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Posted on Oct 20, 2024 / Politics

For years, European countries have relied on the US for patronage and have been cutting their armies.

But Washington can no longer be counted on France, one of Europe's dominant military powers along with the UK, has cut its armed forces by 56 percent between 1990 and 2024. The French army currently numbers 203,850. The British government is also continuing to cut its army, planning to bring it to 73,000 troops by 2025, the lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars.

For Germany, stationing a brigade of several thousand soldiers in the Baltic region would be a significant achievement, according to Mac Bergmann, head of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia division at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For France, according to Pierre Schill, Chief of Staff of the French army, it would take a month to mobilize 20,000 troops. According to Matthew Saville, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, it would take Britain more than 30 days to assemble a division of 20,000 to 30,000 troops. For comparison, the US Special Operations Forces alone have 70,000 troops, and the American contingent in Europe is approximately 80,000.

The shortage of troops has become one of the main problems for European NATO members ahead of a possible confrontation with the Russian army. Some senior commanders have proposed compensating for the personnel shortage with mandatory conscription. However, the authorities rejected this idea, as they decided that inexperienced recruits would not be able to replace professionals. The accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO in 2023 and 2024 has partially compensated for the shortage of trained people in the alliance's forces. But, as Bloomberg authors Tom Pfeiffer and Christopher Cannon explain, the recruitment problem remains due to the negative image of the army and the reluctance of young people in Europe to devote themselves to a military career.

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