The Finnish army tomorrow

With the aim for a more effective future
- Picture © Finnish Defence Forces

The Finnish army will go towards being smaller in the future, but not necessarily less effective. It has already been decided that the combined mobilized force of the Finnish Defence Forces will shrink from 490.000 to 350.000 soldiers in 2008. This means mainly that most of the local defence troops in their present form will dissapear. Instead the local defence troops will consist of volunteers organized in units, from platoon to batallion size units. This is something of a "rebirth" for the Finnish reservist movement, since the former reservist organization "Suojeluskunta" was forbidden in the Paris peace treaty of 1947. The new "maakuntajoukot" (which translates roughly to local defence troops) can be used in peace-time as well to fight fires and to support the society in general when the need arises, in example during environment catastrophes. The first units will be started in late 2004 and in 2008 they should be in full strength of between 50 000 to 100 000 volunteers.

With a smaller army the time in reserve will also be changed, so that a mobilized finnish army (especially in the brigades) would consist of younger soldiers than would be the case now, mainly reservists under the age of 35. The two armoured brigades will be scrapped sometime around 2015 because it is not prioritized to spend the limited military fundings on buying some 130 new MBT´s and hundreds of other armoured vehicle to replace the ageing (mainly Russian-made) equipment used today. The scrapping of these two armoured brigades will however not affect the Leopard 2A4´s or the newer armoured vehicles since these are not organized in the armoured brigades. The Leopards will be attached to the two southern readiness brigades in a company to battallion-level. Attack helicopters, such as the Eurocopter Tiger has been deemed to expensive for the tiny Finnish military budget, but most probably heavy multi-rocket launcher systems, as for example HIMARS or something similar, will be bought to the army. The Air Force F-18´s may also be upgraded with attack software in the near future, so that they will be able to give ground support to the army.