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Europe’s populations are readier to fight than they are often credited. The problem isn’t their lack of will, but elite pessimism about it.

The belief that Europeans are too soft to fight — too coddled, too individualistic, too “post-heroic” — is quietly shaping policy decisions about mobilization, recruitment, and spending. Military veterans, academics, and arguably even European leaders appear more worried with divisions in their own societies than with the adversary itself. And even where self-confidence is growing — in Finland or Poland — it is often tempered by doubts about the crucial question of whether other allies would defend them if attacked.

This skepticism feels plausible — but it risks becoming self-fulfilling. “Will to fight” is not a fixed category. Instead, it is a social potential: something that can be cultivated or suppressed. Across issues as varied as tax compliance, welfare take-up, or financial bailouts, we know that trust or mistrust in society can shape outcomes. Defense is no different. If planners assume society won’t step up and design policies around that belief, they make it more likely that society will live down to expectations.

It is easy to show how leaders’ pessimism about society can become self-fulfilling. People are unlikely to meet the moment when political leaders use conscription to discipline youth rather than to build trained mass. The same holds when leaders oppose pragmatic fixes to recruitment or retention problems, such as allowing soldiers to sleep longer, because they feel it looks “soft.” And when armies place conscripts and reservists in static or dull and dangerous roles out of mistrust in their ability to master complex skills, they squander their potential.

Publics take their cues from such policies. As Australian foreign minister and historian Paul Hasluck put it, people often fail to mobilize not from inherent weakness, but because they see their government doesn’t trust them to. He faulted his own country for shying away from demanding sacrifice or civic contributions — thereby signaling a lack of faith that citizens would rise to the occasion. When governments send that signal, individuals lose confidence that others will do their part, and collective trust erodes.

NATO’s European allies are now deciding how best to invest in their defense. A key question is how to balance spending on advanced technology with building human mass. The danger is getting the balance wrong: acting as technological optimists but societal pessimists, embracing innovation in hardware while seeing demographic change, education, and diversity as weakness. That’s not just analytically incoherent. It encourages societies to see their defining attributes as flaws.

How We Misread Society

This isn’t to say politicians and planners can afford to ignore the warning signs. There are genuine reasons for pessimism about social cohesion in Europe. Political polarization has deepened across the continent, and trust in institutions has declined. Younger generations place more value on autonomy and personal well-being than on collective duty. And as Europe’s societies have become more diverse and mobile, they have grown fragmented, leaving citizens less confident that others will share the burden when it counts.

But entrenched pessimism, when baked into defense planning, becomes a trap. Leaders should ask a different question: not “What if they won’t fight?” but “What if they would — if the conditions were right?”

When politicians judge normal citizens by the template of the highly trained professional soldier, they not only downplay people’s ability to learn quickly, but also assume ordinary people share the motivations of professionals (often unusually conscientious individuals drawn from families or localities with strong traditions of military service). And when politicians use benchmarks set by past generations to measure today’s society, they underestimate its capacity to rise to a challenge or act differently from the past.

Take the rise of personal independence in Europe. Polls show that individualism erodes peacetime willingness to fight. Yet in war people join up precisely to defend their way of life. Constitutional freedoms like property rights intensify the motivation to fight for house and home. And democratic freedoms encourage people to fight for a future they have chosen. By contrast, authoritarian states with supposedly stronger collective values frequently see their much-vaunted “unity” dissolve under fire, leading to mass desertion.

It’s true that Gen Z shows relatively low employer loyalty and ambition for traditional leadership roles. But they are also mission-driven, competitive, and responsive to recognition. Scandinavian conscription systems —misperceived as a way to discipline “woke youth” — actually succeed because they tap into those motivations, offering public service as a path to personal growth and social esteem. Other militaries are beginning to recognize that they have overemphasized leadership roles while neglecting the importance of “followership.”

Women often report lower willingness to fight, but in many cases it reflects lack of information, not lack of resolve. Women rule out military service not because they reject the idea of violence, but because they are unaware what roles exist, from trauma surgeon to explosive ordnance disposal technician. The tendency to pin the disparity on differences of gender or sex relegates women to “invisible” or “political” battalions and misses opportunities for practical fixes such as raising awareness about specific roles or interservice spouse assignments.

As for being international or cosmopolitan — a mindset European leaders actively cultivated as they pacified the continent — this usually requires first adopting a national identity, then building outward. Cosmopolitans can mobilize quickly when convinced of the justice of their country’s cause. By contrast, across history, the people most bound by “unchosen” ties to family and locality were slow to answer national — let alone international — calls. In a multinational alliance such as NATO, a cosmopolitan outlook can therefore be an asset rather than a liability.

And then there’s political disillusion. Populations that are disenchanted with their government are indeed reluctant to put their lives in its hands. Yet, they may also view participation in war as a way to change the system, as political leverage. Across history, elites have repeatedly expected populations to defend institutions they don’t trust or are excluded from — only to find that society fights best when it has hopes of something new to fight for, whether Poles under Napoleon or Black Americans in World War II.

