In my wallet, I still carry with me the selective service card I received when I turned 18. Since that was in 1997, and the Selective Service Act only allowed for the calling up of men aged 18-25, it's a pretty empty gesture at this point, but I keep it with me as a reminder.
As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third year, there are headlines about how the average age of front line Ukrainian troops is 43. To our American eyes, that suggests a country which has already run out of draftable men aged 18-40, a country in the final stages of defeat, such as Germany in 1945 or the Confederacy in 1865.
Ukraine is indeed facing a manpower shortage, and will need to make some tough decisions if it is going to continue the war. However, the tough decisions are not necessarily the ones we might imagine from our American context, and they're the result of Ukraine's very post-Soviet demographics.
As of now, Ukrainian law only allows for men aged 27 and above to be mobilized for combat duty. A controversial new mobilization law which is being debated would lower that mobilization age to 25. Men aged 18-25, the entire draft age range in the US, have as of yet not been drafted for service at all.
This may seem odd. Recruiting or conscripting 18-year-olds for military service has been such a staple of US military history that those who walk about the need to avoid some conflict habitually talk in terms of "sending our 18-year-olds off to die". This isn't a matter of picking on the young. Combat is incredibly physically demanding, and young men peak in their ability to simultaneously handle extreme physical activity and ignore their own mortality at the age of 18-20. I do what I can to stay in shape, but that only makes me that much more aware that at 45 I move lower and get injured more easily than I did 25 years ago.
So why is Ukraine exclusively mobilizing non-prime age men for their army?
The reason is that like the rest of the Soviet world, Ukraine experienced a massive decline in fertility from the mid 1980s on, hitting its lowest point around 2000.
Strange though it is to think about, 2000 is now 24 years ago, so that period when Ukraine's fertility rate had dropped to just one child per woman was the period when today's 24 year olds were not being born in Ukraine. Thus, if you look at the number of people of different ages in the Ukrainian population prior to the war, you see the smallest populations in the prime military service age range.
So why is the war being fought by Ukrainian men in their 30s and 40s? Because there are almost twice as many of them as there are men in their early 20s. As of 2021, Ukraine had 1.1 million men aged 20-24 and 1.9 million men aged 35-39.
Add to that the fact that if the country is going to rebuild and have another generation of children after the war, that small generation of young men in their late teens and early 20s need to survive to have families and hold jobs. They are quite literally the future of the country.
Of course, young people are always the future of a country. But in more normal demographic situations, young people are more plentiful. In 1966, when the US drafted 382,010 men aged 18-25 into the army for the Vietnam War, the demographic pyramid was almost exactly an inverse of what Ukraine has now.
Those 1966 draftees represented less than 5% of men of conscription age. If Ukraine were to tap their 20-24 year olds for the 500,000 men their army says they need to mobilize, they would need to mobilize half the Ukrainian men in that age range.
Russia, of course, faces a similar overall demographic problem. The difference is simply that Russia's population is three times larger. In grinding trench warfare which has come to resemble WW1 with drones, even with Russian casualties often higher than Ukrainians ones, they simply have more men to send into the meatgrinder.
This is, of course, why Ukraine is so eager to get more and better military aid for the US and the rest of NATO. The American way of war for the last hundred years has been to substitute firepower and technology for bodies. This still doesn't always work. In Vietnam, the US military was successful in inflicting far higher casualties on the North Vietnamese than the US suffered; the problem was that the North Vietnamese were willing to go on suffering those casualties and the US was not.
If Ukraine is going to manage to continue to defend itself with anything like success, without completely giving up their future generations, they will need to employ Western style military technology and tactics to achieve a similarly lopsided casualty ratio.
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