Return from Mandatory Military Service does not promptly resolve personnel management challenges, says EMGFA

The General Staff of the Armed Forces (EMGFA) sent this Monday the decision on a possible return of Mandatory Military Service to the Government, but highlighted that this hypothesis will not “resolve, in a timely manner, personnel management challenges”.

In a response sent to Lusa, the General Staff of the Armed Forces (EMGFA), headed by General Nunes da Fonseca, writes that “the possible reintroduction of Mandatory Military Service in Portugal is a matter that should not be seen in a reductive logic of solution of staff shortages, but rather through a comprehensive approach to creating a national and universal service provision of a civic nature, aimed at all citizens”.

“This comprehensive approach has the contours of national policy, and is not intended to resolve, on a specific basis, Armed Forces personnel management challenges”, the response reads.

The EMGFA recalls that, two decades ago, “Portugal went from a model of military service that included conscription to a professional model based exclusively on the volunteering of men and women to serve the country, through the Armed Forces”.

As part of the consolidation of the model of professionalization of military service in the Armed Forces, in recent years, continues the EMGFA, “it was possible to guarantee concrete measures, such as the implementation of the Special Contract Regime, as well as the creation of permanent staff in the category of soldiers in the Army and Air Force, which reinforced the complementarity of the different forms of effective military service provision, in a model based exclusively on volunteering”.

The branch emphasizes that, with the objective of effectively fulfilling the missions of the Armed Forces, the professionalization model “implies the need to ensure the obtaining, existence and maintenance of human resources at adequate levels of sustainability and stability”.

“In this sense, the EMGFA, in articulation and coordination with the branches of the Armed Forces, will continue to maintain a permanent dialogue with the Ministry of National Defense in order to continue adopting timely measures that contribute to better recruiting, retaining and motivating personnel, specifically through the recognition of their merits and selflessness, as well as the revaluation of their careers”, they write.

This Friday, in an article in Expresso, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, Henrique Gouveia e Melo, stated that it may be necessary to “rethink compulsory military service, or another more appropriate variant”, in order to “balance the expenditure/results ratio” and “generate greater availability of the population for Defense”.

Admiral Gouveia e Melo said, in statements to DN, in the March 31 edition, that “Mandatory Military Service must be preparation for society”.

Urged by the DN to clarify the reintroduction of Mandatory Military Service, which he defended in an opinion article published in the weekly edition of Expresso, Gouveia e Melo explains: “This is not an SMO in the old model of the Colonial War. This one is outdated. There is a war of aggression carried out by the Russian Federation, which threatens us, and that is why we have to have more imagination, the result of two trends that are getting worse.”

The Army Chief of Staff, Eduardo Ferrão, in statements to Expresso, argued that “a reintroduction of compulsory military service is justified to be studied and evaluated from various perspectives”.

Mandatory Military Service ended in 2004. Its end was approved in 1999, by an executive led by the socialist António Guterres, establishing a transition period of four years.

The transition to professionalization was completed in September 2004, two months before the scheduled date, November 19, with centrist Paulo Portas as Minister of Defense