© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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The Future of Conscription: Some Comparative Reflections

James J. Sheehan

JAMES J. SHEEHAN, a Fellow ofthe American Academy since 1992,is the Dickason Professor in theHumanities and Professor ofModern European History, Emeri-tus, at Stanford University. Hispublications include Where HaveAll the Soldiers Gone?: The Transfor-mation of Modern Europe (2008),Museums in the German Art Worldfrom the End of the Old Regime to theRise of Modernism (2000), and Ger-man History, 1770–1886 (1989).

[Conscription] is always a signi½cant index of thesociety where it is found; to view it solely as a methodof conducting war is to see very little of it.

–Victor Kiernan1

When Alexis de Tocqueville listed the advan-tages of democracy in America that came “fromthe peculiar and accidental situation in whichProvidence has placed the Americans,” he had nodoubts about which was most important. Ameri-cans, he wrote, “have no neighbors, and conse-quently they have no great wars . . . nor great armies,nor great generals.”2 Shielded from potential ag-gressors by its two great ocean glacis, the UnitedStates was, for much of its history, able to avoidbuilding those mass armies on which Europeanstates lavished so much energy and resources.When, during the Civil War and World War I, greatarmies were built, they were dismantled as soon asthe war was over. We should not underestimate thereluctance with which Americans abandoned thistradition: the Selective Service Act of 1940 wasrenewed a year later with a one-vote majority in theHouse of Representatives and included a prohibi-

Abstract: This essay provides a historical and comparative perspective on contemporary American mili-tary institutions. It focuses on the origins, evolution, and eventual disappearance of conscription in West-ern Europe. By the 1970s, Europeans had developed civilian states in which the military’s traditional rolesteadily diminished; the formal abolition of conscription after 1989 was the ½nal step in a long, largelysilent revolution. A brief survey of military institutions outside of Europe suggests why mass conscriptarmies will remain politically, culturally, and militarily signi½cant in many parts of the world. Seen in aglobal context, the American experience appears to combine aspects of Western European civilian stateswith the willingness and ability to project military power.

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tion on sending draftees out of the West-ern Hemisphere. The abolition of thedraft and the creation of an all-volunteerarmy in 1973 were in response to theimmediate crisis of Vietnam, but theseactions also represented a return todeeply rooted traditions in Americanpolitical culture.

In the 1830s, as Tocqueville was writinghis great book on American democracy,European states were in the process ofcreating new kinds of armies, founded onsome form of conscription. The termitself ½rst appeared in a French law of1798 that called for compulsory militaryservice for all young men between twen-ty and twenty-½ve. The system evolved inthe nineteenth century, ½rst in Prussiaand then throughout Europe. The theoryand practice of conscription were insepa-rable from the larger ideals and majorinstitutions of the modern state. First,conscription is essentially democraticbecause every male (in theory, althoughrarely in practice) is liable to be called onto ½ght. Military service is linked to citi-zenship, that complex blend of rights andobligations that binds people to theirstate. The citizen army, therefore, is notsimply a military institution, but also away of expressing and acquiring thosepatriotic commitments essential for thenation’s survival. Second, conscriptionrequires the administrative capabilitiesand material resources that states did notpossess until the modern era. For the sys-tem to work, governments had to be ableto identify, select, assemble, train, equip,and deploy a signi½cant percentage oftheir male population, retaining some ofthem on active duty for several years withthe rest on reserve status for severalmore.3

In the nineteenth century, Europeanstates developed conscript armies to pre-pare for massive territorial conflicts inwhich the fate, perhaps even the exis-

tence, of the nation might be at stake.Among the great powers, only Britain didnot adopt conscription, relying insteadon naval power and a small professionalarmy. Outside of Europe, Japan was the½rst non-Western state to adopt con-scription, based on a careful study of thePrussian model. In 1873, as part of a larg-er program of political and social mod-ernization, Japan introduced compulsorymilitary service, including three years onactive duty and four in the reserves. Fromthen on, the army became the key instru-ment in Japan’s initially successful butultimately doomed attempt to be a greatpower. In the twentieth century, govern-ments throughout the world importedthe idea of conscript armies, which, likeso many other European institutions,seemed to be an essential part of what itmeant to be a modern state.4

