SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Sweden's government has a message for you Swedes:
The security environment in Europe and in Sweden's vicinity has deteriorated and the all-volunteer recruitment hasn't provided the Armed Forces with enough trained personnel. The re-activating of the conscription is needed for military readiness. Trained personnel are fundamental for building military capability. In 2016 the Armed Forces lacked 1,000 active squad leaders, soldiers and sailors as well as 7,000 reservists.
Recruitment to the Armed Forces will be both voluntary and conscription. Individual motivation, interest and will should to be considered as much as possible. The Armed Forces is planning for 4,000 recruits annually in basic military training in 2018 and 2019. The modern conscription is gender neutral and will include both women and men.
What's that about the security environment? Oh, it's about Russia:
Sweden is reinstating the military draft — for men and women — because of dwindling volunteers and growing concerns over a more assertive Russia in the Baltic and Ukraine. [...] Marinette Nyh Radebo told the BBC the "security change in our neighborhood" prompted the move by Sweden, which is not a NATO member. "The Russian illegal annexation of Crimea (in 2014), the conflict in Ukraine and the increased military activity in our neighborhood are some of the reasons," she said.
[...] Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said he was inspired to make the draft gender-neutral by neighboring Norway, which in 2013 introduced a law applying military conscription to both sexes. That made Norway the first NATO member to draft both men and women, joining a tiny group of countries around the world, including Israel. Turkey and Germany are the only major NATO countries that still use a draft. Conscription also exists in Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece and Norway, according to Deutsche Welle. France ended the draft in 2001. Italy and the Netherlands put the draft on hold.
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Saturday March 04 2017, @11:17PM (2 children)
Dear AC,
Please look again. There is no physical land border between Russia and Sweden. There is in some regard a sea based border, or common access area in the Baltic sea. The Russian baltic fleet has two main bases -- one is in Kronshtadt, fairly close to St Petersburg, that come out into the Baltic sea via the Gulf of Finland. Then you have the other one in Baltiysk in Kaliningrad which is situated right on the Baltic sea, wedged in between the Baltic trio (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Poland. Finland could be a bit of a pain in the arse to go thru but the Baltic trio isn't even a speed bump on the road as far as the Russian army is concerned. Sweden is clearly not the masters of the Baltic sea and hasn't been for quite some time.
* back to the rest of the story *
The conscription was suspended in 2010. Re-instated again in 2017. That little seven year period is just a gap in the history of things since Sweden had conscription in the "modern" form since the early 1900's, 1901 if I'm not remembering wrong as I type this. Before that Sweden had another draft system that has more or less in various form existed for hundreds of years, going back all the way to when Sweden was a military-superpower for it's age and geographical location. This little seven year gap was clearly another failed political experiment. There wasn't even large public support for removing the draft in the first place but they did it anyway. Sweden had about a decade earlier started to dismantle the previous defence doctrine and change from a large homeland defence to a mobile and agile rapid response force - so that we could join our friends in the USA and NATO to go and bring "peace to the world". Trying to do it on the cheap just made things worse. Turns out this was a really shitty idea when you have the third largest country in Europe by land mass (excluding Russian - since it Russia, and Turkey since it's not geographically in Europe for the most part, and culturally it's even more distant) to defend but only a population of about 10 million. You pretty much need conscription to keep the system going.
So conscription is "back". But it's not the old system. When I was young they tested EVERYONE in each cohort. Everyone being male that is, females had to apply to be tested. Everyone that was physically or mentally unfit became exempt, people that for religious or moral grounds couldn't or wouldn't usually got placed someplace else in a non-military capacity. I, like everyone of my age, got a letter in the mail telling me to be at a location on a date and time for testing - basic testing took two days, some deployments would later require more testing if selected for that. If I had refused I could have been sent to jail.
Initially in the current system they will annually test about 20k people, about 13k male - 7k females. So it's not even going to be an even 50/50 gender distribution. The new total is about 1/5 of how many they tested in the previous system, and from the tested they will only select a portion compared to the previous when more or less everyone that wasn't exempt got trained in one way or another. They are only initially wanting to fill a few thousand spots and they could more or less take the volunteers that they get from testing. Getting drafted against your will is going to be very unlikely. I'll wait for the first sob-articles in the papers coming after the summer or early autumn where someone is going to cry their heart out about being forced. Plus they already removed the parts in the law that said that if you refused you could go to jail for a year. Making this whole thing some kind of 'draft-light'.
Why aren't they bringing back the old homeland invasion defence? It cost to much and they are still trying to do this on the cheap. There is no need for eternal vigilance as if Sweden was Israel, there is only one enemy and it's Russia - they just don't want to admit that even tho it's the worst kept secret ever and everyone knows it. The only other contender for an enemy would from a historical standpoint be Denmark, but that is so unlikely it's not even on the map even tho about 1/5 or so of current Sweden was once Denmark. Sweden is currently spending about 1% of GNP on defence, a number that even tho they are increasing the number in actual money will most likely fall below 1% as a value of GNP. When Sweden had a fairly large force for homeland defence Sweden spent around 3% of its GNP on defence. The second problem is that most of the bases have been demilitarized and are no longer operational. They have been sold off and are now turned into houses, shopping malls and offices. The third problem is that the swedish armed forces have a very skewed ratio of officers to soldiers, extremely heavy of the officer side compared to other similar nations. But they still don't have enough officers to actually train soldiers. Those are gone, Sweden didn't need them when it was going to be part of the world police powerranger squad. Cause then Sweden would only use all those all volunteers elite troopers so all the normal grunt trainers went away, got axed or got military office jobs.
So while the reinstatement of the draft might be necessary it is currently more window dressing for the masses then an actual change or return to the previous homeland invasion defence force Sweden once had, one where Sweden might actually have been able to hold out for a week or two or long enough for America to come and save us from the evil reds.
(Score: 1) by rochrist on Sunday March 05 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)
No physical land border? What do you call Finland and Northern Norway then?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday March 05 2017, @10:31PM
No physical land border? What do you call Finland and Northern Norway then?
Yes. Finland and Norway are not Sweden, they have not been part of Sweden for about 200 years and 100 years respectively. So the land border with Russia is between Finland and Norway and Russia and not with Sweden. If you can just skip countries then sure Sweden has a land border with more or less every country in Europe, Asia and Africa. It's just usually not how these things are counted.