Sweden officially joined NATO last week as the alliance’s 32nd member and the United States’ newest treaty ally. Analysts and commentators have been quick to highlight Sweden’s robust arms industry and the geographic benefits of an allied Sweden. With its control of 109-mile-long Gotland Island at the center of the Baltic Sea, Sweden will help turn the Baltic into a “NATO lake,” protecting the vulnerable trio of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But Sweden’s greatest potential contribution to the alliance is curiously unsung. The selective conscription system that Sweden reauthorized in 2017 offers a critical example to the many European NATO militaries facing an existential threat at home: the struggle to find soldiers for their shrinking forces.
Sweden officially joined NATO last week as the alliance’s 32nd member and the United States’ newest treaty ally. Analysts and commentators have been quick to highlight Sweden’s robust arms industry and the geographic benefits of an allied Sweden. With its control of 109-mile-long Gotland Island at the center of the Baltic Sea, Sweden will help turn the Baltic into a “NATO lake,” protecting the vulnerable trio of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But Sweden’s greatest potential contribution to the alliance is curiously unsung. The selective conscription system that Sweden reauthorized in 2017 offers a critical example to the many European NATO militaries facing an existential threat at home: the struggle to find soldiers for their shrinking forces.
Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, which prompted Sweden and neighboring Finland to seek NATO membership, has reminded Western nations that in a major war, few things matter more than mass. Total casualties in the war are perhaps 500,000, with vehicle losses and munitions expenditures to match. Unfortunately, the Atlantic alliance abandoned mass in the 1990s, when the threat from Moscow was presumed dead and buried. European states took more than a peace dividend—they effectively disarmed, slashing their forces to the bone and ending the compulsory military service that had been the bedrock of many NATO militaries. Warning signs, including an extremely limited ability by European allies to contribute to the campaign in Kosovo in 1999, were ignored.
By the mid-2000s, the German Bundeswehr was half its Cold War size, while the British Army was only able to provide a single brigade in Afghanistan. Germany and Britain were and are considered NATO heavyweights. The condition of smaller NATO armies was even more parlous.
The situation only worsened in the following two decades. The Bundeswehr is now down to barely 180,000 men and women while the British Army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. French forces, despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s bluster, are unable “to do anything on a large scale for any length of time,” according to a prominent analyst. The end of their campaign in Mali testifies to the limitations of French land power. A 2017 Rand Corporation study found that Britain, France, and Germany would each take several weeks to generate a single armored brigade each for combat in the Baltics, “with little spare capacity for any other contingencies.”
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Sweden’s military has taken a 500-year path to joining NATO, from the Vikings through Napoleon and neutrality. So what’s another few months?
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There are a few large NATO forces remaining, but they are not front-line states. Turkey and Greece maintain large conscript forces, but the ability or willingness of either to fight Russia is questionable. The United States boasts about 1 million active military personnel, but the potential return of former U.S. President Donald Trump has put Washington’s willingness to go to war for its allies in doubt—and the United States is grappling with its own recruiting crisis and shrinking army.
Though NATO is now rearming in terms of weapons, manpower remains the proverbial long pole in the tent. Aging populations, expansive social welfare states, and the limited appeal of professional military service leave European states struggling to man even small armies. Despite the manifest Russian threat, the European recruiting problem is only deepening. The Bundeswehr finished 2023 with 1,500 fewer troops than the previous year, despite loud commitments to rearming. The British Army has missed its recruiting targets for 14 years straight. Fiscal 2022 saw a staggering 30 percent drop in new recruits. Le Monde noted an “evaporation” of French military personnel in 2023, with a 6 percent increase in net outflows.
Even high youth unemployment in many southern European countries does not appear to move the needle. Despite a jobless rate north of 20 percent for 15- to 24-year-olds, Italy struggles to meet an annual military recruiting goal of just 8,000 enlistees. In 2020, the average Italian soldier was 38 years old—at least a decade past the optimal age for a combat soldier.
