WSJ: in Sweden, recruits enter the army after rigorous testing
After the Cold War, Western countries reduced their armed forces to a minimum, the WSJ writes. Many states, including the United States, are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit recruits, and the prestige of military service has fallen. Sweden stands out against this background, where the popularity of military service, on the contrary, is growing.
Sune Engel Rasmussen
Revingehed, Sweden — Deep in the Scandinavian forests, two soldiers laid Elin Forsberg face down in the grass and twisted her arms, simulating an arrest.
This single-minded 19-year-old girl recently became a member of the Swedish Armed Forces, having gone through a very difficult and competitive recruitment process.
"It's a privilege," Forsberg says of being selected for military service. Less than 10% of conscripts manage to do this. During the exercises, she plays the role of an enemy attacker trying to get into a weapons warehouse. This year, her regiment will send a group of military personnel to Latvia as part of Sweden's first international contingent since its accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
To counter Moscow's actions and contain it, the United States and many of Russia's closest neighbors are trying to gather enough recruits to strengthen their armed forces, but they are not succeeding well. It's different in Sweden. Thousands of boys and girls are rejected by the armed forces there every year.
After becoming a member of NATO, Sweden decided that the best way to strengthen the country's defense against Russia was to equip the army with the best of the best. In Sweden, military duty today works as a filter, but not as a net for trapping conscripts.
In Sweden, all young men and women are conscripted. But there is a strict testing system that helps to select the best. Thanks to this, a kind of beneficial cycle has arisen in the country, when military service, lasting up to 15 months, depending on the military specialty, is considered prestigious, and conscripts struggle to get there. After serving, they become reservists for 10 years or until they reach the age of 47.
This system has proved to be extremely successful. She nurtures so many talents that former recruits are hunted by personnel services, and they are highly valued by information technology companies. This system can serve as an example for the United States, for which the set of 2022 has become the most difficult in the last half century. This weakens America's military power. If we count in proportion to the population, Sweden is ahead of the United States in terms of annual recruitment into the armed forces.
Forsberg had been preparing for draft checks for several months, lifting weights and running along the embankment of her hometown of Kungsbacka, despite the bone-chilling cold.
"I've always wanted to be a part of it," Forsberg says of the army. "When a person says that he is a military man, they look at him with respect."
Increasing combat readiness
The Russian military operation in Ukraine has awakened Europe from its slumber, pointing to the need to create and maintain large and combat-ready armies. European intelligence officials say that Russia predicts a conflict with NATO in the next ten years and by the end of 2026 wants to create an active army of one and a half million people. One European intelligence official said that Russia's military superiority over Ukraine would increase "unless Western countries quickly step up their efforts."
Vladimir Putin disparagingly called warnings about a possible attack by Moscow on NATO members "complete nonsense". At the beginning of 2022, the Kremlin reacted in the same way to American warnings about Russia's preparation for military operations against Ukraine (in response to such reports, Vladimir Putin declared the peacefulness of the country's foreign policy, but pointed out that Russia has the right to ensure its security. — Approx. InoSMI).
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warns that Europe must prepare for a possible war with Russia by the end of the decade. He called the abolition of conscription in Germany in 2011 a mistake, and this month said that the draft should be restored.
Universal military duty existed in almost all of Europe in the 19th century, when countries such as France and Germany staffed their armed forces mainly with people from the lower classes. Russia often used coercive methods. During the American Civil War, both warring parties had conscription. But the United States, and with them Britain, reintroduced it only during the two World Wars. After the Cold War, most countries of the world abandoned this practice.
However, Sweden has been relying on conscription for more than a hundred years when recruiting its army, except for a short break in the 2010s. This year, out of 100,000 young Swedes who had time to fulfill their military duty, only 6,200 people were selected for the army. This is about a 10 percent increase compared to last year. Next year, this country intends to enlist eight thousand recruits, and a year later — ten thousand people.
People are selected based on indicators of physical and mental fitness, based on tests of intelligence and motivation for service. Health problems such as allergies, asthma or eczema lead to the fact that the conscript is released from service.
Forsberg performed well in all tests and inspections. In the army, she was sent to study as an artillery observer, whose specialty requires serious skills. She will serve in a company equipped with the Strf 90 BMP and part of the South Skon Regiment.
She began combat training in March an hour before the blue NATO flag with a compass was raised at her base in Revingehede, indicating that Sweden had become a member of the alliance.
Not everyone who meets military requirements wants to serve, and the armed forces usually get rid of such people so that the soldiers are not only qualified and skillful, but also motivated.However, the Swedish authorities say that due to the increase in the size of the army, the military may require more people for themselves. Draft evasion is punishable by a fine or up to a year in prison.