Although the creation of mass armieswas an essential function of Europeanstates, their uses were limited. Through-out the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, governments were unwillingto dispatch their citizen-soldiers to ½ght“small wars” of colonial conquest orpaci½cation. “Conscripts,” the Germanstatesman Otto von Bismarck once re-marked, “cannot be sent to the tropics.”Like Britain, whose army was constantlydeployed in defense of its empire, everycolonial power left these overseas battlesto professionals or, whenever possible, tonative forces recruited from local popula-tions but usually commanded by Euro-pean of½cers.5

Yet conscripts fought the two worldwars of the twentieth century and,despite the horrendous losses suffered bytheir citizen armies between 1914 and1918 and again between 1939 and 1945,every European state either retained orrestored conscription after World War II.Britain, which had only belatedly and

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reluctantly introduced a draft in bothworld wars, preserved national serviceuntil 1960. Perhaps even more remark-ably, Nazi Germany’s three postwar suc-cessor states–West and East Germanyand the Austrian Republic–eventuallyreintroduced conscription. On both sidesof the Iron Curtain, therefore, the mem-bers of nato and the Warsaw Pact pre-pared mass armies in anticipation of anew land war between East and West. Atthe same time, Western European statesall sent conscripts in a succession of ½nal,futile efforts to defend their overseas pos-sessions. Of the 135,000 troops dis-patched to the Dutch East Indies in 1945,two-thirds were draftees; conscripts alsorepresented a signi½cant percentage ofthe French army stationed in Algeria in1961. Political opposition engendered bythe loss of citizen-soldiers in defense ofcolonial rule was one reason why govern-ments were forced to abandon thosecampaigns–as well as, eventually, theirempires. Not accidentally, Portugal, theleast democratic of the colonial powers,was also the last to surrender its overseaspossessions.

By the end of the 1960s, the securityenvironment in Europe had begun tochange. Except for Portugal’s struggles inAfrica, the colonial powers had alreadyliquidated their imperial enterprises,some of them centuries old, and haddone so with remarkable speed and rela-tively little political resistance. Equallyimportant, the Cold War order imposedby the two superpowers essentiallyremoved the danger of conventional warbetween European states; in the West,this new state of affairs made possible the growing cooperation of nationaleconomies and rising aspirations forpolitical integration. Of course, thepotential for armed conflict persisted,especially on the German-German bor-der, which bristled with the largest

amount of lethal hardware in history.Nevertheless, to more and more Euro-peans, the possibility of a continentalland war seemed increasingly remote.The sort of limited war that had beenfought in Korea and was still going on inVietnam hardly seemed possible in theonly place in the world where the super-powers directly confronted one another.The risk of escalation to nuclear catastro-phe was simply too high.6

These changing assessments of the mil-itary situation are clearly reflected inpublic opinion polls: when asked whatthey wanted their governments to do,Europeans consistently stressed domes-tic issues–a stable currency, education,health care, retirement bene½ts, law andorder–and rarely mentioned nationaldefense or effective military institutions.These polls do not suggest that Euro-peans no longer cared about being con-quered; they simply didn’t think that itwas going to happen.7

The end of imperial wars and the wan-ing salience of security concerns pro-duced a silent revolution in Europeanpolitics, a revolution that can be mea-sured in budgets, where defense spend-ing stagnated, in popular attitudes to-ward the military, and in the symbols andceremonies of public life. The army, onceregarded as essential for both nationaldefense and national identity, moved tothe margins of most people’s conscious-ness. “Security” ceased to denote issuesof national defense and came to be iden-ti½ed with individual welfare.

