Quotes of the Day

Three of albert wang's friends are in the Army, and they say it's great. So the 19-year-old film student, whose family migrated from China six years ago, has come to the Australian Defence Force Recruiting Center in Sydney's Parramatta to see if he's got what it takes to join the Army Reserve. It's not patriotic duty that brought him here, or even the pay, he says. "For me it's a challenge - personal and emotional. I want to develop my skills, see what I can do. It sounds exciting."

For the adf, the biggest challenge these days is getting more young people like Wang to apply. The recruits lining up for basic training each year are barely enough to replace the troops filing out the gates. Despite efforts to build it up, the 52,000-strong adf is no bigger than it was in 2002; last year it grew by just 70 members. Yet over the next decade the military must find an extra 2,500 troops. "The adf can't do the things we need it to do," says Neil James, head of the Australia Defence Association, a national-security lobby group. "There's a limit to how small you can make the defense force, and we've reached it. If we can't start to fill the force in the next few years, some really hard choices will have to be made."

Hardest of all would be making military service compulsory. But former adf chief Admiral Chris Barrie believes that within 20 years Australia won't have enough young people to sustain an all-volunteer military. Conscription "is not a question of if," he says, "it's a question of when." He's found scant agreement among defense experts and none among politicians. But, says Ross Babbage, head of the defense think tank the Kokoda Foundation, "a problem is coming, and we can't afford to neglect it."

Guns, tanks and planes were once simple to operate. Now, high-tech communications and weapons systems mean the military needs engineers, electricians and computer technicians just to move. The diversity of adf missions - 1,600 troops are now serving abroad, from the Solomon Islands to Iraq - demands a whole new range of skills: troops must be ready not only to fight but to tend the sick, provide water and sanitation, and maintain law and order. But in an ageing workforce where the demand for skills outstrips supply, attracting and keeping people of the caliber the adf needs is hard - and getting harder. Over the next 20 years, says Babbage, the number of Australian men aged 18 to 35 will stagnate, then decline. "Competition for these people is going to be intense."

It's a fight the adf can't afford to lose. At the request of Prime Minister John Howard, a team of experts, including Generation Y author Peter Sheahan, is looking at ways to recruit and retain more skilled people; their report is due in May. Meanwhile, Brigadier Simon Gould is attacking the problem like the infantry commander he once was. Now the adf's chief of recruiting, he oversees a marketing campaign that targets the 1 in 4 young Australians favorably disposed to the military and highlights the "230 different jobs" recruits can choose from. "It's like the World War I posters of General Kitchener saying 'Your Country Needs You,'" Gould says. "We need young Australians to come and join us."

Duty and patriotism call less loudly today, though, than big paychecks and career mobility. To capture enough of Australia's best and brightest, the military must not just sharpen its image - "the army. the edge" - but soften its ways. Moves the government and defense chiefs are being urged to consider include raising adf salaries, which lag behind civilian earnings; offering free tertiary education after an agreed term of service; revising weight-for-height and age standards for recruits; making it more convenient for reservists to do their training; and making it easier for people to move back and forth between regular forces, reserves and civilian life throughout their career.

But the military can change only so much. It can't afford, for example, to compromise on health and fitness. Yet an internal report leaked last year noted that young Australians were getting fatter and that their "high incidence of nonmedical drug use ... severely limits the pool of recruitable candidates." The profession of arms will always demand commitment and sacrifice, unpopular concepts in an affluent and individualistic society. adf research has found that young people's biggest concerns about the military are being away from home for long periods (the largely stay-at-home Air Force has less trouble recruiting than the oft-moved Army and Navy), and being sent to war. There's a good chance that military life will always involve both.

Conscription has never been a popular idea in Australia, and the next generation is unlikely to embrace it. "I don't think we need it," would-be reservist Wang says. "I wouldn't support it." Nor does the Kokoda Foundation's Babbage. But one way or another, he says, more Australians will have to do their bit for defense. At present just 26 in 10,000 serve, fewer than in many European countries. "The whole country benefits from national security, and in a crisis the whole country would need to contribute to it. We do that through taxes, but we may have to do more." Australia plans to spend $1.5 billion in the next decade to boost its defense capability. But without trained people, no amount of helicopters and networked command systems will add up to an effective military. And, Babbage says, "if you haven't got a defense force when you need it, you're done."

• Elizabeth Keenan
• The Australian military has a manpower fight on its hands. Can it outbid its rivals and still be effective?