Last week, the Finnish parliament announced sweeping cuts to the armed forces. Over the next two years, five bases will be closed and several units combined. Savings of up to 10% of the current defense budget are sought.
In and of itself, closing some bases doesn't materially affect Finland's national defense. The problem is that these closures are part of a longer trend of gutting the armed forces to save money. Finland is not a member of NATO, and is committed to maintaining an independent national defense. However, back in 2009, the chief of staff of the Finnish Army publicly stated that Finland is no longer capable of defending her territory. Since then, more cuts have followed.
The Finnish Army maintains practically no standing forces, instead relying on conscription to create a large reserve army. This wartime army, however, has been slashed to a third of its size over the last decade, and the current round of cuts will have a heavy impact on reservists' refresher training. Funding for materiel is basically non-existent, leading to the effective disbanding of Finland's mechanized forces, with the remaining tanks and IFVs divided between three "readiness brigades" mostly lacking tracked mobility.
It was of course inevitable that the end of the cold war brought pressure to re-examine Finland's security and defense policy. In fact, no reorienting has happened; Finland has chosen to maintain the facade of her cold war armed forces while in fact cutting their funding to the point where they are little more than a paper army. The process is dictated by party-political expediency: a comprehensive defense review would be politically risky, especially since the political left has successfully demonized NATO, and conscription had been enshrined as a sacred guarantor of the nation's security and manhood. Estimates of the actual costs of conscription to the national economy are simply ignored, and although some 30,000 conscripts are trained annually, neither the refresher training nor the equipment exists to create a capable wartime army from this vast reserve.
In short, Finland continues to operate a massively wasteful system of conscription which fails to produce a viable national defense. There is no political pressure or desire to address these issues; instead, defense policy is mined for populist talking points while the "big picture" is studiously ignored. Over the last few years, the Ottawa land mine ban treaty was acrimoniously debated, which in the current situation is like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic. Similarly, when the current base closures were debated, several politicians made a great point of the fact that Finland's only Swedish-language unit, a marine brigade, was not disbanded. The marine brigade in question has a vital role in Finland's wartime planning, which is cheerfully ignored by politicians trying to turn the debate into a language-political one.
The net result is that Finland is currently unable to defend her territory or airspace, and unwilling to take any steps to change this state of affairs or even admit that it exists. Instead, most Finns either profess a blind faith in a non-existent national defense or deny the possibility of war altogether. Finland is currently defenseless in the face of potential military pressure from Vladimir Putin's Russia, and should Europe be re-divided into opposing power blocs, Finland will be re-Finlandized and return to the state of quasi-independence under Russian domination she was in during the cold war.
In destroying her national defense and refusing any international security arrangements, Finland is gambling heavily on peace in our time. At stake is her independence as a nation and the lives of her citizens. Despite paying a heavy economic price for maintaining an obsolete and ineffective system of conscription, she is more vulnerable today than at any other time in her history, and is constantly becoming more vulnerable. This gamble is not a policy consciously decided on, but an emergent property of her dysfunctional nationalism and political culture. Defense policy is subordinated to cheap populist point-scoring and the myth of inherent Finnish military prowess, which prevent any reasonable public debate.
Our current national defense consists of hoping no-one will attack us. If they do, we can't defend ourselves.
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