Conscription, Scaling-up and Regional Defence: Perspectives from the Baltic Sea States

Introduction

Europe’s security environment is in the process of being drastically reconfigured because of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the related fears and doubts over the reliability of U.S. support and security guarantees. This is prompting several EU governments to bolster defence spending and rethink their manpower principles.

The increase in European rearmament has been described as the embarkation of an ‘experiment’, generating ‘new imbalances’ between EU states (Tooze, 2026). The rate of increase in defence expenditure varies considerably between different countries in both GDP share and absolute terms – notably Poland and Germany are rearming at a rapid pace, while France, Spain, and Italy exhibit a notable lack of urgency and/or affordability (ibid.). A key challenge in efforts to ‘scale up’ concerns the tension between military leaders urging societies to prepare for potential conflict, while Western armies struggle to fill their ranks through all-volunteer systems alone.

The debate over conscription has intensified. Several EU states with existing conscript systems (e.g., Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark) are expanding or modernising them to strengthen force structures, including reserves. Germany has approved a mixed model requiring all 18-year-olds to register for potential service, keeping mandatory mobilisation as a future option (Höller, 2025). Whether this is a temporary or more sustained return to conscription over a longer term remains to be seen.

However, at least presently, discussions across the continent are converging as policymakers continue to consider building up military capability, either by returning to conscription models – whether universal service or forms based on variations of voluntary, selective, or lottery-based systems, and male-only or gender-neutral models – or other large national service schemes in response to manpower shortages and strategic uncertainty.

The conceptual use of ‘scaling’ in military contexts has gained ground recently, as ‘scalability’ has been adopted among some Western armed forces – notably the Dutch armed forces and MoD – to conceptualise ‘scalable armed forces’ (Zijderveld et al., 2025). This comes as part of the transformation in guiding principles of organising, moving from an expeditionary peace enforcement model to a model concerned with interstate warfare as a possibility within national and regional territorial defence (ibid.). This tendency of redesigning forces towards a mass army reflects a general principle that the constitution of different forces reflects different security needs.

The purpose of this report is to examine how a selection of states in the Baltic Sea region – Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Germany – are adapting to the sudden felt need to ‘scale up’ militarily, with a focus on compulsory military service, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022.

Rather than discussing the broad concerns of regional security, our focus is on regional defence – the policies and practices aimed at organising and managing increased military defence capabilities. Our key research aim is to investigate possibilities for scaling up recruitment, as this is often perceived as a constraining factor for a return to a large-scale, mass-force structure. A central question that our report seeks to address is: Which models for conscript training exist that other forces can emulate to increase the volume of soldiers?

The ambition of the report is not to offer a comprehensive overview, but rather to adopt a deliberately selective approach. This means focusing on the experiences and challenges of the Swedish and Finnish forces as they provide the most available data and both operate systems of conscription, unlike Poland and Germany. Indeed, it has been suggested that Sweden provides a useful reference case because after a seven-year suspension (2010–2017) it reactivated conscription (Strand, 2021, p. 3). Significantly, however, this can be seen as a ‘reimagination’ of a ‘Scandinavian model’ – gender-neutral, selective and competitive, and therefore ‘still voluntary’ – rather than a ‘return’ to a traditional one (ibid.). To complement this, we also draw on the relatively unchanged Finnish model and experiences.

It is beyond the report’s intention and realistic scope to develop an equivalent level of analysis for countries such as Lithuania, despite its reintroduction of conscription in 2015. The report is designed to offer insights that may be of relevance and practical utility to other countries, including Lithuania, and potentially Poland and Germany. Sweden and Finland are thus allocated a proportionally larger share of the analysis.

The report also addresses a range of thematic aspects. Similarly, these aspects are not afforded equal emphasis. Instead, the space allocated to each reflects their relative relevance and perceived usefulness to aid scaling-up efforts.

Our study is delimited by capacity reforms preoccupying Western armed forces as they steer away from the post-Cold War era’s archetype of the all-volunteer professional force concerned with peacebuilding, counter-terror, and expeditionary missions and towards invasive war and the model of territorial and national mass defence (Hasselbladh, 2024; A. Weibull & Abrahamsson, 2008).

Such ‘ideal-type’ thinking risks a logical ‘binary trap’, where the nuance and variation in states’ military policies are overly simplified. Indeed, the post-Crimea response for a state such as Sweden is less of a return to a narrow territorial and geopolitical ‘security’ concept, but rather an expanded signification of ‘threats’ conceived not only in military but also in hybrid-, cyber-, terror-, and organised crime terms, and threats directed at transport, infrastructure, public health, and climate (Angstrom & Ljungkvist, 2024). Yet it is beyond the scope of this paper to consider such nuances of the expanded idea of ‘security’ (Haldén, 2001).

Furthermore, it falls outside of our research design to consider the qualitative range of possible typologies and merits of conscript subjects producible via ‘force design’ processes, such as in terms of tasks and skills.

Our recommendation is that a schematic version inspired foremost by the Finnish conscription system serves as a model for other states to adapt to their own contexts. It concerns a rationalised, more efficient and more purposeful training system prioritising necessity, shortened training, and division of labour for states wishing to rapidly expand their military ranks.

We also discuss the implications for training redesign, the skills-based diversification of the mass army, public opinion, and casualty sensitivity, as well as scaling elasticity.

Our policy-oriented recommendations on how to scale the output of conscription are:

Increase training capacity by employing non-regular military personnel;
Intensify training by adding more hours per week;
Streamline training by prioritising core combat competencies and eliminating excessive generic content, ‘add-ons’, and ceremonial activities;
Employ a 6-month basic training regime, allowing for the processing of two cohorts per calendar year;
Develop cooperation between the military and universities of technology and offer conscripts career prospects in technology development.

Read the full publication here.