This revolution in Europeans’ views of security gradually–and once again,silently–transformed their conscriptarmies. Every Continental country re-tained conscription until the 1990s. Buteverywhere its character changed. Ar-mies reduced the time required in activeservice as well as conscripts’ reserve obli-gation. Exemptions from the draft be-

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came much easier to get, as did the rightto perform alternative service, both ofthem ways to drain off potential politicalopposition to the military. The percent-age of those actually conscripted and the size of the armed forces declinedthroughout Europe. Within the armiesthemselves, regulations were eased, pun-ishments made less severe, and trainingless rigorous. In a few states, enlistedmen were allowed to form unions, work aforty-hour week, and even receive over-time pay. The semi-of½cial motto of theDutch armed forces was said to be “Ascivilian as possible, as military as neces-sary.” In fact, where European armieshad once been seen as a way of instillingdiscipline and patriotic commitment incivilian society, by the 1970s they werebecoming increasingly “civilianized,”the products of a gradual but unmistak-able readjustment of the citizen’s senseof obligations to the nation.8

During the 1990s, after more than twodecades of gradual decline, conscriptarmies were ½nally abolished in most ofEurope. The most obvious reason was theend of the Cold War and the subsequentwithdrawal of Soviet forces, which re-moved even the remote possibility of aterritorial threat from the East. Fiscalpressures, too, encouraged governmentsto take a hard and critical look at theirdefense budgets. Most important, it hadbecome painfully clear that Europe’sarmed forces, while quite large, were mil-itarily worthless, especially for the kindof technically sophisticated, fast-mov-ing, and intensive combat made possibleby the so-called Revolution in MilitaryAffairs. European states no longer need-ed mass armies to defend the homeland,but rather a relatively small number ofprofessionals who could, if necessary, besent on expeditions abroad, perhaps aspart of a multinational peacekeeping

mission. As Bismarck had warned in thenineteenth century, such missions werenot for conscripts.9

In The Netherlands, where the numberof conscripts had plummeted since the1950s, the draft was abolished in 1993;two years later Belgium ended it. France,despite the powerful historical memoriesof the revolutionary nation in arms and adeep distrust of professional soldiers,announced the end of the draft and intro-duction of an all-volunteer army in 1996.Spain, Italy, and most of the former Com-munist states of Eastern Europe soon fol-lowed. By the beginning of the twenty-½rst century, the overwhelming majorityof nato’s armed forces were profession-als. The speed and ease with which Euro-pean states abandoned compulsory mili-tary service reflected the long erosion ofconscription’s political, cultural, andmilitary signi½cance.10

Germany has held onto conscriptionlonger than the other major Europeanstates. In part this is because of postwarGermany’s historically rooted anxietyabout professional soldiers and pride inthe democratic army created after thewar. Signi½cantly, as the proponents ofconscription also pointed out, the in-creasing number of those choosing alter-native service provided the relativelyinexpensive caregivers and hospital or-derlies who are essential for the FederalRepublic’s welfare system. Without amilitary draft, Germany’s civilian insti-tutions might suffer. In practice, howev-er, conscription in the Federal Republichas already come close to disappearing:between 2000 and 2009, the total num-ber of men performing military servicedropped by more than half, from 144,647to 68,304. In any case, it was dif½cult todescribe as compulsory a system inwhich a civilian alternative was nowgranted automatically, making the Ger-man army what one expert called “an all

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volunteer force in disguise.” Needless tosay, the German troops serving as part ofthe nato contingent in Afghanistan areall professionals.11

At present (February 2011), conscriptionin Germany seems to be on the way out.Under severe pressure to cut his budgetand recognizing the need for a smallerbut more effective force, the energet-ic minister of defense, Karl-Theodor zuGuttenberg, sought to suspend the draft(abolition would require a constitution-al amendment) and introduce substan-tial reforms in the composition of Ger-many’s armed forces. It is striking that inthe current German discussions, as hadbeen the case in debates about endingconscription in other European states,the level of engagement, both amongpoliticians and their constituents, is low.Well before they were abolished formal-ly, Europeans’ conscript armies hadceased to be politically or culturallysalient, either as a source of positive com-mitment or a target of active opposition.

