| dc.description.abstract | Technology advances have changed the structure of future wars from relying massive troops to win, into relying high quality manpower to succeed; it is fair to say the key to winning future wars is to raise the ratio of professional military personnel. For several decades, our country adopted the method of ＂hybrid system,＂ which is to draft soldiers/NCOs and having volunteered officers as the composition of armed forces. However, being affected by recent political and societal opinions, the R.O.C. Armed Forces have decreased the conscription time to one year. This resulted in difficulties of maintaining combat power, because once young people are trained ready with combat capabilities, they are done with service. Moreover, the R.O.C. faces the trend of low fertility which caused decreased number of young people can be drafted each year; therefore, in order to ensure national defense capabilities and security, adopting ＂voluntarism＂ becoming the most important mission in the process of transitioning our national defense.
Systematic Researches were conducted for this thesis along with literature reviews and case studies. The thesis follows human resources management viewpoint to examine the most troubled case, the R.O.C. Army: current status of adopting voluntarism and future directions. The thesis shows that there are 58 countries’ military forces adopt voluntarism to fight future high-tech wars. And in the early stage, most countries encountered problems such as lack of volunteers, or incompetent soldiers. Since the R.O.C. has a strong adversary across the strait, we not only adopted voluntarism to recruit officers, NCOs, and soldiers, we also maintained drafting young males for 4 months to basic training and to train with units. If the war occurs, these conscripts will be mobilized again with orders to defend the homeland. Therefore, our military system maintains a hybrid of conscripted and voluntary system.
The R.O.C. Ministry of National Defense (MND) reviewed the processes and experiences of the United States, Britain, and Japan, later established the interagency “Voluntary Military System Project Team.” This team analyzed the operational requirements, manpower available, resources available, and published the “Voluntary System Execution Plan” that consists of 41 measures to attract talents and improve working conditions. The main idea was planning a well-rounded “welfare, dignity, and promotion” system as the advantage for the R.O.C. military. However, the MND have not achieved these goals yet, due to societal viewpoint and negative opinions from people towards the military. If we want the voluntary system to succeed, we need to consider raising the societal respect towards soldiers, enhancing the living conditions, implementing good promotion system, and taking good care of veterans in order to attract great talents into the military. The global trend is to adopt voluntarism; voluntarism is a significant policy we must implement, it is vital to our country’s survival and there is no way to turn back. | en_US |