Vucic: Compulsory military service to be reinstated

BELGRADE - Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said compulsory military service had been discussed at Monday's session of the extended Collegium of the Serbian Armed Forces chief of general staff and would be reinstated.

"We discussed that, and we will reinstate compulsory military service, but we want our professional soldiers to be as strong as possible in the meantime, and we want to fill our units as well as possible," Vucic told reporters after the session.

He also said a decision had been made to set up a digital military platform that would enable command rooms to see everything a UAV or a soldier on the ground saw.

Vucic added that the programme would take four or five years to implement.

"That means connectivity. Soon, we will have large and powerful UAVs with a wide and long range of vision. Accordingly, everything that a UAV or a soldier sees, day or night, everything all our tank crews and our APC crews see, we, too, will see in command rooms," he said.

That way, we will be wasting no time on assessing reports, he said.

"We will be working with the world's very best, we will have one of the most powerful small armies in the world. We will never jeopardise anyone, but we will know how to safeguard our country and defend it from any potential aggressor," Vucic said.

If Serbia were to be attacked now, its army would be able to offer incomparably stronger resistance compared to 1999 and deter even the most powerful aggressors thanks to its level of equipment and technological advances, he said.

He announced that a large-scale military parade would be held on September 19 or 20 and that people would be able to see what the Serbian Armed Forces had acquired, designed or manufactured.