The sudden, impromptu release of v.premier Salvini on the restoration of military leverage has first provoked the skepticism of the defense minister and of the professional soldiers, and then moved controversially to newspapers and social. Yet it would have been an excellent opportunity to bring order into the subject and hurts the superficiality with which the topic has been addressed and immediately removed.
For a start, the main and exclusive function of the soldier is combat. All other functions (social and health control of the male population, recovery of illiteracy, static surveillance, civil protection, support to law enforcement, civic education) are to be considered ancillary. Repeating the naja as an antidote to the rudeness of young people, Salvini has therefore started on the wrong foot. Although all the other functions mentioned above have been systematically exploited by modern states, the compulsory lever basically serves to obtain the maximum of men trained to combat at a price lower than the expensive professionals, and in fact the British, whose army is always been professional, they restored the lever only during the two world wars, when the quality had to be necessarily integrated by the quantity. If there had not been the Cold War, in Europe the lever would probably have been abandoned within the 1950, while the presence of five million soldiers of the Red Army and their satellites has practically forced NATO to do likewise from the Baltic to Turkey . As it happens, the only European states that keep the lever today are confining with Russia.
Since the end of the 80 years, however, the international scene has not changed before and with it the nature of military operations: no longer the comparison between masses of men and mechanical means distributed in two symmetrical blocks, but a fragmented and changing picture that has moved the accent on what once colonial police operations would have been called: peacekeeping missions, interposition or stabilization in crisis areas, conducted by a few units of motivated, well-trained and equipped professionals and in some measure expendable without causing the fall of the government. In this context, Italy immediately adapted to the new operational needs, adhering to the various missions at the time known in the external area, but soon realizing the limits of the military personnel, even if integrated into more reliable departments (Folgore, San Marco ). For its part, the lever - officially "suspended" in the 2004 - as well as unpopular, was an institution already heavily compromised by both budgetary shortcomings and social changes. Wellbeing has never produced soldiers and the progressive laws favorable to conscientious objection have finally made compulsory military service something similar to the current one optional obligation of vaccines. For their part, the military was the first to realize that the same technology required long-term personnel. Marina and Aeronautica already had a strong component of professionals, given the technical nature of the two weapons, while the Army was in danger of falling behind. So the transition from the lever to professionalism, at least from a military point of view, can be defined as a rational process, while its management has been less rational.
The British - who had faced the problem well before us - at the time said that switching from the lever to professionalism had to be an operation conducted gradually, being however almost impossible to go back. In Italy everything was done quickly, with the mirage of saving resources and intercepting the vote of young people. I remember well the rapid removal of the historical ideas on the army of people guaranteeing democracy, as well as the ill-concealed scorn of career officers towards the commitment lavished for years by millions of young people obliged to a service that they would have gladly avoided. To win two World Wars and the Cold War were not the professionals, but the trained masses of the conscripts. In any case, the haste with which everything has been dismantled to recruit volunteers of low social background has caused the side effect of having now oversized structures and a body of officers and non-commissioned officers disproportionate to the troop. What is worse, the calculations on the cost of a professional army soon turned out to be optimistic: training and maintaining an army of unionized professionals was much more expensive than expected and the economic crisis of the following years did the rest, penalizing the ambitious initial projects and cutting not only the funds for the recruitment of new recruits and the maintenance of vehicles and installations, but also those for interesting initiatives such as Future soldier. And if we want to say it in full, conceiving the army as a social shock has caused the progressive aging of the mass of the non-commissioned officers and the military in general. A caporalmaggiore is today twice the age of a vintage najone, to the point that he could be his father.
That said, is it really worth going back? Restoring the lever means restoring what has collapsed: military districts, barracks that are now falling and not even converted, training areas, warehouses. It means dressing, feeding, housing and training personnel in service for a few months; all this has an excessive cost compared to the immediate advantage, in an Italy where the very notion of border to be defended has in fact been annulled by historical circumstances and by politics. What then the expensive professional is also employed in urban picketing operations and his lieutenant is entrusted with the tasks of a capomuta is secondary: now the osmosis with the civil society has come down, it is permissible to resort to façade initiatives to make neighbors feel to people who are now members of a separate body of society, with which it is even difficult to speak without being looked at with suspicion. Seeing is believing.
On the other hand, the idea of a universal civil service, or even a European one, is mandatory and open to men and women. Renzi had talked about it, Merkel also spoke about it. Compared to military service, the cost would be lower, as the State did not have to dress, feed and house the staff involved in the civil service. Above all, it could offer young people a range of opportunities ranging from training to social assistance, from the possibility of benefiting from a kind of Erasmus abroad to training at public and private institutions. Important that there is a coordination and above all a public management of the service, avoiding the fragmentation to use and consumption of private individuals who characterized for years the so-called conscientious objection.
Finally, two words on an initiative started by the National Association of the Fante and also supported by other associations of arms. Precisely within the Universal Civil Service it was suggested to allow military service to those who wanted it. Even optimistically calculating an 10%, one would have an auxiliary military rate sufficient to lighten the barracks services, take care of the efficiency of the structures or carry out functions of low specialization. It is not utopia: years ago at the Infantry School of Cesano a mixed department was created experimentally: parà professionals (ie combatants) and conscripts (for the barracks services, sometimes entrusted now to external companies when there is money). The mixed system seems not to have had any luck (I can however mention Austria), and yet it could have its functionality, if the professional army had not become a black hole that from the beginning absorbed all available resources. On the Fante's project, the then undersecretary of Defense, gen. Domenico Rossi, above all because it would have been easy to select future professionals in time. The series of suicides that recently affected the military in service shows that the selection did not always work. The initiative could perhaps be implemented by the League, but the gross intervention of Salvini and the skepticism of the competent Minister of Defense, however, have burned for now any initiative.
(photo: US Air National Guard)
