Could Europe conscript 300,000 troops to deter Russia without the US?

After the Cold War, European countries systematically downsized their armies, with key players such as France suspending conscription and seeing a corresponding fall in the size of its armed forces – by 38% from the 1990s till today.

Only Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey never suspended conscription.  

“Now, the more urgent thing is essentially having enough troops to hold the line, not necessarily to fight the Russians, but to send a strong deterrence message,” Dr. Alexandr Burilkov, researcher at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, told Euronews.

That message would be: ‘Should you try what you did in February 2022, it won’t succeed,’ according to Burilkov, citing the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Burilkov is one of the co-authors of a joint analysis by the Bruegel think-tank and the Kiel Institute, which estimates that Europe will need 300,000 additional troops to defend itself, on top of the current 1.47 million active military personnel, including those in the UK. 

“In the past two years, the Russians have put their economy and society largely on a war footing,” Burilkov said, adding that “when collectively done, boosting defence capabilities is not an unfeasible expense, especially considering the consequences.” 

NATO allies are currently discussing how to do this, both in terms of equipment and military personnel – and conscription is part of the debate, a NATO official told Euronews, adding that in order to ensure collective effective defence in the current environment, more forces are needed to carry out the alliance’s defence plans. 

“How to generate these forces, whether to utilise conscription system, reserve forces or other model, is a sovereign national decision taken by allies,” the same official said.  

The transatlantic military alliance does not mandate national military policies, but it can play a role in defining a demand signal and facilitating exchanges among allies. The official added that debates on best practices, lessons learned, and NATO’s potential role in addressing recruitment and retention challenges will be elevated on the alliance’s agenda in the coming months. 

Following Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, Baltic states such as Latvia and Lithuania have implemented various conscription models to expand their armed forces. 

Croatia also plans to reintroduce compulsory military service this year, and more countries could follow, as intelligence services warn of a potential Russian attack on a NATO member state within five years and uncertainty grows over Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO and European security. 

“In order to have resilient militaries that cannot just last at the opening stages of the conflict but continue fighting if necessary, it is very much necessary to be able to introduce any kind of system that would both increase the quantity of the available personnel and increase the resilience of that system,” Burilkov argued, referring to conscription, as well as well-trained and efficient reserves.  

Lessons from the Baltic model

Finland and Estonia have mandatory military service. Denmark, Lithuania, and Latvia use a lottery-driven conscription system, while Norway and Sweden have selective compulsory service in place. 

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but Carnegie Europe researchers argued in a 2024 policy paper that lessons can be drawn from the Nordic and Baltic states. These countries have introduced various incentives to make military service more attractive, including financial benefits and employment opportunities. 

Lithuania, for instance, offers financial support to those who voluntarily join the service, as well as employment and educational assistance during and after military duty. And the Estonian Defence Forces work with private employers in programmes such as the Forces’ Cyber Conscription, where they send their employees to the cyber service to improve their skills and then apply them to their jobs. 

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“A lot of militaries are going through a process of kind of reconsidering what roles need to be military and what roles need to be civilian, because the nature of warfare and national security is changing,” Linda Slapakova, researcher at RAND Europe, noted.  

Yet not everybody agrees on the need to bring back compulsory military service, an option legally impossible in some countries, and politically implausible or practicably unlikely in others.  

“Looking just at the military, there’s a lot required in terms of the training infrastructure, getting people through medical checks and getting people signed up to do their training and their service,” Slapakova told Euronews, stressing that that kind of infrastructure doesn’t exist in many countries. 

“If the goal is just to improve capability of the armed forces, I think there’s a lot of kind of other issues that countries can be looking at before they start considering something like mandating young people to join the military or civilian service,” she added. 

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A Gallup poll conducted last year found that only 32% of EU citizens would be willing to defend their country in the event of war. 

In major EU economies such as Italy, Germany, and Spain, the numbers were even lower: just 14% of Italians, 23% of Germans, and 29% of Spaniards said they would be willing to fight for their country in wartime.