The Draft Returns to Europe: How a Generation Is Being Called to Arms

Eight hundred Croatian teenagers reported for military training this week - the first compulsory call-up in the country since 2008. They are not alone. Across the continent, ten NATO nations now require mandatory service. The Balkans is rearming at a pace not seen since the 1990s. And in the barracks, the curriculum includes drone warfare.

New military recruits in formation. Croatia's first conscript class since 2008 began training this week. (Unsplash)

The bus pulled up before dawn. Inside were eighteen and nineteen-year-olds in civilian clothes, most of them carrying duffel bags and mobile phones. By the time they stepped out at the barracks gates - in Petrinja, in Sinj, in Varazdin - they had stopped being civilians. This was Monday, March 9, 2026. It was Croatia's first mandatory military call-up in eighteen years.

More than 800 young Croatians reported for duty across three military installations. They received their kit, their dormitory assignments, and their first orders. For the next two months, they will operate under military discipline - learning fieldcraft, drone control, cyberdefense, and the basics of combined arms tactics. At the end of it, Croatia plans to train 4,000 recruits every year from here forward.

"They have now been torn from the civilian environment," said General Tihomir Kundid, Chief of the General Staff of the Croatian Armed Forces, speaking to reporters outside the Petrinja garrison. He added, with a bureaucratic gentleness that barely softened the underlying reality: "We will acclimatise them step by step, so that they do not experience too much stress."

Croatia is not an outlier. It is a data point. Across Europe, mandatory military service - abolished or suspended by country after country in the post-Cold War years when the continent decided the peace was permanent - is returning. Ten NATO member states now require it. More are considering it. The political debate that once divided governments is narrowing. The question is no longer whether conscription is coming back. The question is whether Europe is preparing fast enough.

1. Why Now: The Security Calculus Has Broken

European militaries are accelerating training programs and procurement cycles at a pace not seen since the Cold War. (Unsplash)

Croatia's decision did not happen in isolation. The country's defence minister, Ivan Anusic, was direct about the cause when he spoke to the BBC on Monday. "The situation in Croatia and all around our neighbourhood was stable," he said. "Right now, it's completely different."

That transformation has two primary drivers. The first is Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine, now four years old, which has killed hundreds of thousands of combatants, flattened entire cities, and demonstrated - conclusively - that a major conventional war in Europe is not a historical artefact. Croatia shares a border with Hungary, which borders Ukraine. The proximity is not abstract.

The second driver is what Anusic described as "the proxies of Russia all around Europe doing their jobs" - a reference to a documented pattern of destabilization operations, sabotage campaigns, and intelligence penetration across NATO's eastern and southern flanks. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have been tracking Russian hybrid operations for years. Now the Balkan states are paying attention in ways they weren't before.

And then there is the Iran war, which began February 28 when American and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iranian leadership and military infrastructure. The conflict has already spread beyond the Middle East - a drone attacked a British air base on Cyprus on March 1, Iranian attacks have targeted Gulf shipping, and NATO air defense assets in Turkey intercepted a ballistic missile. The assumption that Europe's wars stay at Europe's borders has been stress-tested and found wanting.

The strategic calculation that drove two generations of European governments to abandon mandatory military service - that NATO's conventional deterrence plus nuclear umbrellas were sufficient, that peacekeeping could replace war-fighting, that professional armies were more efficient than mass conscript forces - has been revised in every major European defence ministry over the past 24 months.

What replaced it is simpler and less comfortable: you cannot defend a continent with a small professional force when the adversary is willing to absorb massive losses and sustain a multi-year campaign. You need bodies. You need trained citizens. You need a society that can be mobilized.

2. The Ten-Country Bloc: Who Is Already Drafting

Croatia joins a bloc of ten NATO nations that now maintain mandatory military service. The trend line is not hard to read. Lithuania re-introduced conscription in 2015, within a year of Russia's annexation of Crimea. Latvia followed in 2023. Sweden - which had suspended mandatory service in 2010 - brought it back in 2018 as the political climate shifted after Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine began in 2014. Each re-introduction followed a security event. Each was framed, at the time, as exceptional.

None of them were exceptional. They were a sequence.

Norway has gone furthest in one direction: it made conscription gender-neutral in 2015, becoming the first country in the world to require compulsory military service from both men and women. Norway's model has since been cited by defence planners across Europe as a template - not just for the numbers it generates, but for the social contract it represents. When everyone serves, defence becomes a shared burden rather than someone else's problem.

Denmark is expanding its mandatory service period and has begun discussions about including women. Germany - which suspended its draft in 2011 - has been engaged in a sustained political debate about reinstating it, with Defence Minister Boris Pistorius explicitly advocating for a return to compulsory service. No decision has been taken, but the framing has shifted dramatically from "whether" to "how."