If, as seems very likely, the Germanparliament agrees to suspend conscrip-tion, then only a handful of Western Eu-ropean states will still have a draft. Theseinclude Norway and Denmark, wheremilitary service continues to be a part ofa citizen’s duty to the nation. In neithercountry, however, does conscriptionhave a military purpose. There are, forexample, no conscripts in the small, butquite effective, unit that Denmark hascontributed to the nato mission in Af-ghanistan. In addition to Norway andDenmark, three of the ½ve Cold War neu-trals–Austria, Switzerland, and Finland–still have conscript armies. (Irelandalways had a small professional force;Sweden abolished conscription in Sum-mer 2010.) Austria requires six months ofactive duty in what has traditionally beenan underfunded and poorly equippedarmy. In Switzerland, on the other hand,

the army has always had a signi½cantrole, as a deterrent to aggression and as asource of national identity. There areindications, however, that in the currentsecurity environment, both of thesefunctions are losing their central place inSwiss politics. It may be that amongEuropean states, only Finland retains aconscript army on the traditional model.In a country where 80 percent of the malepopulation has served in the military, theprestige and importance of the armedforces remains high. Moreover, the Finn-ish military’s strategic objective remainsterritorial defense, a purpose persistentlynourished by memories of the heroicWinter War against the Soviet Union in1940 and recently reinforced by theexample of Russia’s invasion of Georgiain 2008.12

With few exceptions, European mili-tary institutions continue to be pro-foundly affected by the global economiccrisis that began in 2008. In fact, expendi-tures for defense, which were stagnantfor decades, have been in sharp declinesince the turn of the century: the Euro-pean members of nato spent 2.05 per-cent of gdp for defense in 1999, 1.65 per-cent in 2008. This trend is not likely to be reversed in the austerity budgets nowbeing formulated throughout Europe.The British government, for example,announced drastic cuts in troop strengthand equipment in a comprehensive de-fense review published in October2010.13 One result of these budgetarypressures may be greater cooperationamong European states. Britain andFrance, Europe’s two most importantmilitary powers, have already taken stepsin this direction. But since the road toeffective transnational military institu-tions is bound to be long and dif½cult, the most likely consequence of thesebudgetary problems is a continuation of Europeans’ dependence on the United

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States, a dependence most dramaticallyexpressed in the remarkable survival ofnato decades after the disappearance ofthe common adversary against which thealliance was founded.14

An unspoken assumption behind Euro-peans’ budgetary debates is that militaryspending has become discretionary, anexpense to be weighed against a variety ofother demands on the state’s resourc-es–not, as was long the case, a necessaryprice to ensure national survival. Euro-pean governments recognize that theystill face profound dangers: terrorism,organized crime, and in some countries,increasingly violent social protests. Andthere are occasions when states may wantto project power by sending an expedi-tionary force abroad. But the preserva-tion of order and the deployment oftroops on some distant mission are verydifferent from the defense of the nationfrom existential threats, the purpose forwhich the mass conscript army had orig-inally been created.

Soon after the end of the Cold War andthe dissolution of the Soviet Union, theAmerican political scientist Robert Keo-hane remarked that “one of the most vex-ing questions in Europe today is wherethe frontier between the West Europeanzone of peace and Eurasian zone of con-flict will be.”15 On the western side ofthis line, conscription has largely disap-peared and military service has becomelimited to a relatively small group of pro-fessionals who are compensated, like½re½ghters and police of½cers, for therisks they are asked to take on behalf oftheir fellow citizens. On the other side ofthe line, however, where the survival ofthe nation might still be at stake, militaryservice remains both a political obliga-tion and a strategic necessity.

