NATO Countries Struggle to Recruit Troops to Counter Russia Threat – Foreign Policy

For most of its history, NATO has had a problem: not enough troops.

It was an issue for much of the Cold War, when NATO looked across the Warsaw Pact lines in East Germany and saw 6 million troops to their 5 million, and more divisions, tanks, combat aircraft, and submarines.

Ever since then, the problem has only gotten worse. In the 1990s and 2000s, NATO nations shed troops and painted their green tanks in desert camouflage for 20 years of war in the Middle East. By 2014, when the Kremlin ordered troops into the Crimean Peninsula, there were only around 30,000 U.S. troops in Europe. Pentagon officials scrambled to figure out how to make it look to the Russians like there were 10 times that many.

NATO basically forgot about its military, said one senior NATO nation diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about military planning. It was absolutely insufficient for a big crisis.

As NATO builds out its new war plans this year to defend against a potential Russian attack on three axesnorth, central, and southit is getting all of the tanks, artillery, and ammunition in place. But it is struggling to find enough troops. The alliance plans to train NATOs new 300,000-troop Allied Response Force this summer, but to keep pace with Russias buildup of people, the alliance is going to need reservesa lot of them. And NATO is having to rethink the entire way that it gets troops from allied countries.

We have to think about making sure that we have enough military to execute the plans that we have agreed to, Royal Netherlands Navy Lt. Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATOs Military Committee, told Foreign Policy on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February.

Most of NATOled by the United Stateshas been recruiting all-volunteer forces for the past half-century, though in the United States, all eligible men have to register with the selective service in case Congress or the U.S. president authorizes a draft.

But falling unemployment rates in the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean have made hitting recruiting numbers more difficult. Since the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. employers have kept adding jobs, keeping the unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent. In the Netherlands and Germany, unemployment is lowabout 3 percentmeaning that anyone whos out of work is either switching jobs or just entering the workforce. But there are other factors. In the United States, at least, fewer people are meeting military recruitment standards because of fitness, mental illness, or past criminal activity, leading to a shrinking pool of recruits.

The biggest factor that has driven down recruitment, experts think, is the lack of an existential U.S. national security threat. Were victims of our own success, said Kate Kuzminski, director of the military, veterans, and society program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington think tank. The sense of existential threat is not necessarily as strong as it used to be, which is a good thing, but it leads to some challenges when it comes to recruitment.

The U.S. military missed its recruiting target by more than 41,000 people last year. The active-duty U.S. military is smaller than it has been in over 80 years. The British Army has fallen short of its targets every year since 2010. And Germanys Bundeswehr shrank by 1,500 military personnel last year, despite a massive recruitment drive. Even Ukraine, which is outside of the NATO alliance, has had to drop its conscription age from 27 to 25 to bring on enough troops to help fight off a Russian invasion on its soil.

Russia has adjusted its conscription age, raising the maximum age at which someone can be conscripted form 27 to 30, but the Kremlin has also taken action on the other end of the spectrum: raising the service age to re-conscript old soldiers. So youve got retired generals whove been drinking for the last 30 years being conscripted back into service, Kuzminski said.

In the U.S. Army, attrition and exhaustion have been most acute in the combat arms branchesthe service experienced a high rate of suicide just among tankers between 2019 and 2021. Air defense troops have also had high rates of fatigue, in part because of their globe-spanning mission.

So the Americans and the Europeans are going out to try to find people. A handful of nations, such as Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, and Norway, already conscript service members for some length of time. Latvia is bringing conscription back. And Swedenwhich once conscripted half of its populationhas brought back the old mobilization model and is looking to double its conscripts by 2030. Poland is trying to resist economic gravity, building a 250,000-troop active-duty army and adding 50,000 territorial defendersa reserve force akin to the Ukrainian mobilization modelwhile unemployment is hovering around 2 percent.

If you talk about people, [and] you cant find them in terms of voluntary service in a professional armed forces, then you need to think about other ways to find people, Bauer said. And thats either conscription or mobilization.

Russia is having no such troublefor now. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned recently that the Kremlin was planning to mobilize another 300,000 troops by the beginning of June, and the British Ministry of Defense believes Russia is bringing on 30,000 new recruits every month, almost entirely through forced conscription. Though Russia has emptied its borders with NATO of its troops to send them to fight in Ukraine, European officials believe that the Kremlin intends to double the almost 19,000 troops it had on NATOs eastern flank before the war.

Its a big question if Russian society will actually sustain the sacrifices, said Leon Aron, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. Putin is in a marathon against the West, Ukraine, and his own society. Even amid that marathon, the United States believes that Russias military has almost completely reconstituted in the last several months, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said at a CNAS event earlier this month.

But China, on the other hand, might not want to run a marathon against the United States or other Western powers. On both sides of the Atlantic, officials and experts are also thinking about mobilization in deterrence terms now. NATO officials characterize the option of bringing two U.S. divisions across the Atlantic Ocean to help out in an Article 5 contingency as one of their chief deterrents against Russiaanywhere between 45,000 and 90,000 troops.

Particularly for the China scenario, all signals indicate that theyre terrified of a protracted conflict, Kuzminski said. What draft mobilization in the U.S. signals is that we have the ability and the willingness to engage in a protracted conflict, which hopefully is the thing that keeps them from pulling the trigger in the first place.

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NATO Countries Struggle to Recruit Troops to Counter Russia Threat - Foreign Policy