The United Kingdom, which has not had mandatory military service since 1960, has seen renewed calls for a national service program - though British political culture remains resistant to anything framed as a draft. Poland, already spending more than 4% of GDP on defence (the highest in NATO), is considering extending its voluntary service training programs into something closer to reserve obligation.

3. What They're Actually Learning: The New Military Curriculum

The barracks experience in 2026 is not the same as the barracks experience in 1990, or 1965, or 1943. The curriculum has changed as fundamentally as the threat environment.

In Croatia, General Kundid's "very dynamic, very interesting programme" - as he described it to Croatian state media - includes drone control as a baseline skill. Recruits are being trained in both offensive drone operation and drone protection - how to detect, jam, and intercept unmanned systems. Cyberwarfare techniques and countermeasures have been added to the standard training package.

This reflects a broader shift in how European militaries understand the battlefield. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that drones are not supplementary equipment - they are the primary surveillance and strike tool of tactical-level conflict. Footage emerging daily from the Ukrainian front shows commercial-grade quadcopters modified to drop grenades, first-person-view racing drones repurposed as precision munitions, and counter-drone systems that look like repurposed gaming controllers. The technology is cheap, proliferating, and lethal.

A Croatian recruit who spends two months learning drone tactics is not being trained to fight the last war. They are being prepared for a conflict that is already happening 800 kilometres to their northeast.

The BBC's James Landale, reporting from Ukraine this week, documented an anti-drone "bullet" system that Ukrainian engineers have developed - a kinetic interceptor designed to defeat FPV drones at close range. Ukrainian officials are actively showcasing this technology to Gulf states and European partners. The knowledge transfer is deliberate: Ukraine is not just fighting Russia. It is building a distributed network of allied militaries that understand drone warfare from the inside.

"For four years now, we've been looking at not just the Russian aggression in Ukraine, but the proxies of Russia all around Europe doing their jobs." - Croatian Defence Minister Ivan Anusic, BBC interview, March 9, 2026

The new curriculum also reflects electronic warfare realities. In Ukraine, GPS jamming is constant. Artillery rounds are guided by drone spotters who operate in the same contested radio environment as the systems designed to kill them. Soldiers trained only in legacy communications and navigation are disadvantaged from the moment they enter the operational area. European militaries are scrambling to incorporate this into basic training.

The pay is modest. Croatian conscripts receive a monthly allowance of approximately €1,100 ($1,273) - roughly competitive with entry-level civilian wages for young workers in the country. The 10 people who registered as conscientious objectors in the first call-up will serve four months in civilian service and receive less than half that amount. The incentive structure is transparent.

4. The Balkans Arms Race: Serbia, Kosovo, and a Region Rearming

Balkan defence spending is rising across the board as old tensions resurface under new military pressures. (Unsplash)

Croatia's conscription decision does not exist in a Balkan vacuum. It is being watched, and matched, by its neighbours - some of whom are friends, some of whom are not.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced that mandatory military service will return to Serbia within the next 12 months. Serbia has also significantly increased its defence spending, acquiring new weapons systems and expanding its military exercises. Belgrade has formally maintained a position of military neutrality - Serbia is not a NATO member and has resisted pressure to join - but its arms procurement and force structure development tell a different story. A neutral country preparing for war is still preparing for war.

Slovenia is watching Croatia and Serbia with equal attention. Ahead of this month's parliamentary elections, Slovenia's largest opposition party has been openly pushing for a return to mandatory military service. The governing coalition has not yet committed, but the political space for resistance is shrinking. Slovenia borders Austria and Hungary and has deep trade and transit ties to the rest of the EU - but it also shares a cultural and security memory with the other former Yugoslav states.

The problem is that Croatia's military expansion is being read in Belgrade as a threat. Croatia's new military alliance with Kosovo and Albania - a trilateral partnership that has been formalized through bilateral agreements and joint exercises - has "jangled nerves" in Serbia, according to James Ker-Lindsay, an analyst specialising in Balkans and international conflict, speaking to the BBC.

"Any military development in the Balkans just makes the whole region far less secure because everyone reads it as being aimed against them," Ker-Lindsay told the BBC. "The problem is that Croatia has been arming. And of course, when Croatia buys arms, then Serbia looks at it and thinks we need to as well."

This dynamic - where defensive preparations by one state generate threat perceptions in neighbouring states, which then prompt their own defensive preparations - is a classic security dilemma. It is the same logic that drove European arms races in the late 19th century. It does not require any actor to be acting in bad faith. It only requires mutual distrust and genuine uncertainty about intent.

