The Swiss Army and the Porcupine Principle

Everyone knows that “Switzerland does not have an army. Switzerland IS an army,” quipped an observer. (1) Indeed, a little known fact is that the Swiss maintain, proportionally, the largest military force in the world, with more than twice as many active-duty soldiers per capita as the next proportionally-largest force, in Israel. Israel admired the Swiss model so much that it copied it. (2)

Switzerland is two times the size of New Jersey. Switzerland and New Jersey have about 7.5 million people and about 8.7 million, respectively (2005). Yet, there are 1,579,921 males age 15-49 who are fit for military service in Switzerland, with 524,000 conscripts training at any given time (2004). The remainder of the militia is “walking around in street clothes or in blue from the collar down. They are a civilian army, a trained and practiced militia, ever ready to mobilize,” writes John McPhee who was permitted in the early 1980s by the Swiss Army to observe various exercises of a “refresher course” for militia members in the Swiss Alps. (3) He wrote about his experiences with the Section de Renseignements (in French-speaking Switzerland) of the Eighth Battalion of the Fifth Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division in his charming book titled: “La Place de la Concorde Suisse.”

The military of Switzerland is a unique institution that falls somewhere between a militia and a regular army. A militia in the case of Switzerland is the entire able-bodied population of the country, which can be called to arms against an invading enemy in considerably less than 48 hours, according to one source, and within 12 hours, according to another. (4,2)

This tight timeframe requires soldiers to keep their army-issued assault rifles clean and handy in their homes. Every Swiss soldier receives a gas mask and a tin of 50 rounds of ammunition that is to be opened in case of war. The ammunition is loaded in the rifle magazine, which is carried in the soldier’s pocket, and engaged in the weapon only for the personal self-defense of the soldier in case he or she is attacked between home and the barracks. Every year, Swiss soldiers must present themselves with their rifles at a shooting stand, and fire a certain number of rounds, which are issued.

The Swiss Army has a small nucleus of about 3,600 professional staff, half of whom are either instructors or staff officers, according to one source. (5)

The Porcupine Principle

“The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years, and are determined to know how so as not to,” deduced McPhee in this tongue scrambler statement. (3) The Swiss defend themselves on what they call the “Porcupine Principle”, meaning they roll themselves up into a ball and brandish their quills. According to a Swiss Army officer, “The foremost battle is to prevent war with a price of entry that is too high. You must understand that there is no difference between the Swiss people and the Swiss Army. There is no difference in will. Economic, military—it’s the same thing. For seven hundred years, freedom has been the fundamental story of Switzerland, and we are not prepared to give it up now. We want to defend ourselves, which is not the same as fighting abroad. We want peace, but not under someone else’s conditions. We will fight from the border. In response to a ground attack, which would in all likelihood come from the northeast, we intend to keep a maximum proportion of our land free.” (6)

The Swiss have honeycombed their mountains and lowlands with hidden artillery and forts, many of which are open to the public today. “Valley after valley…there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an invasive war.” (McPhee, p. 21) If the enemy encroaches too far into Switzerland, the Swiss Army will “interrupt” the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, and railroads, at between 3,000 and 6,000 predesignated points of demolition.

“Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage. All purposes included, concealed and stationary artillery probably number upward of twelve thousand guns. The Porcupine Principle. Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole division can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide.” (McPhee, p. 23)

The Swiss Idea of Neutrality is Armed Neutrality

Some comments made by Swiss colonels, majors, and captains, assembled by McPhee during his travels with the Swiss Army, are:

1. “We are quite ready. The basic Christian idea is: I smash you; you turn and say, ‘Smash here also.” The Swiss are not going to do that.”

2. “In Switzerland, there are people prepared to fight even against the government if the government were to capitulate.”

3. “We dislike war. We don’t want war. We must be so impressive that the war never starts. I’m not sure we can do that. But I hope we can.”

4. “Ten per cent of the people of Switzerland are in the Swiss Army. If ten per cent of the people in the United States were in a Volks army, it would include twenty-two million people. Think of the impression THAT would make on the Russians. An army is always a matter of impression, isn’t it?”

5. “Even if we are subjected to nuclear blackmail, we will never give up.”  (McPhee, pp. 26-7)

McPhee summarizes the essential nuance of the Swiss idea of neutrality as “brute military power.” He continues: “The Swiss definition of neutrality absolutely includes an army, because the task of a neutral country is to defend its territory. Switzerland’s declaration of independence is that it will attack no one, will participate in no so-called police action, will make no alliance, and will defend itself…Bumper stickers on Swiss cars say [in French, here translated into English]: You have to be strong defensively to be neutral. Our population density and our terrain make armed neutrality possible.”

