than merely talking about them, we should invite them to contribute their ideas to national security.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius — the country’s perennially most popular politician — is trying to fix to an increasingly urgent problem: the Bundeswehr’s shortage of soldiers.
In recent months, Europe’s largest country committed previously inconceivable sums to its armed forces, but even the shiniest new equipment is useless without soldiers. And Germany is already some 50,000 short of the 230,000 to 240,000 soldiers the coalition government wants it to field. (At the end of last year, the Bundeswehr had 181,174 men and women on active duty.)
Pistorius, much-liked for his pragmatism and for speaking in ways the public can easily understand, has a practical solution in mind, and that is to create a “new military service” based on Norway’s selective military service.
The Norwegian system — which I’ve frequently highlighted as a model other countries could adopt and adapt — sees all 18-year-olds assessed for military service, with only a small percentage eventually selected. It’s a clever system because modern militaries don’t need human masses for trench-style warfare, and the selectivity makes military service extremely attractive.
Sweden adopted a similar model a few years ago, and now Pistorius wants Germany adopt it too.
But it’s a gamble. What if enough young Germans don’t accept the offer of military service the way Norwegians so enthusiastically do? What if the Bundeswehr needs so many soldiers that being selected for military service doesn’t quite resemble getting a place at Oxbridge? Would the government then force them to serve?
That’s the Gordian Knot the defense minister must now solve, and the coalition’s Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union on the one hand, and the Social Democrats on the other are divided on the issue.
The U.K., which also wants to grow its military, faces recruitment challenges too. At the moment, its armed forces comprise 148,230 active-duty personnel, and they have fallen short of recruitment targets. Even though the armed forces have produced some truly impressive recruitment advertisement campaigns in recent years, the numbers refuse to leap.
The issue is much the same in other European countries that don’t have military service. Even some that do haven’t managed to make the prospect of serving (including signing up for active duty after competing military service) quite as attractive as Norway does. One-quarter of Norwegian conscripts go on to active duty.
But there’s a solution: Ask the teenagers.
Discussions around military service naturally focus on what might work, what should work, how the youngsters might respond, how they can be incentivized to participate and much else. But the teenagers themselves aren’t consulted.
Imagine if they were. Just as we appoint seasoned experts to write national-security strategies, we could invite young people to participate in task forces focusing on military service and related matters. Naturally, such task forces would have to be led by senior government officials, but the rest of the membership could be comprised by young people of serving age.
In fact, the defense of our countries now hinges on our young people. They have skin in the game — and just as important, they’re extremely likely to have good ideas about how military service should be set up. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to provide recommendations regarding the military training itself, but they’d be the best possible experts on what might make Gen Z and its successors want to be part of national security, and what national security should look like.
This goes beyond what kind of sleeping quarters they might like. For example, would they consider getting a driver’s license as part of their military training — as Germany is considering — a significant carrot? How would they get young tech types interested in the armed forces? What about educating the general public about what the armed forces do? The latter is a particularly crucial undertaking now that virtually every European country says it wants to spend more money on defense but is struggling to get the message out.
Young people might have good, constructive ideas; solutions the rest of us have failed to think of.
And let’s remember they aren’t just potential national-service participants: They’re also the future stewards of our countries. Whatever we decide today will have an impact — whether positive or negative — on the future of our nations. Let’s get them involved.
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