Really feels like things are heating up.
theguardian.com
How close are we to the next big war?
Sweden institutes mandatory military service for men and women
Jose Torres
Other urls found in this thread:
dn.se
youtube.com
warisboring.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Josiah Foster
Thank god
Elijah Nguyen
universal army soon comrades
Jeremiah Ward
BASED SWEDEN
David Torres
Well, Sweden used to have a decent sized army and was able to mobilize around 800,000 men through conscription in the 1980's. After the cold war ended, the army was incrementally cut down and scrapped. The idea was to do away with conscription completely and make the army a solely professional one. Unfortunately, the government wasn't willing to pay decent wages to the soldiers, with the natural consequence that very few people became soldiers. This "professional" army is now only able to mobilize around 20,000 men, with an additional 30,000 who are still left in the voluntary home guard. The home guard is slowly going away too, as the people there are mostly men in their 40's and 50's, with few replacements coming in.
Today the politicians have been slowly and slowly getting more scared about Russia. A few years ago on easter, Russia sent nuclear bombers escorted by fighter aircrafts against the Swedish east coast in a simulated attack, but no Swedish fighter planes could be sent to intercept them, because the pilots were all sent home on easter. It all turned into a great scandal. A few years later, we had the submarine story of supposedly Russian submarines in the archipelago outside Stockholm, but no evidence came out that supported it. Since the Russian annexation of Crimea, there has been a lot of fear, justified or not, that Putin will try to take back the former Soviet satellites around the Baltic sea. Part of the plan is said to include taking the Swedish island of Gotland, a strategically important point in the baltic sea. If Russia got hold of it, they could place anti-aircraft systems on the island and prevent NATO support to members in the region. Since 2005 however, the army has completely left Gotland, which now only had the local home guard left.
Now, just a few weeks ago, Russia mobilized heavily on the Latvian border, as if they were about to invade. This scared the heck out of the politicians and the military command, who quickly dispatched 150 (!) men from the army to the island, as protection.
This is where we are now. The politicians realized that maybe we are not living in the era of eternal peace which was supposed to have followed the end of the cold war, but are still not willing to pay soldiers enough to voluntarily draw people into the profession, so they now want to just force people to do it anyway. The proposal for renewed conscription would only cover a few thousand people per year, or enough to fill in the gap left in the professional army. This is scheduled to start in 2019 at the best, and would still take a decade or more to build up again.
Whether the threats are real or not, Sweden is completely screwed militarily and will have to rely on NATO for a long time to come.
Ryder Taylor
the fuck?
Eli Wright
shit taste fam
Sebastian Hill
Yes, now woman can kill brown people in imperialist wars too!
Equality!
Jaxon Gutierrez
Women in the military will never be used in an actual war and everyone knows it.
Ryan Rodriguez
...