When Serbian officials announced a fresh proposal over the holidays for a return to compulsory military service, it was hardly an ambush. In fact, the conscription debate has never really disappeared here in the most populous of the post-Yugoslav republics.
Plans for its reintroduction have cropped up every few years since its abolition in 2011, including after a high-profile Defense Ministry study in 2016 and again at President Aleksandar Vucic's urging in 2018 and 2022.
Now, with Vucic's tacit portrayals of an endangered "new Serbian world" that is held at arm's length by the West, the Defense Ministry said on January 4 that the General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces had formally proposed to Vucic a return to conscription after more than a decade as an all-volunteer army.
While Vucic soft-pedaled, vowing to "look into modernizing" the laws on military service, he punctuated it with a warning that Serbia "would be trampled like a cockroach" without a suitably strong army. Despite that, official talk of conscription runs the risk of further alienating government critics who have accused Vucic and his national populist party of seeking to divert attention away from more important issues.
"It's an understatement to say that I was shocked," Stefan Ardalic, an economics student in the central city of Kragujevac, modern Serbia's first capital and home to a leading arms manufacturer, said, "because I think it's completely unnecessary at the moment." Instead, he suggested that Serbia invest in schools and hospitals. And like many of the young people who spoke to RFE/RL's Balkan Service about the prospect, Ardalic doesn't seem to want any part of a mandatory stint in the army.
But it's the friendly fire from right-wingers who are normally unfazed by calls to nationalism in the rough-and-tumble Balkans that's surprising. This week, they joined the chorus of criticism normally dominated by Serbians like Ardalic, who resent the fact that the cost of introducing conscription might have a negative impact on education and health-care budgets.
The Military Union of Serbia (VSS), an association that claims to represent nearly half of Serbia's current servicepeople and many veterans of Balkan wars, welcomed the recognition of any shortcomings in the military but suggested the new push to reinstate conscription was a "cheap" effort to distract the public and score points on the right.
Its president, right-wing gadfly Novica Antic, also questioned the timing of the announcement of a scheme that would require a whole series of legislative amendments, with a new parliament not yet in session and the government technically a caretaker one.
"I think it's just a matter of politicking and collecting cheap political points, or maybe even diverting attention from some important topic that is burdening our country at the moment," Antic told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. He has spent years campaigning publicly for improved efforts to fill what he says is an annual shortfall of about 10,000 new recruits and has called for more effective leadership of the military, a position that has angered the Defense Ministry in the past.
Antic has long argued that the solution doesn't lie in forced service but rather in better pay and better working conditions in the military.
"If the position of the army were improved to make [military service] more popular in order to fill our units, we wouldn't need to restore military service like this," Antic said.
Cost Of Conscription
The specifics of the General Staff's latest recommendations have not been disclosed, aside from the assertion that it follows "a detailed consideration of the general security situation and contemporary challenges faced by Serbia as a militarily neutral country." Its aim, defense officials said, is "rejuvenation and improvement" of recruitment and training of "active and reserve forces."
There were no details on how much it might cost, and the Defense Ministry did not respond to RFE/RL's question as to whether such spending was factored into the 2024 budget. The Defense Ministry's own estimate of the cost of conscription back in 2016 was 600 million euros ($658 million). Vucic suggested in 2018 that it would cost 90-130 million euros, or up to one-tenth of the Defense Ministry and military's combined 2024 budget of 1.3 billion euros.
There is no publicly available figure on the total number of active soldiers in Serbia's army and air forces combined. But unofficial estimates put it at between 22,000 and 25,000, including more than 10,000 officers and noncommissioned officers.
Women do currently serve in Serbia's army, but officials made no mention of whether they would be included in a draft. Previous statements have suggested that, while women are free to volunteer for military duty, conscription would be limited to men.
There are around 430,000 men between the ages of 18 and 30 in Serbia, according to the latest census, in a population of nearly 6.7 million. About 1.8 million more men are physically fit and under the cutoff age of 50 for military service.
Defense Minister Milos Vucevic told TV Pink on January 4 that the prospective return of mandatory military service is merely "to protect the country," and "doesn't mean that we are preparing for conflict or that war is on the horizon." He said the conscription would last up to four months.
Three days later, President Vucic quibbled about the details, saying any mandatory service could be shorter, "if it lasts at all," and adding that Serbia's army was "a hundred times stronger than 10 years ago." But he nevertheless argued for strengthening the military -- "without the army we would be trampled like a cockroach" -- and said he was "looking into" the General Staff's proposal.
Vucic has previously characterized military service as a crucial formative experience that teaches "men…maturity [and] what patriotism is, what work is, [and] what obligations are."
Concerns Abound
At least a dozen European states still require military service, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Russia, and Ukraine. Georgia, Lithuania, and Sweden have all abandoned and then reintroduced conscription.
Most of the young people asked by RFE/RL about the prospect said they didn't think a return to conscription was imminent. "Whoever wants to go voluntarily, feel free to go," Djordje Zlatkovic, a Serbian medical student, said. "I think this is just diverting the public's attention from more important topics."
Serbia doesn't belong to any military alliance, although it has been a participant in NATO's Partnership for Peace program since 2006 despite lingering bitterness over that transatlantic alliance's 78-day bombardment of rump Yugoslavia in 1999. More than two decades on and with EU membership a declared goal, Serbia's national defense and security strategies adopted by parliament most recently in 2019 reiterated the country's military neutrality, and officials have said repeatedly that Belgrade has no intention of joining NATO.
In a response to RFE/RL's Balkan Service, the NATO Military Liaison Office in Belgrade said any potential return to compulsory military service was up to Serbian authorities. It said "NATO will continue to support Serbia's efforts to modernize its armed forces" within the partnership and stressed it fully respects Serbia's neutrality.
But Vucic has relied increasingly on advanced Russian military weaponry and even intelligence, as relations are strained along Serbia's border with its partly recognized former province Kosovo. That approach -- along with his refusal to join EU condemnations and sanctions on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 22 months ago -- has underscored concerns that the Serbian president is being coddled by the West at its peril.
Vucic, who climbed the political ranks as a Serb nationalist under Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, claimed a fresh mandate for his ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) after official results of national, regional, and local elections last month showed mostly lopsided victories for the SNS, although Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observers warned of "unjust conditions" and opposition leaders have alleged widescale fraud. The president clearly is eager to put some of last year's turbulence behind him, when a newly unified opposition emerged after twin mass shootings rekindled anti-government protests.
Nikola Lunic, a retired navy captain and former defense attaché in London who helped formulate defense strategy for Serbia's military, said the General Staff "repeats periodically" its push for conscription. "But as a rule, without detailed explanation, analysis, and consequences," he added.
He told RFE/RL that it "only indicates that the Serbian Army is facing accumulated problems of filling units, which further implies that the current management is unable to solve it."
Lunic, now executive director of the Belgrade-based Council for Strategic Policy, called general military service "a thing of the past," because modern security threats and technology require professional soldiers.
Asked about the message it sends to Serbs and the region, he said that increasing Serbia's military capabilities through a wider contingent of recruits "will without a doubt draw attention in the region and in Europe, and perhaps the reaction of a similar response."
"Tensions in a region with an unfinished history are always problematic," Lunic said, "and now this move would further undermine the potential for trust."
