ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the security interests of the new democracies, and of all of Europe, are best served by military postures which embody a non-offensive defence (NOD) quality. It attempts to outline and clarify the basic military features of NOD. One of the more advanced and a detailed concepts, developed by the Study Group Alternative Security Policy is "confidence-building defence". In quite a few NATO countries that have armies with conscript components there is a tendency to go over to the concept of an all-volunteer force. Volunteer forces can indeed be better employed for a wider range of out-of-area missions than troops with a sizeable conscript element. In the Russian "military reform" movement, in Hungary and in the Czech and Slovak Republics as well, the call for all-volunteer forces also had quite a few vociferous proponents. The ratio of armed forces to the space that Third World armies must defend is, in many cases, quite low.
