The government has submitted a bill to reduce the mandatory military service term from 2 to 1.5 years, which is planned to be implemented starting with the summer draft of 2026. Secretary of the I Have the Honor faction Tigran Abrahamyan wrote about this on his Facebook page.
The bill justifies this by stating that “in recent years, active steps have been taken to expand contract military service in the form of the “Defender of the Fatherland” program, the introduction of a professional sergeant system, a system for certifying military personnel, and the organization of contract military service with the preservation of military pensions for length of service in border military units.”
The government’s “justification” regarding active conscription is not true only to the extent that over the past 4 years, thousands of reservists and representatives of the Armenian Volunteer Union have been annually called up for combat duty and other combat missions.
I would not advise those in charge to insist that the recruitment of reservists has an exclusively educational and training purpose, since the main purpose of this recruitment in the conditions of complex recruitment is to ensure the fulfillment of combat missions.
No matter how actively recruitment for military service is carried out under the “Defender of the Fatherland” program, the state is still very far from solving the general problems with conscription.
In these conditions, the Government is trying to solve three problems:
1. To carry out a pre-election “trick”, trying to turn the reduction of the army into a referendum.
2. To reduce the army, “justifying” further concessions by the incapacity of the state.
3. Simply fulfill the demand of Azerbaijan in order to assure that the Republic of Armenia does not intend to resist or fight.
I understand that many people do not like my position, some will disagree loudly, some silently, but for me the national and state interests of our country, the security of our people are important, and I will continue to insist that this project is a powerful blow to the state from within, which will further aggravate our security problems,” he wrote.