Western allies may need to enact “a form of conscription” to grow their militaries, a top NATO admiral suggested amid widening misgivings about Russia’s replacement of soldiers and equipment lost during the war in Ukraine.
“It is a societal problem to be solved by society,” Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, who heads the NATO Military Committee, said during the Warsaw Security Forum, “and if you cannot find enough people that voluntarily want to join the armed forces, you have to most likely think about other means of getting the people — a form of conscription, mobilization, reservists — like in Finland, where there’s still conscription.”
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U.S. military recruiters have fallen short of their targets in recent years, in parallel to a war in Ukraine that has exposed severe shortfalls in the ability of Western companies to produce arms and ammunition at a scale needed to deter or fight wars against Russia or China. Those dynamics make for a dangerous combination, Western officials fear, as Russian President Vladimir Putin is racing to expand Russia’s military in response to its struggles during the war in Ukraine.
“The question, how fast they reconstitute or revitalize, rebuild, and modernize — the simple answer would be, too fast,” Polish Gen. Rajmund Andrzejczak, chief of the general staff of Polish armed forces, said Wednesday during an appearance alongside Bauer. “I think it’s too fast. So, do not relax, anybody.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sharpened that point in his own appeal to European leaders and claimed to have “clear information from our intelligence” that Russian military planners are considering “different scenarios” for the future, including an attack on NATO member-states in 2028.
“If there is any pause in this aggression against Ukraine, if this war is frozen, then there will be a new critical moment: the year of 2028,” Zelensky said Thursday on the sidelines of a summit of European leaders in Spain. “If we allow Russia to adapt now, then in 2028, the Kremlin will be able to restore the military potential we deprived it of, and Russia will have enough force to attack the countries which are in the focus of its expansionist ambitions.”
Zelensky invoked Ukrainian intelligence to support that claim, but his suggested timeline comports with Western expectations about Russia’s military modernization.
“Russian force design in land warfare will likely include an attempt to reconstitute the Russian army over the next five years,” Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Vice President Seth Jones wrote in a new study funded by the U.S. European Command’s Russia Strategic Initiative. “Russia retains a significant arsenal of nuclear weapons, a relatively strong navy and air force that remain largely intact, and a reasonably good relationship with China and other countries, such as Iran, that could provide a much-needed jump start.”
Ukrainian forces have inflicted heavy losses on the invading Russian troops, but with neither side able to enjoy air superiority over the battlefields, the conflict has settled into a ground-bound “war of attrition” with grim implications, from Warsaw’s perspective.
“It sounds brutal, but this is a war of attrition … [and] Russia is any scale bigger than Ukraine and [is] possessing bigger potential in economy, in army, and also in the personnel,” Andrzejczak said. “So the question is not necessarily about the numbers of equipment, but about the timeline and synchronizing properly. Are we doing speed of attrition of Russian Army? Speed of attrition Ukraine Army unfortunately, an entire nation, society. And then, a combination of donations, because we still have to support Ukraine — not only fighting, but also winning, and then modernizing in the same time.”
The generals’ discussion dovetailed with Bauer’s remarks after NATO received a Knight of Freedom award from Poland’s Casimir Pulaski Foundation.
“We are the most successful Alliance in history because of the peace we have brought, the countries we have united, and the conflicts we have prevented from spiraling out of control. In the words of the French chief of defense: because of our ability to ‘win the war before the war,'” he said Tuesday evening. “We need a shield against aggression more than ever.”
Putin’s plan to rebuild Russia’s military “will be difficult” for multiple reasons, including wartime strains and the fact that “corruption and graft remain rampant in the Russian military,” according to Jones.
“First, Russia’s deepening economic crisis will likely constrain its efforts to expand the quantity and quality of its ground, air, and naval forces,” the CSIS expert wrote. “Russia has already expended significant amounts of precision-guided and other munitions in the Ukraine war, and many of its weapons systems and equipment have been destroyed or severely worn down. Economic sanctions may create shortages of higher-end foreign components and force Moscow to substitute them with lower-quality alternatives.”
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On the other hand, NATO leaders will have to coordinate “the biggest overhaul of the Alliance since 1949,” Bauer said, while ensuring the “executability” of their new plans, and he stipulated that it need not be “the traditional way of conscription with all the young people into the armed forces” but instead something smaller scale.
“You can also have a model where you take out of all the young people a number, which can still be a considerable number, but a part of that group and give them this experience for a couple of years,” he said. “And look, for example, at medical, cyber, technical people to ensure that you can actually perform the tasks you have to perform.”
