Mar. 21 - Last week, the Danish government proposed what Americans might call an “omnibus defense bill.” Like most such things, its contents are a mixed bag of initiatives that are good, bad, and indifferent.
One element that’s been getting a lot of attention is actually a bundle of three changes to Danish conscription.
“It is a completely decisive priority for me that we create a conscription model that contains the three elements that are in the government's proposal,” says (Defense Minister) Troels Lund Poulsen.
Those elements are:
Extending the period of conscription from four to eleven months
Increasing the operational use of conscripts in defense
Establishing “full equality between the sexes” in conscription
It’s the last of those three that’s getting all the attention, but before we zoom on that, here’s a quick summary of the situation from an English language source (AP) I don’t have to translate:
Denmark currently has up to 9,000 professional troops on top of the 4,700 conscripts undergoing basic training, according to official figures. The government wants to increase the number of conscripts by 300 to reach a total of 5,000.
(…)
All physically fit men over the age of 18 are called up for military service, which lasts roughly four months. However, because there are enough volunteers, there is a lottery system, meaning not all young men serve.
In 2023, there were 4,717 conscripts in Denmark. Women who volunteered for military service accounted for 25.1% of the cohort, according to official figures.
Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the new system would require a change in the law, which he said will happen in 2025 and take effect in 2026.
(…)
Under the plan for which there likely is a majority in the Danish parliament, conscripts will first spend five months in basic training, followed by six months in operational service along with supplementary training.
To shrink it all down into a bite-size nugget: Danish conscription is already in effect and all young men are eligible, but conscription is primarily used just to fill the gap when insufficient volunteers enlist. Under the current arrangements, women can volunteer for Danish military service, but they can’t be drafted.
As the Defense Minister explained, the government is adamant that women must also be eligible for conscription. They’ve gotten pushback on that from two parties, both right of center: Denmark’s Democrats and Liberal Alliance.
Liberal Alliance is a center-right libertarian party headed by Alex Vanopslagh. Denmark’s Democrats is a new, further right offshoot of Denmark’s largest right-of-center party, Venstre (which, unhelpfully, is Danish for Left), and was founded just before the last election by Inger Støjberg for reasons too complicated to summarize in a simple appositive phrase. (And would anyway only bewilder the foreign reader.)
And now back to TV2 News:
The government threatens to terminate the defense settlement if Støjberg and Vansplagh (sic) block female conscription
If the Danish Democrats and the Liberal Alliance intend to block women's conscription, then the entire DKK 155 billion (~$20 billion) defense package risks being thrown into the dustbin.
So said Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) Tuesday.
The announcement comes after the government last week proposed a fully equal conscription for all genders.
Any willingness to negotiate, Herr Minister?
“We are of course willing to discuss the layout of it. But we are not going to give up on equality in conscription.”
TV2 asks: “Will you terminate the deal and start over if they stand firm?”
“That could be the consequence,” he answers. “This is an absolutely crucial priority for the government.”
He explains that, according to the government, there is a clear connection between the desire for a stronger defense with far more soldiers and the proposed extension of conscription.
“It is necessary to make the seriousness very clear. Conscription and capacity are linked. They cannot be separated.”
That’s mostly true, but it’s also irrelevant to the question of female conscription.
Look at it this way: if Denmark decides it must have 15,000 military personnel, and only 10,000 are volunteering, then it must fill the shortfall of 5000 by conscription. Whether those conscripts are male or female is irrelevant to the question of capacity.
At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, the chairman of Denmark’s Democrats, Inger Støjberg, was confronted with Troels Lund Poulsen's threat.
She was asked whether she was willing to risk derailing the entire defense deal over opposition to female conscription.
The answer was not particularly clear.
“We have always said that we are not in favor of female conscription. We also said that during the negotiations,” says Inger Støjberg, who continues:
“I noted last week that the government held a press conference where they said that there is now female conscription. We have to take that. I assume that negotiations will be called at some point.”
In a joint interview with Vanopslagh, she told Berlingske Tidende:
“It is strange to say that now defense policy is no longer about securing the strongest defense, but about waving the flag of equality. I actually think it's pretty wild and untimely—and the situation in Europe is far, far too serious and important for that.”