There is scant prospect of any significant improvement in European military recruiting. Almost all European countries are getting older, and many face rapidly shrinking populations. Worsening physical and mental health among the young, dramatically increased by the coronavirus pandemic, shrinks the eligible recruiting pool even further. Rising hostility to mass immigration makes talk of enlisting droves of foreigners a nonstarter, while a worsening fiscal trajectory, accelerated by both COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war, means that substantial increases to poor military pay are also infeasible. The war in Ukraine, with its millions of refugees throughout Europe and daily images of death and destruction, has yielded no lines outside recruitment offices.
European NATO members face a structural problem that seems to afflict all 21st-century volunteer militaries, including that of the United States: a widening gulf between military and society, especially for young people who have scant acquaintance with the small, cantonized forces that defend them. Professional militaries are becoming family affairs, with multigenerational service increasingly common, just as it was in small, preindustrial armies. This becomes a vicious cycle. Those with no preexisting ties to the military view it as alien territory and are unlikely to seriously consider service. Militaries then fish where the fish are, spending their limited recruiting resources where they will have the highest return: on demographic groups and regions already predisposed toward military service. The bulk of the population thus becomes even more divorced from their military. Small wonder that even with historically tiny annual recruiting targets, professional European militaries struggle to find sufficient young people willing to serve.
Sweden chose another path, one that offers valuable lessons for other NATO members. In 2018, the Swedes restored their conscription system, which had been suspended since 2010. Like Germany and France, Sweden had fielded a very large and capable army during the Cold War, with the ability to mobilize as many as 850,000 men and women. Neutral since 1812, Sweden saw a strong military as crucial to maintaining its independence.
The crew of a ship on the lookout to ensure Swedish neutrality during World War II in 1939. Keystone Archive/Getty Images
After the Cold War, Sweden took its peace dividend, too. Territorial defense, the Swedish Army’s raison d’etre while the Soviet Union was alive, became an afterthought. Swedish politicians and citizens increasingly viewed their military as a provider of peacekeepers and supporter of other expeditionary, multilateral operations—in essence, a luxury good for a state that didn’t need to worry about its own security. All conscription was suspended (though not legally abolished) in 2010, and the Swedish military shrank to fewer than 20,000 total soldiers.
The 2014 occupation of Crimea woke Sweden up—but so did basic math. In Sweden’s wealthy, highly individualistic society, voluntary military service held scant appeal. An experiment with part-time professional soldiers was a failure. The military shrank rapidly: By 2013, only 579 recruits completed the full 11 months of initial entry training. On Jan. 1, 2018, Sweden pulled the plug on its failed policy and restored mandatory military service.
Unlike the Cold War system, however, Swedish conscription is now both selective and gender neutral. A hundred thousand 18-year-olds are screened for service annually, but only about 5 percent of this cohort serves. Sweden aims to double this number by 2030. Roughly 10 percent of those serving do so unwillingly, with jail the alternative.
Young recruits are pictured during an inspection at the regiment in Enkoping, Sweden on March 2, 2017.
Selective conscription, stiffened and led by a small professional force, potentially offers armies the best of both worlds. Since the military needs only a small fraction of every cohort, it can afford to be very picky—standards are higher in Sweden’s post-2018 force than they were before 2010. As in any society, this exclusivity functions as a signaling device: Educational and corporate leaders know that successful conscript service marks a young Swede as being in the top of his or her peer group—doubly so for the small portion of conscripts selected for additional training and longer service as junior officers.
As in any competent conscription system, Swedish national service has two major advantages beyond the basic manning of the military: talent acquisition and expansion of reserves. On the front end, Sweden can screen all young people in the nation, select the most promising for military service, and then attempt to induce the best to stay on for a military career. On the back end, each cohort of conscripts, most of whom will complete their service in nine months, becomes another brigade’s worth of soldiers in the military reserves. Though reservists require regular call-ups to maintain readiness and proficiency, even a poorly managed reserve has military utility in a crisis. The Russian Armed Forces proved this 18 months ago, when it mobilized 300,000 men who had not trained or fought since their initial military service years before. Russia’s partial mobilization was hasty and bloody, but it was still critical to stabilizing Russia’s lines during Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive.
