Morale: Can Europeans Fight?
Ezoic
November 24, 2025: For the first time in 80 years, Western Europe faces the possibility of war on their own territory. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening to escalate into a Russian invasion of Western Europe by 2030 or sometime in the 2030s. Once that became a popular meme, there followed questions of whether Europeans could fight.
While there has been no war in Western Europe since 1945, hundreds of thousands of Europeans have fought in wars outside Europe and, since 2014, over 50,000 have volunteered to fight in Ukraine or Russia. Currently, Ukraine maintains a Foreign Legion that largely consists of volunteers from Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. Ukraine actively seeks foreign volunteers for some technical jobs like network security, code breaking and so on.
It’s not a question of whether or not any Europeans would volunteer to fight in wartime, or under threat of war, but how many. There is also the fact that in modern armies, only about ten to twenty percent of the troops specialize in fighting. The rest provide support services like medical, supplies, engineering, communications, air defense and so on. Support troops carry weapons and are trained how to use them. This is because many support troops operate some of the time in a combat zone and must be able to defend themselves. Members of the Ukrainian Foreign Legion are paid, but those with combat jobs are paid about nine times more than those in support jobs.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20251124629.aspx#gsc.tab=0
