AI Can Measure Europe’s Will to Fight—Without Guesswork

A surprising number of defense plans still start from a flawed assumption: Europeans won’t fight. That story is familiar, it feels intuitive, and it’s shaping real decisions—force structure, recruitment rules, mobilization design, and the balance between technology spending and human mass.

But the more useful diagnosis is different: Europe’s problem isn’t public softness; it’s elite pessimism. When leaders assume society won’t show up, they build systems that signal distrust, offer fewer meaningful pathways to serve, and ultimately reduce the very readiness they say they need.

This matters to anyone working in defense and national security because “will to fight” isn’t just sociology—it’s an operational variable. And in 2025, it’s also a data problem. AI can help NATO and European governments estimate societal readiness more accurately, detect weak signals earlier, and design mobilization systems that build trust instead of draining it.

The real risk: pessimism becomes policy (and then reality)

The fastest way to weaken national resilience is to plan as if you don’t have any. When governments and militaries build policies around mistrust—of young people, of reservists, of immigrants, of “civilian” competence—society picks up the signal.

You see it in small choices that add up:

• Conscription framed as discipline rather than as professional training and civic inclusion
• Recruiting standards and processes optimized for bureaucratic neatness rather than throughput and retention
• Assignments for conscripts/reservists designed around fear of mistakes (static, dull, low-trust roles), which wastes talent
• Culture-war signaling substituting for practical retention fixes (sleep, housing, family stability, mental health support)

The logic is simple: people don’t mobilize just because a law exists; they mobilize when they believe their contribution will matter and others will do their part. Trust is a force multiplier. Distrust is a readiness tax.

For the “AI in Defense & National Security” series, this is the bridge: modern readiness isn’t only about platforms and munitions. It’s about whether your society can generate trained mass, sustain losses, and keep cohesion under pressure. AI can help measure those conditions—but it can also amplify the wrong assumptions if it’s trained on the wrong proxies.

Why peacetime polling keeps misleading leaders

Polling is not a forecast of wartime behavior. It’s an opinion snapshot of an imagined scenario most respondents have never experienced.

Peacetime surveys tend to understate resolve because they capture:

• Fear of war (a rational baseline)
• A belief that fighting is “for professionals”
• Low salience when threat feels distant
• Cynicism about politics that doesn’t necessarily map to willingness to defend home, family, or community

The operational mistake happens when planners treat these polls as destiny. When they do, they design mobilization as if society is brittle—then wonder why recruitment pipelines and reserve systems underperform.

A better frame: will to fight is cultivated capacity

Will to fight behaves less like a national personality trait and more like a social potential that rises or falls based on institutions, leadership behavior, and perceived fairness.

I’ve found it helpful to treat this as a readiness triad:

1. Capability (can people be trained and equipped quickly?)
2. Confidence (do people believe the state is competent and honest?)
3. Cohesion (do people believe others will share risk and sacrifice?)

If any one collapses, “will” drops fast—even in societies that look strong on paper.

Where AI fits: from vibe-based judgments to measurable readiness

AI can’t read minds, but it can reduce blind spots. Done well, AI helps defense planners move from elite intuition (“society is apathetic”) to decision-grade indicators (“these communities show high volunteer capacity but low trust in institutions; here are interventions that work”).

1) AI readiness analysis: detect signals leaders don’t see

Most European defense establishments are information-rich and insight-poor on societal readiness. Data exists across public administration, education, labor markets, health systems, logistics networks, and local volunteering ecosystems—but it’s fragmented.

AI can fuse these into a Societal Readiness Picture that’s updated quarterly (or faster) and tested against exercises.

Useful indicator families include:

• Reserve depth indicators: active reservist participation rates, training completion, churn, employer support patterns
• Civic response capacity: volunteer enrollment, emergency response participation, civil protection staffing
• Trust and legitimacy signals: institutional trust indices, local compliance trends, variance by region
• Workforce adaptability: retraining uptake, technical certification flows, language/skills inventories
• Information resilience: exposure to coordinated inauthentic behavior, rumor propagation velocity during crises

This isn’t about surveillance. It’s about the same thing militaries already do for equipment readiness—just applied to the human and social layer.

Snippet-worthy reality: If you track aircraft readiness daily but check societal readiness every four years with a poll, you’re choosing to be surprised.

2) Mobilization planning: predictive analytics for throughput, not slogans

Mobilization is a logistics and human-systems problem. AI can help plan it the way serious organizations plan supply chains: identify bottlenecks, stress-test assumptions, and optimize flow.

Concrete applications:

• Training pipeline simulation: predict instructor capacity, facility constraints, equipment availability, and dropout risk
• Assignment optimization: match recruits to roles based on aptitude, prior experience, and motivation—then measure outcomes
• Regional surge modeling: estimate how fast different regions can generate manpower given transport, childcare, employer constraints
• Retention risk scoring: flag units or locations where housing, schedule instability, or leadership turnover predicts exits

The point is not to automate mobilization. It’s to make policy choices testable before a crisis forces improvisation.

