Government prepares recruitment for emergency Portuguese Army reserve made up of 18 to 35 years olds

The government is preparing a set of documents to define the creation of an army reserve of Portuguese citizens, aged between 18 and 35 years old, who can be the target of “exceptional recruitment” if necessary. An “availability reserve” will also be created for those who have completed military service, for six years after the end of that service.

The written government order, which press was given access to, was signed by the Minister of National Defence on Tuesday this week. “The program of the XXII Constitutional Government and the Major Options of the Plan enshrines, in the context of preparing national defence for the challenges of the decade 2020-2030, the aim of operationalizing the concepts of an Availability Reserve and Recruitment Reserve, taking into account the reduction in manpower that occurred in recent years and the eventual need to respond quickly to new situations that require additional means “, wrote the Minister of National Defence.

This comes at a time when the military has played an essential role supporting health authorities and Civil Protection on several fronts in the current crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. João Gomes Cravinho, minister of National Defence, determined that a working group be set up to “operationalize the concepts” and present proposals for their legislative framework, recalling that these reservations were already provided for in the Military Law 25 years ago, but that they were never regulated.

“The Armed Forces today play a vital role in different areas of activity, in addition to those that typically associate themselves with military action, assuming, for example, as a fundamental support for civil protection, under the terms of the Basic Protection Law. Thus, it is more and more expected that situations will occur in which an effective deployment of the Armed Forces is necessary, and difficulties may arise in guaranteeing the availability of the necessary personnel to carry out these missions “, points out the minister.

Gomes Cravinho admits that “the shortage of personnel may constitute a constraint to the fulfilment of the different missions assigned to the Armed Forces, urging, as such, to implement the legal mechanisms that enable the Armed Forces to be adequately staffed in each case to respond successfully to the missions assigned to them, consolidating the service provision model in all military service situations provided for in the Military Service Law, including the use of exceptional recruitment to obtain human resources resulting from summons and mobilization.

The drop in the number of personnel in the Armed Forces (FA) means that they have reached historic lows in recent years, in addition to the degradation of facilities and equipment. Last February, a group of generals, including former chiefs of staff, alerted the President of the Republic to the “pre-bankruptcy” situation in the Armed Forces. Throughout the three branches of the forces there are less than 10,000 people, according to updated data provided to press – in the Army about 5200 people, in the Navy just over eight hundred, and in the Air Force about 1000.

The new document states that “the recruitment reserve will be constituted by Portuguese citizens aged 18 to 35 years of age, who, having not rendered effective service in the ranks, can be the object of exceptional recruitment, in terms to be regulated”.

The “availability reserve is made up of Portuguese citizens who have ceased to provide military service until the age limit for military duties, and during the six-year period following the end of the effective service, for the purpose of summoning, intended to allow the Armed Forces personnel to increase to the number considered adequate”. The working group is created “to operationalize the concepts of Availability Reserve and Recruitment Reserve, with the objective of creating an integrated model of information management that supports all actions associated with these concepts, under the terms defined and regulated in the Law of the Military Service”.

The working group includes representatives from the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, and will be accompanied by a member of João Cravinho’s office, another from the State Secretariat for Human Resources, and Former Combatants.