Army building 

Army building is crucial for national defense and the country can face serious threats if not done properly. In this regard, army building should be based on international advanced practice.

According to general military practice, there are two ways of recruitment:

1. Conscription - compulsory enrollment of male citizens of a certain age to serve in the military;

2.Professionalism - voluntary enrollment of people of a certain age (mainly male population) to serve in the army with military training.

In the practice of different countries, army building is carried out by choosing one of these two methods or by combining both.

The Republic of Azerbaijan mainly has conscription in law, but also has military professionalism in part, and army recruitment is carried out under a voluntary contract. In other words, Azerbaijan currently has a mixed army-building format, which applies conscription as a foundation and professionalism as an auxiliary tool.

The Third Republican Platform believes that the current conscription-based army in Azerbaijan is problematic and useless for the following reasons:

1. Conscription lowers the quality of combat training as it is not stimulating for soldiers;
2. Conscription lays the groundwork for endemic corruption in army building;
3. Conscription encourages 'hazing' in the army, i.e. insulting and oppressive treatment of privates by more experienced conscripts;
4. Conscription prevents the formation of an institutional military tradition and promotes the political dependence of the army; 
5. Conscription is a product of a backward Soviet experience and contradicts the international best practices.

Based on the above, the Third Republican Platform believes that the way of completing the army should be changed. The new method of building an army should be based on a mixed format in which professionalism is seen as the basis and conceptualization as a form of auxiliary recruitment. The mixed format based on professionalism should be applied in the following order:

• The officer personnel of the army should be formed from officer cadets who have undergone continuous military and professional training. And at present, the formation of officer personnel is carried out in this way. However, at present, the quality of military training and education is low. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on improving the quality of training and education; 
• The permanent non-officers of the army (e.g. ensigns) should be formed on the basis of professional fixed-term military training. The above-mentioned problem of training quality also applies to this area, and this problem should be eliminated; 
• A decisive part of the army personnel should consist of professional military personnel recruited under contracts concluded over a certain period of time. These personnel should be allowed to serve in the army after completing a training period and achieving qualification requirements sufficient for army training. The main point to be changed in the army building applies to this portion; 
• The method of conscription should be rejected as a method of formation of military personnel. Male citizens who have reached the age of military service must be registered as reservists and undergo short-term military training. Reservists should not be used for the formation of military personnel in peacetime, their compulsory recruitment should be limited to military training, and reservists should be recruited in a proportionate manner only when the necessity arises in wartime; 
• Civilian staff (e.g., suppliers) should be contracted on a voluntary basis, and work outside military service should be assigned to them, while military personnel should not be involved in non-military activities of military formations.

The obligatory training period for male citizens involved in obligatory military training through the conscription method should be reduced from the current 18 months (12 months for higher education) to the normative period - 3 months. (If the normative requirements are not met, this period may be extended for another 1 month.) Involvement of which citizens in training during this period of time should be carried out individually depending on the degree of their military training. The age limit for obligatory military training is 18-30 years.  At the same time, once the above-mentioned tradition of compulsory military training has been established, the issue of organizing shorter military exercises for a fee on legal grounds may be put up for public discussion.

Alternative civilian service should be organized for conscientious objectors who refuse obligatory military service, including obligatory military training, on religious or ideological grounds. The duration of this service should be twice the total mandatory military training period. Appeals from protesting citizens (conscientious objectors) who require alternative civilian service should be investigated by military commissions organized for these purposes and granted if the evidence they provide about religious or ideological motives is reasonable. In conditions of war, they will be recruited into military service which does not require carrying and using weapons. To achieve this goal, it is first necessary to adopt a law on alternative non-military (civilian) service, which has not been adopted for a long time.

All appropriate steps should be taken to organize the material security of voluntary (contract) professional servicemen who make up the bulk of the new army - their salaries should be determined within reasonable limits to ensure their standard of living, and they should be granted appropriate social guarantees (such as medical care, pensions and allowances on a fully unpaid basis) as well as other benefits (such as higher education for family members at the expense of the state,  preferential mortgages).

In order to remove corruption while completing the army, a unified management should be organized in this area, the State Service for Mobilization and Conscription should be abolished and all its powers should be vested in the Ministry of Defense. Demobilized servicemen should automatically receive the status of veterans, and their social welfare issues should be excluded from the competences of the Ministry of Defense and transferred to the relevant social security institutions.

There should be a differentiation between the civilian and military leadership of the army (the civil-military dichotomy), and the political leadership of the army, i.e. the powers of the Minister of Defense, should be assigned to persons with political status other than the military, the bureaucracy in the apparatus of the Ministry of Defense should be organized mainly from the civilian bureaucracy. Military leadership, on the other hand, should be vested in military personnel appointed on the basis of professionalism using the example of the General Staff. In the military protocol, the Minister of Defense should come first and then the chief of the General Staff. In order to avoid politicization of the army, top military leaders (chief of the General Staff, troop commanders and chiefs of Staff of armies) should be appointed on meritocratic principles, and the final approval of such appointments shall require a two-thirds majority vote in parliament.