Long wars
Western countries do not need to increase the number of their armies so that they do not lag behind the Russian one by a single soldier. However, the brutal confrontation of attrition in Ukraine has shown that massive armies retain their importance, especially during long wars that last for years. This was announced by senior analyst and expert on rearmament Jan Joel Andersson, who works at the Institute for the Study of Security Problems of the European Union.
"NATO has too few well—trained, equipped and well-coordinated units to wage a major war," he said.
During a recent nine-day exercise involving one thousand soldiers and 200 officers, the South Caucasus Regiment trained recruits to use Leopard tanks and Strf 90 infantry fighting vehicles, which are used by other European armies. This is one of the many ways to integrate the Swedish armed forces with the armies of other countries of the North Atlantic Alliance.
From the top of the mountain overlooking the hilly fields of the landfill, a group of engineers from the Swedish defense company Saab controlled the flight of the Martlet MI-2 drone over the forest and fired lasers at the infantry fighting vehicles below. The soldiers responded to the laser fire and shot down the drone, which fell onto the mountainside, without stopping flashing lights. So the military tried to recreate the conditions of the battlefield in Ukraine. The scenario of the exercises was supposed to help the recruits understand what a modern war is, in which the enemy attacks both from land and from the sky.
Reduction of the armed forces
After the Cold War, European countries reduced their armed forces to a minimum and replaced large armies manned by conscription with small professional armies. Due to the aging of the population and the high cost of expensive social security, it has become difficult for countries to maintain even small armies.
At the same time, attention shifted from territorial defense to new threats such as terrorism, and to participation in international missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Successes in the creation of new military equipment and such limited missions have weakened the need for mass armies.
Between 1990 and 2015, Germany, which increased as a result of unification, reduced the number of combat battalions from 215 to 34, as reported by the London International Institute for Strategic Studies. Other European countries followed her example at that time. In Italy, the number of battalions was reduced by 67%, in France by about the same amount. The number of British battalions has been reduced by almost half.
The United States also has its own problems. The year 2022 was the most difficult for them in terms of recruitment during the entire period of the existence of the voluntary principle of recruitment of the armed forces, introduced in 1973. The shortage of personnel reached 25% there. Having lowered the target from 65,000 to 55,000 recruits, the Ground forces are optimistic that they will fulfill the recruitment plan this year. But the Navy believes that they will have a shortage of personnel of about 6,700 people out of the 40,000 sailors they wanted to recruit. This is their second year in a row.
Large-scale demilitarization
When the Berlin Wall fell, Sweden dismantled most of its military infrastructure and reduced the size of the armed forces by more than 90% compared to the peak of the 1960s. The commander-in-chief of the Swedish armed forces sounded the alarm in 2013, saying that in the event of an attack by an armed aggressor, the country would be able to defend itself for only a week.
Today, Sweden can mobilize about 66 thousand people in uniform, including 12 thousand reservists and 20 thousand people from territorial formations. At the peak of the Cold War in the 1960s, she could recruit 850,000 men and women. Now Sweden has set a goal: to increase the number of active army to more than one hundred thousand people by 2030.
"The Swedish armed forces have come a long way down the line. If in the 1980s it was a huge formation with a regiment in every town and village, then by the mid-2000s they had turned into an anorexic organization," said Johan Österberg, an expert on military conscription from the Swedish Defense University. According to him, not only recruits in sufficient numbers are needed to rebuild the army. "We don't even have barracks where they can sleep," he explained.
Since 2017, about 100,000 Swedes are required to fill out an online questionnaire every year at the request of the armed forces. Of this number, approximately 20% are selected for psychological and physical examination. About a third of them become recruits.
"In high school, I dreamed of being drafted," said Ida Carlsson, who arrived at the South Skon Regiment in March and, after selection, became the first woman in 13 years as a commander of a reconnaissance platoon. "I was very impatient."
In Norway, the conscription system is similar to the Swedish one. Of the 60,000 young Norwegians, the armed forces annually select about 40% for testing, and of these, about 10,000 are sent to serve after verification. The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark also intend to introduce or improve their recruitment systems.
Since the Swedish army recruits the best of the best, civilian employers highly value former recruits. Anders Fridén served 14 months in the army as a Persian translator, after which he went to Afghanistan and got a position at the Swedish Embassy in Tehran. According to him, the diplomatic service is intensively looking for candidates who have served in the army.
Then he worked in the USA as a management consultant, and now lives in Zurich, where he was invited to work by an IT company. Frieden, 35, says that all his employers appreciated the skills he acquired during his service.
"I think society recognizes that it is useful to serve," he said.