History of Swiss Neutrality

Swiss neutrality began in the summer of 1515, when the Swiss were routed by a French Army under King Francois I at Marignano, in what is now Italy. The confederated cantons of Switzerland, which in 1515 numbered 13, decided to fight thereafter only as mercenaries in other people’s wars, according to McPhee (p. 52). At the time the Swiss were a small and poor nation and chose to “embellish their economy” by leasing their incomparable soldiers…The militia was then, as it has generally remained, cantonal in character. The cantons did the selling of soldiers. The French bought heavily for three hundred years—now twelve thousand Swiss, now seventy thousand Swiss, now a hundred and sixty-three thousand Swiss, depending on the intensity of the problems of France. For all that time, the Compagnie des Cent-Suisse were the personal bodyguards of the French kings. Scarcely had the Swiss soldiers appeared in the French court when the Pope decided that he wanted some, too; and the Pope, of course, still has them, ninety in all—the only vestige of the Swiss mercenaries.” (p. 53)

The Swiss love to hold military parades and an annual voluntary thirty-kilometer foot race for civilian soldiers. There are eight military museums in La Suisse Romande alone. (The Suisse Romande, the French-speaking area of the Helvetian Confederation, comprises six Cantons, each with a distinct character of its own: Fribourg, Geneva, Jura, Neuchatel, Valais, Vaud). In the Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum) in Zurich is the “Louvre of the toy soldier” where in glass cases toy soldiers number in the ten thousands. McPhee concludes that “beneath the long neutrality, there lies what the Swiss describe as ‘an aptitude for war’” that is sublimated and under close control. (pp. 54-55

Connection between Swiss Army and Swiss Banks

The money brought home by Swiss soldiers while working in other countries such as France started Switzerland’s banks. More often than not, high-ranking members of Swiss banks today will be high-ranking members of the Swiss Army. Businessmen are proud of this connection. McPhee notes that “When an important business promotion is reported in the press, the notice might say, typically, ‘He is thirty-seven years old, is married, has three children, lives in Rapperswil, and is a major in the mountain infantry.’” (p. 58)

The Little Book of Service

Every able-bodied male Swiss citizen is conscripted to the armed forces beginning at age 18 years, but about one-third are excluded for various reasons. For women the service is voluntary. Each soldier completes 300 days of military service strung out over many years. (Apparently starting in January 2004, the mandatory time of service for normal soldiers was reduced from 300 days to 260 days. (5))

To keep track of his or her service, each soldier maintains his or her “Little Book of Service”. McPhee’s army supervisor, who was named Captain Rumpf, was 41-years-old. His Little Book of Service showed 1,100 days. Captain Rumpf was trying to become a major and thus had accumulated many more days than the normal citizen soldier. (p. 78)

“At the age of 20”, according to another source, “about half the service is done during an initial training period of 21 or 18 weeks, depending on the service branch [army, air force, or navy (in the lakes of Switzerland, such as Lake Geneva) , with the exception of the Grenadiers, an elite infantry unit with a 25-week boot camp…Thereafter, men remain in the military until the age of 30 (or longer, if the military service is not yet completed), performing three weeks of training every year. However, the service period of non-commissioned officers and officers is significantly longer. It is possible to postpone the initial training to finish university. The successive training weeks can also be postponed, but there is limited scope. In general, men interrupt their work during these weeks. During military service, the employee is paid a compensation of 80% of his regular salary by the state. Most employers, however, continue to pay the full salary during military service. In this case, the compensation is paid to the employer.” (5)

Swiss Civil Defense Structures

As noted elsewhere, the Swiss are much enamored of the use of thick concrete in their walls and ceilings. (7) This tendency arose during the Second World War, as the Swiss observed the horrific destruction of cities around them, and particularly the devastation wrought on civilian populations huddled in cellars during the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden. In their usual orderly and intense way, the Swiss set out to determine how to prevent a similar devastation in Zurich. A Nazi major general told them that concrete could have saved the citizen populations. So in the late 1940s, the Swiss people began building private homes and apartment houses voluntarily using such construction. Soon after, the Swiss government started to provide subsidies and regulation to make sure that ceilings were made of forty centimeters of concrete. (McPhee, p. 102)

When nuclear weapons became an issue, the Swiss decided to design shelters that were one-bar, meaning that walls and ceilings had to be built to withstand a pressure of one bar, which is equivalent to ten metric tons per square meter. At Hiroshima, a one-bar shelter might have saved lives half a mile form the bomb. Unlike in the US, which grappled mightily with the efficacy of building nuclear bomb shelters, the Swiss believed: “A society that systematically shuts its eyes to an urgent peril to its physical survival and fails to take any steps to save itself cannot be called psychologically well.” (McPhee, p. 103)  The biggest bomb shelter in the world today is the Sonnenberg-Tunnel, in which an Autobahn traverses Lucerne. In a nuclear emergency, doors high enough and wide enough fort the hangar of a rigid airship would slide on rails and close the tunnel. The doors are five feet thick, made of concrete. Switzerland is legendary for its shelters.

Summary

All able-bodied men (and a couple thousand able-bodied volunteer women) in Switzerland are conscripted at age 18 years. They prepare for war even though they never plan to fight a war. Two-thirds of conscripted men complete military service of 300 (or 260 days, beginning in 2004) strung out over many years; the remainder do civil service of some kind. Armed neutrality is deeply engrained in Swiss culture. The Swiss have the largest army in the world on a proportionate basis to the size of their population. The Swiss are mentally tough and physically fit. The Swiss may be on to something.

Sources:

1. Jonathan Steinberg, the New York Times Book Review, back cover of “La Place de la Concorde Suisse” by John McPhee, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

2. “Militia” in Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia#United_States; accessed June 3, 2006.

3. John McPhee: “La Place de la Concorde Suisee”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983, p. 3.

4. Ibid, p. 4.

5. “Swiss Military” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Army; accessed June 3, 2006.

6. John McPhee: “La Place de la Concorde Suisse”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983, p. 13.

7. SEMP Biot #245: “Civil Defense: The Swiss Approach” (August 4, 2005) at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_245.html; accessed June 3, 2006.