Sweden was fortunate in that it was restoring a conscription system that had been dormant for less than a decade. When the system was restored, all serving field grade officers and generals had served as conscripts themselves. But the restored selective conscription system included major changes: Women were fully integrated (they now make up about 15 percent of conscripts), and Sweden established a long-service professional noncommissioned officer corps, something that had been absent in the Cold War mass army.
The success of Sweden’s selective conscription system has created a virtuous cycle. In an inversion of the paradigm afflicting most NATO countries, service begets service. Sweden’s Home Guard, a voluntary reserve for territorial defense, has seen recruitment quadruple in early 2024 compared to the same time a year earlier. Once an aging and socially irrelevant force, the Home Guard is suddenly popular with young Swedes, who have seen restored conscription and Sweden’s new seriousness about national defense as evidence that military service is an honorable and necessary component of citizenship.
Other volunteer auxiliary defense organizations, like the all-women Lotta Corps, have gained proportionately even more new members than the Home Guard. In January, Sweden also restored compulsory civic service, committing municipal rescue workers and critical infrastructure personnel to enhance the country’s official national strategy of societal “total defense.” As Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson bluntly told his country: “Citizenship is not [just] a travel document.”
Swedish soldiers during a military exercise on the island of Gotland, Sweden on Sept. 19, 2017. Anders Wiklund/AFP via Getty Images
In the face of renewed Russian aggression, what NATO needs most urgently is mass, in both active and reserve forces. Some analysts have called for rejuvenating Europe’s reserves within the context of all-professional militaries. But this fails to solve the recruiting problem. In fact, many countries have reserve recruiting problems that are even more severe than those for the active force. Why volunteer to put up with the disruption, dislocation, and danger of military life for only limited pay and benefits?
There is also the cost issue. European efforts at rearmament are caught between a rock and a hard place—between static budgets and the enormous costs of being ready for modern war. For Europeans forgetful of their continent’s less-than-peaceful history, the scale is mindboggling: Russia has lost the equivalent of 15 Bundeswehrs’ worth of equipment in Ukraine and is still fighting. Purchasing sufficient weapons and munitions will devour European military budgets before any meaningful increase in manpower can be considered. Germany’s vaunted Zeitenwende, to take one example, is off to an excruciatingly slow start.
Most Western countries will struggle to afford meaningful military mass without the enormous budgetary advantage that conscription confers. Expanding personnel in a professional military comes with a huge price tag in compensation, benefits, and recruiting outlays, and many European militaries struggle to attract sufficient recruits due to comparatively poor pay. And as many NATO members struggle to reach the alliance’s defense spending floor of 2 percent of GDP, conscription offers both cheap capacity and a way to demonstrate commitment that goes beyond budgets. Swedish conscripts earn the equivalent of about $450 a month—a fifth of what a U.S. Army private first class is paid.
European leaders are beginning to grasp that their professional military model is failing. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has publicly described the end of German conscription in 2011 as a “mistake.” The head of the British Army, Gen. Patrick Sanders, has described young Britons as a “prewar generation” who may be called to national service. Both men have pointed to Sweden as a potential model.
For NATO’s 29 other European members, Sweden’s selective conscription example is potentially transformative. Finland, Sweden’s neighbor and alliance predecessor, draws even more attention for its system of universal male service, but Sweden’s system offers a more useful model for countries struggling with military manpower and national commitment but unwilling to take the drastic step toward universal mandatory service. In its renewed Home Guard and civilian defense organizations, Sweden also shows the downstream benefits of restoring an ethos and expectation of citizen service.
Even if Russia is ultimately stopped in Ukraine and its threat to Europe reduced for now, a less stable future with potentially less support from the United States is going to demand more robust and resilient territorial defense from European states. Once they’re done celebrating NATO’s newest member, the alliance’s leaders should take a close look at what they can learn from Sweden’s restored system of national service.
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