Polish Youths' Motivations for Military Service

The new wave of discussions about relationship between military and society has started in Poland since suspending conscription and introduction of professional military service only. One of the two main issues was to have enough reserve troops for wartime mobilization. The second one is the problem of possible emergence of military “caste” and focuses on establishing the links between society and military. The main topic of our presentation is the attitude towards different forms of military service and military training among polish youths. The presentation will be based on the surveys conducted by or done for the Military Office of Social Research (Military Center for Civic Education), including representative research of university level students (N=2000) and other representative or all-population research projects on youths, including military training participants. The results coming from these studies show that factors determining interest in military service are difficult to identify. Traditional variables used for describing place in the social structure are only partly useful in predicting interest in military service. Traditional set of values composed of patriotism, conservatism and hierarchy are weak predictors of military service interest too. The hypothesis is we may face another set of motivations pushing young people towards some forms of military service. In our paper we will test two different ones: career orientation hypothesis and adventure orientation hypothesis.