Description
Citizens’ willingness to undertake military service has important implications, both for national security and the tenor of domestic politics. In early 2022, thousands of ordinary Ukrainians took up arms to defend their country in an outpouring of national resistance, and the country’s ongoing efforts to resist continue to depend in part on the ability to fill its army’s ranks. Even in peacetime, military recruitment crises matter: they can reveal underlying tensions between the values and attitudes of those in uniform and the civil societies they serve, which might in turn endanger core tenets of democratic civil-military relations. Yet, the extent to which recruitment crises become wider crises in civil-military relations depends, in part, on how military institutions decide to respond to them. This paper examines the response to recent military recruitment crises in the all-volunteer militaries of two neighbouring democracies: the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In both cases, profound military recruitment crises challenged core elements of military institutional culture, creating feedback loops that had the potential to close emergent civil-military gaps. This paper examines the factors affecting military responses to recruitment crises, to assess their implications for democratic civil-military relations and the production of military power. For the British Army, this resulted in (contested) efforts to reposition the public image of military following decades of counterinsurgency and overseas interventions, in a conscious effort to reconnect with wider social morays. Conversely, in neutral Ireland, where the Defence Forces had long been committed to UN peacekeeping as their raison d’etre, the military struggled to shed its bellicose image, leading ultimately to increasing political tensions between government and army.