Kosovo and Bosnia are watching Serbia's rearmament with alarm. Kosovo's security forces have been built from scratch over the past decade, transitioning from a lightly armed protection corps to a proper military with armour, artillery, and NATO-standard training. The process has accelerated. Bosnia, whose constitution enshrined a fragile ethnic power-sharing arrangement in the 1995 Dayton Accords, has its own set of military complications - the Republika Srpska entity within Bosnia maintains ties with Belgrade that complicate any unified Bosnian defence posture.

The Balkans is a region where the 1990s wars ended with agreements, not resolutions. The underlying ethnic, territorial, and political disputes were frozen, not solved. The current regional rearmament is thawing ice that everyone preferred to leave alone.

5. The Volunteer Factor: Who Is Showing Up and Why

One of the more striking facts from Croatia's first call-up: more than half of the 800 conscripts did not wait to be called. They volunteered.

This is significant. It suggests the security conversation has penetrated Croatian society in a way that has shifted public attitudes toward military service - at least among the cohort of young people who will be asked to serve. In the post-Cold War era, military service in Central and Eastern European countries carried baggage: it was associated with communist-era conscription, with institutional hazing, with mandatory obedience to systems that many citizens had spent decades dismantling. The volunteer rate suggests that association is weakening.

One in ten of the first conscript cohort are women. Women face no obligation to serve under Croatian law - the decision is voluntary for them. The ten percent figure is not negligible. It suggests that the perceived legitimacy of military service, and perhaps more critically the perceived relevance of a military threat, is not exclusive to young men.

The Norwegian model, where mandatory service applies equally to men and women, has produced consistently high levels of public support - including from women who serve. Norwegian defence surveys consistently show that women in mandatory service report high satisfaction and sense of purpose. The Norwegian military's reputation has benefited from the gender-neutral approach, which has produced a more diverse, cognitively varied force that military planners say performs better in complex operational environments.

Croatia is not moving to gender-neutral mandatory service yet. But the direction of travel across Europe is toward it. Sweden's expansion of its own conscription program in 2024 included measures to bring more women into service. Denmark's ongoing review is expected to recommend mandatory service for women.

The shift reflects a deeper social reality: the threat environment does not discriminate by gender. Drone strikes don't ask. Cyber attacks don't ask. Missile barrages don't ask. If the threat is existential, the burden of response needs to be distributed across the whole population - or the social contract that underlies military service fractures under the weight of who is being asked to bear it.

6. Europe's Strategic Pivot: From Peacekeeping to War-Fighting

The return of the draft is one visible symptom of a much larger shift in European defence posture. For three decades after 1991, European militaries were optimised for the wrong thing. They built forces for peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, for stabilisation missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, for counter-terrorism at home. They reduced armour. They reduced artillery. They reduced ammunition stockpiles. They moved away from mass and toward precision.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 revealed how badly calibrated that shift was. European stockpiles of artillery shells - designed for low-tempo peacekeeping operations - were exhausted within months of trying to supply Ukraine's war effort. European industrial capacity to produce new munitions was insufficient to meet the demand. European armies, trained for small-unit counterinsurgency, faced the prospect of defending against a massed armoured force and realised they had hollowed out the very capabilities they would need.

The current European rearmament is an attempt to correct four years of reckoning with those failures. NATO's eastern members - the Baltic states, Poland, Romania - have been loudest and fastest in rebuilding war-fighting capability. But the signal has spread. Germany is modernising its Bundeswehr at scale for the first time since reunification. France has revised its military programming law to fund a significant expansion of its armed forces. Britain, despite fiscal constraints, has committed to restoring capabilities in armour and long-range fires.

The Iran war has added additional urgency. European states that have bases and assets in the Gulf region - Britain's HMS Prince of Wales carrier group, French forces in the UAE, German naval presence in the region - are now operating in an active combat environment. Two RAF drones were scrambled from Akrotiri in Cyprus on March 1 after a Hezbollah drone attacked the base. The Norwegian frigate HNoMS Maud conducted defensive operations in the Arabian Sea last week. Europe is not a spectator in the current war. It is a participant whether it chose to be or not.

"Even the thinnest of chances for a change are no more within the system. So, everything will remain much the same." - Tehran resident in his 30s, speaking to BBC Persian on the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran's new Supreme Leader, March 9, 2026

The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei - reportedly even more hardline than his father, closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and described by Iranians in Tehran as "vengeful" over the killing of his father in the war's opening strikes - suggests the Iran conflict will not resolve quickly. A prolonged Middle Eastern war that continues to destabilize oil markets, trigger European energy crises, and pull NATO assets into combat operations east of Suez is precisely the scenario that makes European ground defence planners most nervous. Every carrier group in the Gulf is a carrier group not available for the North Atlantic or the Baltic.