3) Recruitment and retention: personalization without manipulation

European forces often talk about “Gen Z” as a problem. That’s backwards. The problem is outdated recruiting funnels.

AI-enabled recruiting can improve conversion and retention if it’s built around transparency and consent:

• Role discovery tools that show realistic pathways (including non-combat roles) based on interests and skills
• Pre-training programs tailored to fitness and basic skill gaps
• Candidate experience optimization (faster scheduling, clearer requirements, fewer dead ends)
• Better matching to “followership” roles, not only leadership tracks

This is especially relevant for women and under-tapped communities: willingness often rises when people understand the breadth of roles and see a system that expects them to succeed.

Trust in allies is mission-critical—and AI can help close the gap

A recurring European anxiety isn’t “Will my people fight?” It’s “Will other allies fight for me?” That doubt matters because it can suppress resolve and investment.

AI-enabled mission planning and coalition coordination can reduce that uncertainty in practical ways:

• Shared operational pictures that reduce ambiguity during escalation
• Readiness transparency dashboards across allies (what’s available, where, and when)
• Interoperability validation through continuous data-driven exercises
• Decision support for reinforcement timelines so commitments feel concrete, not rhetorical

There’s a strategic communications angle here too. When allies can show credible reinforcement plans—with data-backed timelines—public confidence tends to rise. People don’t rally around vague reassurance. They rally around believable capability.

The trap to avoid: “AI will measure will to fight” becoming a new form of pessimism

Here’s the uncomfortable part: AI can reinforce elite pessimism if it’s trained on the wrong proxies.

If you build models that equate:

• low institutional trust with disloyalty,
• political polarization with inability to mobilize,
• individualism with unwillingness to defend home,

…you’ll produce neat dashboards that justify bad policy.

Guardrails that keep AI honest

If you’re deploying AI for societal readiness analysis, require these safeguards:

1. Use multiple data sources (not just social media). Social platforms overrepresent outrage and underrepresent duty.
2. Separate attitude from behavior. Track observed participation (training completions, volunteering, emergency response) alongside sentiment.
3. Test predictions in exercises. If the model can’t forecast turnout and performance in realistic drills, it’s not ready.
4. Publish governance rules. Who sees what? What’s anonymized? What’s off-limits? Trust collapses when people feel scored in secret.
5. Measure policy impact. If you change a recruiting rule or reserve incentive, the model should show whether readiness improved.

A hard stance: Readiness analytics that citizens perceive as intrusive will backfire. In democracies, legitimacy is part of capability.

What modern “will to fight” programs look like in practice

The goal isn’t to moralize society. It’s to build structures that make participation easy, meaningful, and respected. Europe already has proven ingredients—especially in countries that maintain credible territorial defense.

Here’s what works reliably across systems:

Practical design principles

1. Offer many entry ramps: short-term service, reserve-first options, civil defense pathways, cyber and logistics tracks.
2. Make roles legible: people commit faster when they can picture the job, the training, the team, and the impact.
3. Treat citizens as adaptable: design equipment and workflows that are learnable under stress.
4. Reward contribution publicly: social esteem is a powerful motivator, especially for mission-driven cohorts.
5. Keep leaders close to society: regular interaction (not just speeches) reduces elite anxiety and improves policy realism.

Where AI improves these programs

• Identify which communities have high latent participation but face barriers (transport, childcare, employer policies)
• Build training schedules that maximize completion and minimize churn
• Detect disinformation spikes during recruitment pushes and crisis drills
• Provide commanders with early warning for morale and retention issues—before they become headlines

What defense leaders should do in 2026 planning cycles

European defense planning is already under pressure: ammunition stockpiles, air and missile defense, drone warfare lessons, and industrial capacity constraints. Adding “societal readiness” can feel like one more burden.

It shouldn’t. It’s a way to make every other investment pay off. A high-tech force that can’t scale trained personnel, sustain cohesion, or mobilize logistics under attack is a brittle force.

Three concrete next steps:

1. Stand up a Societal Readiness Cell that reports alongside force readiness, with clear metrics and democratic oversight.
2. Run an annual “mobilization throughput exercise” (not just tabletop). Use AI to compare predicted vs actual bottlenecks.
3. Treat alliance trust as a measurable variable: reinforce planning transparency, reinforcement timelines, and interoperable command workflows.

Europe isn’t “too soft.” Its plans are too distrustful.

The most damaging narrative in European defense right now isn’t that adversaries are strong—it’s that democracies are weak by nature. That story hands authoritarians a propaganda win for free, and it encourages policy choices that shrink participation.

For the AI in Defense & National Security community, the opportunity is clear: use AI to replace guesswork with evidence, and use evidence to design institutions that earn trust. When citizens feel trusted, trained, and needed, “will to fight” stops being an abstract debate and becomes a practical capability.

If you’re building AI for defense—readiness analytics, mobilization planning tools, coalition decision support—ask one question before you ship: Will this system increase mutual confidence between leaders and society, or quietly drain it?