But while the line between the peacefuland conflictual parts of Eurasia may be

ill-de½ned–frontiers are, by de½nition,contested and imprecise–there is goodreason to suppose that it runs directlythrough the former Soviet imperium. Onthe peaceful side are the Soviet Union’sformer Eastern European satellites andthe three newly autonomous Baltic re-publics. Despite some hesitation andreluctance on both sides, these stateseventually joined nato; with the excep-tion of Latvia and Lithuania, they, liketheir new allies in the West, have abol-ished conscription in favor of small pro-fessional forces. In 2008, there were only4,000 conscripts among the 317,000 mili-tary personnel in the new nato mem-bers from the East. Moreover, again as inthe West, military expenditure in theEast has continued to decline: except forBulgaria (2 percent), Poland, and Roma-nia (each 1.9 percent), the Eastern Euro-pean states are well below the statednato goal of allocating 2 percent of gdpto defense. What the eminent militarysociologist Martin Shaw once called “thelast bastions of classical militarism in thenorthern industrial world,” the formerCommunist regimes of Eastern Europehave become, within little more than adecade, civilian states on the WesternEuropean model.16

On the other side of the frontier are theremaining Soviet European and CentralAsian successor states. All these statesretain conscript armies. Some, such asBelarus, are among the most militarizedstates in the world. Where there are stillexternal threats and ongoing territorialdisputes, as in Georgia, Armenia, andAzerbaijan, military institutions have animportance far greater than in the civil-ian West.

With just over half of the old SovietUnion’s population and three-fourths of its territory, the Russian Federation is far and away its most important suc-cessor state. Russia’s military capacity

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was among the casualties of the SovietUnion’s extraordinary implosion. Evenbefore the ussr disappeared in 1991, theSoviet military suffered a series of stun-ning blows, including defeat in Af-ghanistan and the loss of its bases in East-ern Europe. After 1991, morale and cohe-sion deteriorated precipitously, attendedby endemic corruption, criminality, andbrutality. At present, Russia is supposedto have over one million men on activeduty, with another twenty million reserv-ists, but in practice only a small percent-age of these forces are deployable. Sincethe 1990s, there have been several effortsat reforming the military, the latest andmost ambitious of which was introducedin September 2008, following the rathermixed results of Russia’s brief invasion of Georgia that summer. Although con-scription remains in effect (early in 2008the length of service was reduced to oneyear), the reformers want to create asmaller, better trained and equippedforce that is permanently ready fordeployment. But formidable barriers toeffective reform remain, including thepervasive weakness of the Russian ad-ministrative apparatus, the economicproblems created by the global decline inenergy prices, and, perhaps most seriousof all, the long-term effects of Russia’sdevastating demographic decline. Ac-cording to the Chief of the Russian Gen-eral Staff, in 2012 the number of draft-eligible males will be half of what it wasin 2001.17

Among the members of nato, onlyTurkey clearly occupies a position on theconflict side of Keohane’s frontier. Turk-ish troops have long defended a contest-ed border on Cyprus and fought a long,bloody civil war against the Kurds. Howthe creation of a semi-autonomous Kurd-ish territory in Iraq will affect Turkey isby no means clear. In any case, unlike itsEuropean counterparts, Turkey’s mili-

tary budget has not dramatically de-clined; conscription remains in force,exemptions are rare, alternative service isvirtually impossible. Militarily and polit-ically, the army played a central role inthe emergence of the Republic from theruins of the Ottoman Empire. Despiterecent efforts by the Erdogan govern-ment to limit the army’s influence, thegenerals continue to be a powerful politi-cal force. Indeed, the sharp differencesbetween civil-military relations in Tur-key and Europe represent another barrierto Turkey’s absorption into the EuropeanUnion. Unlike the rest of the eu, Turkeyis not a fully developed civilian state; the possibility of international and do-mestic violence remains very much a partof Turkish political life.18

