RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION AS A CHALLENGE OF CONTEMPORARY ARMED FORCES AND SOCIETIES

Abstract

In the last week of June 2017, the 14th ERGOMAS Conference was held in Athens, Greece. The abbreviation stands for European Research Group on Military and Society, which was founded in 1986. It is a public, non-profit and ideologically independent professional organization of scientists. They operate through conferences where they meet every other year. The group is actively engaged in various fields: Military Profession, Public Opinion, Mass Media and the Military; Morale, Cohesion and Leadership; Military Families; Civilian Control Of The Armed Forces; Gender and the Military; Warriors in Peacekeeping; Military and Police Relations; Violence and the Military; Recruitment and Retention; Veterans and the Society; Military Conflict Management and Peace Economics, and Critical Military Studies. In each of these areas, a coordinator is responsible for the preparation and execution of sessions at conferences. Dr. Tibor Szvircsev Tresch is an ERGOMAS coordinator for recruitment and retention in the modern armed forces, as well as a member of the Editorial Board of the Contemporary Military Challenges. In Athens, we agreed to prepare together a special thematic issue on this subject. Recruitment and retention in the armed forces is not only a problem the Slovenian Armed Forces and Slovenia have been dealing with in the past few years. Rather, it is a complex phenomenon that is also encountered by other modern armed forces, societies and countries. On the one hand, they vary greatly with regard to different factors, but at the same time they share the same issues – an insufficient number of military personnel, unsuccessful methods of their retention and insufficiently thought-out concepts of their retirement from the armed forces and return to the labour market. Different countries use different methods to deal with this issue. In some aspects, some of these approaches are even similar. However, the fact remains that all of them use a very intensive, professional and scientific approach, which is also evident from the articles in this issue. With regard to Slovenia's challenges, we can note down that it is time to approach this field from a wider perspective. The problem of recruiting personnel for the Slovenian Armed Forces is not only the problem of the Slovenian Armed Forces, but also Slovenia as a country, which is obliged to ensure national security.