Why Research Reinforces Pessimistic Policy

Why has the rich academic literature on “will to fight” failed to correct this pessimism? The answer is that the field has been driven mainly by the United Kingdom and the United States, countries without compulsory national service but with a rhetorical faith in “the people.” In those countries, leaders and planners were forced to treat will as something to be estimated from a distance, not shaped through direct contact. As a result, the research findings have been overstretched to meet the demands of anxious policymakers.

Most scholars, for instance, assess a society’s will to fight primarily through peacetime polls. Yet these surveys capture only how people imagine a war they have never experienced. It is hardly surprising that responses look weak: war is frightening, and fighting is still seen as something professionals do. The problem arises when such guesses are treated as forecasts of real behavior, much as peacetime distractions — doom-scrolling TikTok or chasing Instagram likes — are sometimes read as signs of deeper social decline.

When drawing policy lessons to build resolve, academics tend to look to states with the most data and the longest record of success. Yet these are often the least transferable cases — the few countries that have kept service compulsory. Finland built a strong territorial defense because it lived beside a major threat: Its official non-aligned status left it reliant on itself and cautious of expeditionary warfare. Holding Finland up as a model risks disparaging societies whose histories and threat perceptions are very different.

Academics make a similar mistake when drawing lessons from wartime case studies. We both romanticize particular national efforts and generalize them into universal templates. Ukraine is the latest example. Research shows that Ukrainians fight for reasons potentially found elsewhere — trust and distrust, culture, and recent experience — but each of these mattered primarily because of how that specific war struck that country at that moment. Since the next war will be different, we should not overplay Ukraine’s role as a model.

The reason policies such as conscription matter is not that they let politicians reform society or restore moral fiber. Their real value lies in keeping political and military leaders responsive to their citizens. In countries like Finland, where service has been maintained, politicians stay relatively close to society. In the United Kingdom or Germany merely reopening the conscription debate helps close the gap to citizens. This gives policymakers a better sense of national resolve — and their power to shape it — than academic indicators ever could.

The more that political and military leaders come into contact with wider society, the more they tend to see that people’s peacetime characteristics and skills can become assets in war. Policy then shifts toward adapting the military to society rather than trying to adapt society to military needs. This all reflects a basic sociological pattern: When leaders cannot read the people they depend on in a crisis, they grow anxious and pessimistic about them — and that anxiety soon shapes policy. Help them read society, and policy improves.

In Europe, social distance is only now beginning to narrow. After the Cold War, politicians became a separate class, detached from ordinary citizens. Most militaries shrank, professionalized, and lost contact with the broad mass of society. And even neighbors like Poland and Hungary were relative strangers. If academics have failed to offer a corrective to this estrangement, it is because they, too, kept their distance from the rest of society, calling it objectivity but reflecting the rise of a highly educated elite.

So What Should Change?

Ben Connable and Michael McNerney’s assessment in 2018 and Raymond Kuo and Catherine Kish’s analysis in 2025 support this message. Kuo and Kish, writing on Taiwan, show the dangers of bad policymaking: Even when societies are willing, morale falters when policymakers and planners mishandle them. Meanwhile, Connable and McNerney show how often policymakers and planners do just that — reducing war to mechanics even while insisting that intangible human factors decide it.

It is leadership, then, not latent social weakness, that sets the limits of resolve. And confidence should flow in both directions. People should trust the leaders who guide them, and leaders should trust the societies they serve. Building that mutual confidence demands proximity, in which leaders help to shape society and are, in turn, shaped by it. Policymakers can take several steps to turn that insight into planning and preparation.

First, stop treating surveys as prophecies. The data captures peacetime attitudes, not wartime behavior. Instead, imagine how people might respond well to war — and build the structures that help them do so. In Sweden, the Association of Volunteer Motor Transport Corps trains truck drivers for crisis logistics. It is a model set to replicate the success of Ukraine’s cyber-defense networks.

Second, design mobilization policies that reflect real motivations. People join the military for many reasons: camaraderie, adventure, boredom, even Instagrammable opportunities with specialized equipment. They often embrace the praise of duty to country and self-sacrifice to cover more frivolous impulses. What matters is offering them a way in and then ensuring that service provides meaning once they are inside.

Third, prioritize practical fixes over culture wars. Many recruitment and retention failures are logistical, not cultural. These are solvable — but not if the starting assumption is societal decay. Practical fixes include pre-training to help volunteers meet fitness requirements, short-term service for those with manageable long-term health conditions, leading by explanation instead of orders, and greater attention to mental health.

Fourth, trust people as much as tech. When war comes, people learn the skills they need. The task is to make technology intuitive, like the STEN gun or Panzerfaust — which were simplified for widespread use. Ukrainians using commercial drones, improvising battlefield repairs with 3D-printed parts, and turning ordinary vehicles into communication hubs show the importance of making systems that people can master and adapt under pressure.

Finally, stop reinforcing adversary narratives. Authoritarian states do not own societal cohesion. But when our leaders praise their resolve and cohesion while questioning our own, they legitimize the idea that democracy equals weakness. The traits that define open societies — autonomy, plurality, dissent — can be assets in war, if harnessed rather than feared.

Florence Gaub, Ph.D., is director of the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome where she focuses on the future of warfare.

Roderick Parkes, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the NATO Defense College and most recently served as research director of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

The analysis offered here reflects the personal judgment of the authors and not the position of any organization.

Image: Midjourney