In most of Eurasia, the political role ofthe army is closer to the Turkish modelthan to the civilian states of WesternEurope. In a few places like Myanmar themilitary rules directly; sometimes, as inThailand, its power is veiled by a di-aphanous curtain of civilian authority.Most often, the army acts, as it tradition-ally did in the Turkish case, as a kind of“deep state,” using the threat of a coup toset limits on what governments can andcannot do. Nowhere is this situationmore dramatically clear than in the polit-ical crisis now unfolding in Egypt. Thusfar (early February 2011), the army hasplayed a cautious role, refusing to usedeadly force against demonstrators butnot abandoning the government. Wherethe loyalties of Egypt’s conscripts lieremains uncertain, but for the army’sleaders, more than three decades of pow-er and influence are at stake. (“It is,”notes one well-informed observer, “anopen question how much power the mil-itary has, and they might not even knowthemselves.”)19

In North Korea, where Kim Jong Il isseeking to extend his family’s control

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into the third generation, his heir appar-ent was made a four-star general beforehe was appointed to the Central Commit-tee of Korean Workers’ Party, a sequencethat underlined how the army has con-solidated its hold on political power.With terms of active duty from ½ve totwelve years and reserve obligations upto the age of sixty, North Korea has whatis perhaps the world’s most extensive andsocially intrusive system of conscription.

The border between the two Koreanstates may be the most heavily forti½ed,but it is by no means the only contestedfrontier in East Asia. Some of the territo-ries involved in these disputes are verysmall, and in others the conflict is largelyinert; but there are some–Kashmir, forinstance, or parts of the Sino-Indian bor-der–that remain volatile enough toerupt into large-scale international vio-lence. With two major powers, India andChina, and a number of unstable andpotentially aggressive smaller states, therivalries and tensions within East Asiasomewhat resemble the European inter-national system before 1914. Not surpris-ingly, it is here that the mass conscriptarmy continues to provide the founda-tion of national defense.

In the past few years, a number of ex-perts have argued that conscription, likethe modern state from which it devel-oped, was on its way to historical obliv-ion. The international studies scholarEliot Cohen, for example, recently de-clared that “the age of the mass army isover.”20 Perhaps. There is no questionthat in many parts of the world, conscriptarmies have been dissolved or dimin-ished; quality, represented by the abilityto use complex new weapon systems, hasreplaced quantity as a measurement ofmilitary power. In much of Europe, therise of civilian states has changed the bal-ance between rights and duties that had

once made military service inseparablefrom citizenship. But in many parts ofEurasia, especially on the wrong side ofthe frontier separating zones of peaceand conflict, conscript armies designedto protect the territorial interests ofstates are still centrally important and awar between states remains a constantdanger. Here, civilian states on the Euro-pean model have not developed: militaryservice remains an important part ofyoung men’s lives, conscript armies havepolitical and cultural signi½cance, andthe of½cer corps often plays an importantrole. In countries such as Egypt, NorthKorea, Thailand, Burma, and Pakistan,conscription still has a future, which willhelp shape the future of these nations.

Where does the United States ½t intothis picture? With its massive militarybudget and globally deployed armedforces, it is surely not a civilian state onthe European model. However dividedthey may be on the use of force in speci½csituations, most Americans agree that asa world power, the United States must bewilling and able to project military powerto defend its interests throughout a dan-gerous world. And yet, unlike those stateswhere military service remains a nationalobligation, the United States counts onprofessionals to meet its extensive globalcommitments. The burden of America’smission in the world, therefore, is carriedby a relatively small portion of the popu-lation, whose sacri½ces are honored butnot shared by the larger society. In asense, the United States is a civilian statewith signi½cant military obligations.Many of the other essays collected in thisvolume examine the tensions that arisefrom this uneasy mix of values and aspi-rations.

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endnotes1 Victor Kiernan, “Conscription and Society in Europe before the War of 1914–1918,” in War

and Society: Historical Essays in Honour and Memory of J. R. Western, 1928–1971, ed. M.R.D.Foot (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1973), 141.