7. Timeline: Europe's March Back to Compulsory Service

8. The Geopolitical Signal: What European Conscription Tells Moscow and Tehran

The continent that dismantled its draft armies after 1991 is rebuilding them. The decision carries signals beyond the purely military. (Unsplash)

Military conscription is not just a practical measure. It is a political signal. When a state decides that its security situation requires the training of its entire eligible population for potential combat, it is communicating something about its assessment of the threat - and about its willingness to impose costs on adversaries who might underestimate it.

The original logic of European conscription drawdowns in the 1990s and 2000s was partly fiscal and partly political: professional armies were cheaper to maintain at peacetime readiness, easier to deploy, and better trained for the complex operations that dominated the post-Cold War period. But they also sent a signal - perhaps unintentionally - that European governments did not consider the threat of conventional territorial war serious enough to require citizen soldiers.

Russia's planning for the Ukraine invasion reportedly included assessments of European resolve and response capacity. Whether conscription policy fed into those assessments is unknown. But it is plausible. A continent that has demobilized its draft armies, reduced its defence spending, and refused to stockpile ammunition at war-fighting levels is a continent that has communicated its risk tolerance.

The signal being sent now is different. Ten NATO nations with mandatory service. Germany debating a return. Poland spending 4% of GDP on defence. Croatia training teenagers in drone warfare. The accumulation of these signals is intended to communicate that the calculation has changed - that Europe is preparing for a threat it previously refused to take seriously.

Whether the signal arrives in time is a different question. Serbia's rearmament proceeds in parallel. The Balkans is not stable. The Iran war is in its tenth day with no ceasefire in sight and oil prices swinging between $90 and $120 per barrel. A generation of European teenagers is receiving military training in drone control and cyberdefense - skills that would have seemed exotic a decade ago and are now considered baseline.

The uncomfortable truth that European defence planners are grappling with is this: the transition from a peacetime professional force to a wartime mass mobilization capability takes years, not months. You cannot draft a soldier in January and deploy them in March. The training pipeline is long. The equipment pipeline is longer. The industrial base required to sustain a major conflict - shells, vehicles, fuel, medical supplies - has to be rebuilt from scratch after decades of under-investment.

Croatia's 800 conscripts represent the beginning of that pipeline. They are not ready for war today. They are part of a ten-year project to be ready for a war that European strategists believe is genuinely possible - and possibly probable - within that window. The countries that started earlier - the Baltics, Scandinavia - are further along. Croatia is late. Serbia is starting. Germany is still debating.

In the barracks at Petrinja, a recruit from Zagreb handed over his civilian clothes and received a uniform. He did not wait to be called. He volunteered. That, too, is a signal. The young people being asked to bear this burden are, in at least some numbers, choosing to accept it. Whether their governments can build a force worth serving in - properly equipped, adequately funded, led by officers who have thought seriously about modern warfare - is the question that follows the recruitment poster.

9. Conclusion: The Post-Peace Generation

The teenagers who reported to Croatia's barracks on Monday grew up after the Balkan wars. Most of them were born after 2005, after the EU expansion, after Croatia joined NATO in 2009. They spent their childhood in a Europe that told itself the peace was permanent. The hard borders were gone. The armies were relics. History had ended.

It had not ended. It had paused.

The generation now being conscripted across Europe - in Croatia, in the Baltic states, in Scandinavia - is the post-peace generation. They came of age with Ukraine burning on one horizon and the Middle East detonating on another. They know what drones do. They have seen the footage. They are not naive about what they are being trained for.

General Kundid promised them a programme that would not cause "too much stress." That is a kindness, and it may be accurate - two months of training is not Verdun. But the strategic architecture being built around these conscripts - the equipment being procured, the alliances being extended, the threat assessments being quietly revised upward in every European defence ministry - is not designed for peacekeeping. It is designed for something harder.

Croatia plans three more intake cohorts before the end of this year. Serbia will follow within 12 months. Slovenia's elections will settle the political question by spring. Germany's Bundestag will debate the mandatory service legislation by summer. The draft is returning to Europe. The question is whether it is returning fast enough to matter.

The bus that pulled up before dawn on Monday will pull up again in June, and again in September, and again in December. The next 800 will step out of it into the same barracks, receive the same kit, and begin learning the same skills. Drone control. Cyberdefense. Fieldcraft. The infrastructure of a continent preparing itself for a future it would rather not contemplate.

That is where Europe is right now. And the teenagers in the dormitories at Petrinja know it better than most of their parents do.