The secretary-general of the PCP spoke out today against compulsory military service, considering that it would serve as “cannon fodder” in the current context of the “arms race”, and argued that what is needed is to value the careers of the Armed Forces.
Speaking to journalists after visiting the exhibition “Factum” by photographer Eduardo Gageiro in Lisbon, Paulo Raimundo considered that the defense of the return of compulsory military service is being made “in the context of an accentuation of the ballistic discourse, of armament and war”.
For the PCP leader, “this arms race was enough” and now he wants to add “cannon fodder” to it.
“This conversation is about an intensification of the war, and we don’t need war, we need peace, we don’t need armaments, we need a way of dismantling the arms race, and we don’t need cannon fodder, we need to value the professionals we currently have, give salaries and careers to the active military,” he said.
Paulo Raimundo thus spoke out against compulsory military service, stressing that we are not talking about service as it was conceived before it ended in 2004.
“We’re talking about compulsory military service as a response to the needs that someone wants, for a war that someone wants but that we don’t defend. And that would be a disaster, as we can imagine,” he said.
This Friday, in an article in Expresso, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, Henrique Gouveia e Melo, said that it may be necessary to “rethink compulsory military service, or another more appropriate variant”, in order to “balance the expense/results ratio” and “generate greater availability of the population for Defense”.
This position was also shared by the Chief of Staff of the Army, Eduardo Ferrão, who, speaking to Expresso, argued that “a reintroduction of compulsory military service is worth studying and evaluating from various perspectives”.
Meanwhile, in a response to Lusa, the General Staff of the Armed Forces referred the decision on a possible return to compulsory military service to the government, but stressed that this hypothesis would not “solve specific manpower management challenges”.
Compulsory military service ended in 2004. Its end was approved in 1999 by an executive led by socialist António Guterres, with a four-year transition period.
The transition to professionalization was completed in September 2004, two months before the scheduled date of November 19, with centrist Paulo Portas as Minister of Defense.
Return of compulsory military service doesn’t solve specific manpower management challenges