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994), 288–289.3 The classic analysis of conscription’s political signi½cance is Morris Janowitz, “Military

Institutions and Citizenship in Western Societies,” in The Military and the Problem of Legiti-macy, ed. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins and Jacques Van Doorn (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publica-tions, 1976), 77–92.

4 See David Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Tech-niques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600–1914 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990).

5 See Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1998).

6 On the changing security environment in postwar Europe, see James J. Sheehan, Where HaveAll the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2008), chap. 7.

7 For some examples, see the data in Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Valuesand Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

8 See Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, chap. 8. The best collection of informationon military institutions is The Military Balance, published annually since 1959 by the Inter-national Institute for Strategic Studies in London. On The Netherlands, see F. Olivier andG. Teitler, “Democracy and the Armed Forces: The Dutch Experiment,” in Armed Forces andthe Welfare Societies: Challenges in the 1980s, ed. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins (New York: St. Mar-tin’s Press, 1983), 54–95.

9 For changing patterns of conflict, see Lotta Harbom and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Con-flicts, 1946–2009,” Journal of Peace Research 47 (4) (2010): 501–509; Andreas Wenger et al.,Strategic Trends 2010 (Center for Security Studies, eth Zürich, 2010); and the essays inIsabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom, eds., Rethinking the Nature of War (London: FrankCass, 2005).

10 See James Burk, “The Decline of Mass Armed Forces and Compulsory Military Service,”Defense Analysis 8 (1) (1992): 45–59; and Curtis Gilroy and Cindy Williams, eds., Service toCountry: Personnel Policy and the Transformation of Western Militaries (Cambridge, Mass.: mitPress, 2007). There is a careful study of the French case in J. Justin McKenna, “Towards theArmy of the Future: Domestic Politics and the End of Conscription in France,” West Euro-pean Politics 20 (4) (1997): 125–145.

11 Enlistment data from Der Spiegel, July 29, 2010. Quotation from Gerhard Kümmel in Gilroyand Williams, Service to Country, chap. 8.

12 Henning Sørensen, “Conscription in Scandinavia during the Last Quarter Century: Devel-opments and Arguments,” Armed Forces & Society 26 (2) (2000): 313–334. Pauli Järvenpäa,“Finland’s Defence Policy: Sui Generis?” Baltic Defence Review 11 (1) (2004): 129–134.

13 See Judy Dempsey, “The Peril that nato Can’t Ignore,” The New York Times, November 10,2010, and “Brie½ng. The Cost of Weapons,” The Economist, August 28, 2010, 20–21.

14 While the persistence of nato points to the enduring importance of the United States forEuropean security, nato’s continuing effort to de½ne its military and political objectivesunderscores the inherent dif½culties in sustaining the Atlantic relationship. The most recenteffort to shape the alliance to meet the challenges of a post–Cold War world was the Strate-gic Concept adopted at the Lisbon Summit in November 2010; for a concise analysis, see

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two ½ne articles on “The Future of nato,” in The Economist, November 13, 2010, 27–30, andNovember 25, 2010, 24–25.

15 Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., After the Cold War: InternationalInstitutions and Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1993), 6.

16 Martin Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, Demilitarization, and War at the End of theTwentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 163. On the armed forcesof the former Communist states, see the data in The Military Balance 2010 and the usefulsummary by Jeffrey Simon, “nato’s Uncertain Future: Is Demography Destiny?” StrategicForum no. 236 (October 2008): 1–7.

17 On the dif½culties of reform, see Carolina Pallin, Russian Military Reform: A Failed Exercise inDefence Decision Making (London: Routledge, 2009). For the most recent efforts, see thechapter on the Russian Federation in The Military Balance 2010.

18 On the Turkish armed forces, see The Military Balance 2010 and “A Special Report onTurkey,” The Economist, October 23, 2010.

19 Thanassis Cambanis, “Succession Gives Army a Stiff Test in Egypt,” The New York Times,September 12, 2010.

20 Quoted in Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld & Nicol-son, 2005), 172.