But don’t get all judgey:
“I definitely think that we will have a better defense if there are more women. You just have to be unusually optimistic or naive if you think that you can achieve this by creating compulsory military service, when we can see today that so many women drop out,” says Inger Støjberg.
Alex Vanoplagh agrees. Therefore, he also believes that female conscription risks weakening the Armed Forces' recruitment base overall.
“This is why, in our eyes, you have to find a solution where you strengthen equality, but where you actually make the Defense Force stronger at the same time. We must not weaken the possibility of recruiting for the Armed Forces with this equality experiment that the government is proposing,” he says.
So the two of them insist that they want more equality in the armed forces—neither of them objects to women serving in the military—but both feel strongly that forcing more women into the military will have a deleterious effect right now.
The government is trying to portray them as spoilers: here we’ve got this great deal worked out, and if you continue to insist on these backward notions of yours you risk tanking the whole thing!
They argue that their position on this was known to the government from the very beginning of negotiations, and that it was therefore foolish for the government to have pushed for something it knew would be a showstopper.
Imagine agreeing with a group of ten friends that you’re going to order pizza. You all haggle over how many pies and what toppings. Two of you say, “We’re cool with anything, just no anchovies.”
Finally the guy who’s gonna call the pizza place say, “Okay, just to be sure we’re all in agreement, we’re ordering four extra-large pies: one pepperoni and anchovy, one sausage and anchovy, one onion and anchovy, and one anchovy and anchovy. Agreed?”
The two of you say: “No, we said anything but anchovies.”
And the rest of the group turns on you angrily. “Jesus Christ! All that negotiation, and now you’re willing to ruin the whole order because you’re too fucking precious to tolerate a few anchovies?”
It’s a pretty good analogy, if I do say so.
I have no strong feelings about any of this because at the end of the day Denmark is so far from being able to defend itself that we’re just arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic.
But Støjberg and Vanopslagh seem to have the better argument on their side. As the Berlingske article makes clear, Danish women are much, much less likely than Danish men to pursue a career in the armed forces. Fewer than 10% of career personnel in the army, navy, and air force are female, and only about one in six employees of the National Emergency Management Agency is female.
Støjberg again:
“None of us is against more women in the Armed Forces. On the contrary. We just want to make sure we don't end up short of soldiers. And that's the risk if you tell the woman who thought she was going to study at (Roskilde University) that she has to go to the barracks in Skive.”
Denmark doesn’t need gender-balanced conscription: it needs a better, bigger, stronger military. That’s only going to come from volunteers, and if the armed forces aren’t getting enough volunteers then the problem probably has more to do with the armed services themselves. Solve those problems, and the rest will take care of itself.
Public administration in Denmark is absolutely dominated by women—I wrote about this stuff about a year ago in “Women at Work”—and the “Public administration, education, and health” branch is 71.4% female. In 2018, there were 636,535 women in that branch.
No men are denied employment in that branch: women just like it better.
The same way the men who work in “Agriculture, forestry, and fishery” presumably like it better than women do, and therefore comprise 78.3% of that branch.
In 2018, there were 14,500 active duty personnel in the Danish military—that includes men and women, and I’m not missing any zeroes. That’s it.
Why force anyone into anything they’re not interested in? What’s the win?
On the other hand, if we must have total gender equality, why is it so wildly important in the military that the government is risking its whole defense deal just to have it, but so utterly unimportant in a field (public administration) that employs fifty-nine times as many people?
Interesting questions.
Matthew Broderick and Rosie O'Donnell both turn 62 today. They celebrate with Gary Oldman (1958), Timothy Dalton (1944), Modest Mussorgsky (1839), and J.S. Bach (1685).
March 21 is Nauroz Bayram in the Azerbaijan Republic, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, and Turkmenistan. It's also Independence Day in Namibia and Human Rights Day in South Africa.
Happy little Friday!
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Neglected to make the most obvious point: the question isn't whether women should be conscripted into military service, but whether anyone should. Extraordinary circumstances aside, I think no.