Troll JF
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- Feb 6, 2015
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Ni kazi Nyeti unajilipua tuu na kubadilisha Uraia hii inahusisha hata ambao ni Askari hasa waliotoka Ngerengere na Monduli wamesema pia hawana Waalimu/instructors wa kijeshi.
IT HAS been a long time since anyone associated Sweden with military might. After 200 years of peace, the country is best known for its official neutrality and international mediation efforts. The conservative Moderate Party, which led coalition governments from 2006 to 2014, cut the military budget so sharply that its own defence minister, Mikael Odenberg, resigned in protest. By 2015 defence spending had fallen to 1.1% of GDP, down from 2.6% in 1988.
Russian aggression and American disengagement have Sweden worried, however, and it has fallen to a left-wing government of Social Democrats and Greens to rebuild the military. On March 2nd Sweden announced that it will reinstitute compulsory military service, which was abolished in 2010 after 109 years. “The security situation in Sweden’s immediate vicinity has worsened,” according to Peter Hultqvist, the defence minister. But a draft will not answer every problem.
The new draft is not universal. Conscription will begin in July, and in the following two years 4,000 draftees a year are expected to serve. Finding those recruits will entail calling up some 13,000 suitable candidates out of a pool of about 100,000 18-year-old men and women and selecting the best ones. The number of draftees will rise steadily to 8,000 per year from 2022 to 2025.
The draft is a response to the difficulties that Sweden’s armed forces face in finding volunteers. Despite strenuous recruitment campaigns, at the beginning of 2016 the military had just 5,800 full-time officers, soldiers and sailors, about 800 fewer than needed. It is also 7,000 short of its goal of 10,000 reservists. Low pay is partly to blame. Young people also see military service as old-fashioned.
A government-commissioned report in 2016 found that between 2010 and 2015, the military recruited just over half the numbers it needed, many of whom subsequently left. It proposed raising the number of military reservists to 23,000, and using government payment for university education as an inducement to sign up.
Stefan Ring, a military consultant in Stockholm, sees reinstituting the draft as window-dressing. It will cost some 630m Swedish kronor ($70m), which he says is not enough to properly train all the new recruits. The military also lacks the instructors needed for the intake, he says, so it is taking in fewer “as an accommodation to what the military can manage than to actual need”.
Sweden’s military also needs to reinvest in infrastructure and materiel. Sweden is strengthening defences on Gotland, an island close to Kaliningrad, a Russian military enclave on the Baltic. But the armed forces need new weapons. In February Micael Byden, Sweden’s highest ranked officer, told the government that the military needs 6.5bn kronor in extra funding by 2020, compared with a total budget of 45bn kronor in 2017. The Swedish armed forces may have manpower problems, but what is really needed is more money.
Makala imeandikwa na http://www.economist.com/news/europ...likely-fix-its-military?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/
IT HAS been a long time since anyone associated Sweden with military might. After 200 years of peace, the country is best known for its official neutrality and international mediation efforts. The conservative Moderate Party, which led coalition governments from 2006 to 2014, cut the military budget so sharply that its own defence minister, Mikael Odenberg, resigned in protest. By 2015 defence spending had fallen to 1.1% of GDP, down from 2.6% in 1988.
Russian aggression and American disengagement have Sweden worried, however, and it has fallen to a left-wing government of Social Democrats and Greens to rebuild the military. On March 2nd Sweden announced that it will reinstitute compulsory military service, which was abolished in 2010 after 109 years. “The security situation in Sweden’s immediate vicinity has worsened,” according to Peter Hultqvist, the defence minister. But a draft will not answer every problem.
The new draft is not universal. Conscription will begin in July, and in the following two years 4,000 draftees a year are expected to serve. Finding those recruits will entail calling up some 13,000 suitable candidates out of a pool of about 100,000 18-year-old men and women and selecting the best ones. The number of draftees will rise steadily to 8,000 per year from 2022 to 2025.
The draft is a response to the difficulties that Sweden’s armed forces face in finding volunteers. Despite strenuous recruitment campaigns, at the beginning of 2016 the military had just 5,800 full-time officers, soldiers and sailors, about 800 fewer than needed. It is also 7,000 short of its goal of 10,000 reservists. Low pay is partly to blame. Young people also see military service as old-fashioned.
A government-commissioned report in 2016 found that between 2010 and 2015, the military recruited just over half the numbers it needed, many of whom subsequently left. It proposed raising the number of military reservists to 23,000, and using government payment for university education as an inducement to sign up.
Stefan Ring, a military consultant in Stockholm, sees reinstituting the draft as window-dressing. It will cost some 630m Swedish kronor ($70m), which he says is not enough to properly train all the new recruits. The military also lacks the instructors needed for the intake, he says, so it is taking in fewer “as an accommodation to what the military can manage than to actual need”.
Sweden’s military also needs to reinvest in infrastructure and materiel. Sweden is strengthening defences on Gotland, an island close to Kaliningrad, a Russian military enclave on the Baltic. But the armed forces need new weapons. In February Micael Byden, Sweden’s highest ranked officer, told the government that the military needs 6.5bn kronor in extra funding by 2020, compared with a total budget of 45bn kronor in 2017. The Swedish armed forces may have manpower problems, but what is really needed is more money.
Makala imeandikwa na http://www.economist.com/news/europ...likely-fix-its-military?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/
