The era of small, professional armed forces is gone, and Europe might need to return to mass conscription, Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă said during his speech at the Black Sea and Balkans Forum on Thursday, May 18th, reported by the Bucharest-based Observator News.
“Back onto the drawing board comes the defense industry, needing to be turned into war industry,” Ciucă said, “and so do the small, technologically sophisticated armies of professionals that must revert to mass armies with society-wide reserves and extensive mobilization capabilities to cope with a large-scale, long, high-intensity, and resource-depleting warfare.”
Considering the prime minister’s extensive military background, these remarks do not come as a surprise. Ciucă, who is leading a centrist coalition since November 2021, is a retired general of the Romanian Armed Forces, participating as a commander in several missions to Afghanistan and Iraq throughout the 2000s. He later became Chief of the General Staff in 2015 and then went on to become Minister of National Defense in 2019.
Even though Ciucă only implied that the Romanian government might consider reinstating compulsory military service, the remarks sent shockwaves through the domestic media landscape. In Romania, mandatory service was only abolished in 2007, and most Romanians still associate it with the unpleasant memories of the country’s communist past.
However, while the vast majority have been consistently against the idea before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been slowly changing people’s perception of military service as well. A poll conducted in March 2022, for instance, revealed that only 47% of the country still opposes it, with 30% explicitly supporting the reintroduction of compulsory service.
While the Romanian government—under the leadership of Ciucă—did not publicize any plans about reinstating compulsory military service, following last year’s invasion, it did unveil a controversial bill aimed at forcing military-aged Romanian citizens living abroad to travel home and report for duty within 15 days of the announcement of general mobilization in the future.
Also, similarly to many other European countries, the bill also created a simplified option for joining the reserve forces through a four-month-long “voluntary” training program.
Nonetheless, if mass-conscripted armies are the future in Europe, as Ciucă said, Romania does have a bit of catching up to do. Back in the mid-1990s, the Romanian Armed Forces counted over 300,000 total active personnel. By the early 2020s, the number of active personnel dropped to around 70,000, with an additional 55,000 troops in reserve (mostly made of middle-aged men who completed their obligatory service before it was abolished).
However, in 2023, Romania’s military spending also reached the magical 2.5% threshold (for the first time in over two decades), with a number of large-scale military procurement programs—neglected before the invasion—now nearing completion.
With almost 230,000 people reaching military age annually, if Romania did introduce compulsory service eventually, it could raise one of the biggest armies in East Central Europe.
