That assessment is not only about tanks on a distant steppe. Bern now talks routinely about espionage, sabotage, cyber operations, and hybrid pressure that sit below the threshold of open war. The militia army, still the backbone of Swiss defense, faces chronic personnel shortages at the same time that those threats are multiplying. Command structures that were designed for a Cold War-era mass mobilization look less well suited to a world of drones, disinformation, and sudden shocks to critical infrastructure.

The State Secretariat for Security Policy notes another uncomfortable fact: Switzerland is surrounded by EU and NATO members. Their stability still underwrites Swiss security. Their politics, however, no longer leave Bern as much room to stand apart. Since 2022, Switzerland has adopted European sanctions against Russia—an unusual step for a country that spent centuries staying clear of other states’ conflicts. Neutrality has not been abandoned. It has been stretched.

The consultation launched this week focuses on reorganizing military command so that political leadership, the armed forces, and civilian authorities can act more quickly when a crisis does not look like a classic invasion. Officials also want to consolidate civil protection services, folding the old distinction between “the army’s job” and “everyone else’s job” into a tighter system for blackouts, infrastructure attacks, and large-scale emergencies.

The second track is more politically explosive: compulsory service. Switzerland’s militia model depends on a broad pool of trained citizens rather than a large standing force. If that pool keeps shrinking, the country either lowers its ambitions, lengthens service, widens who is called up, or spends far more to professionalize parts of the force. The Federal Council has put the whole architecture on the table rather than tinker at the edges.

None of this, in official language, is a bid to join NATO or to scrap neutrality. It is framed as adaptation: keeping armed neutrality credible when the neighborhood is less predictable and the threats less visible.

Swiss neutrality was never pacifism. It was armed non-alignment, codified after the Napoleonic wars and practiced as a hedgehog strategy: expensive enough to make conquest unattractive, impartial enough to keep great powers from treating Switzerland as a prize or a base. The army was the people; the people were the army; the mountains did the rest.

That model worked best when Europe’s wars had fronts, and when Switzerland’s neighbors were not themselves scrambling to rearm. The war in Ukraine, Europe’s rush to replenish stockpiles, and a denser web of hybrid activity have made the old assumptions look thinner. A country that once could treat NATO as a wall it did not have to join now finds that wall under strain—and finds itself under pressure to show where it stands even while insisting it stands apart.

Adopting EU sanctions was the first public crack in that posture. Intelligence warnings about espionage and influence operations are the second. Army reform is the third. Each is modest on its own. Together they suggest that Bern no longer believes the twentieth-century settlement will automatically deliver twenty-first-century security.

Any Swiss government that talks about “strengthening its political stance” while remaining neutral is walking a ridge line. Domestic opinion still prizes the militia, conscription as a civic rite, and the idea that Switzerland is not a party to other people’s alliances. At the same time, business, diplomacy, and security officials know that isolation is not what it used to be. Supply chains, finance, data, and energy tie Switzerland to Europe whether or not it sits in Brussels or at NATO’s table.

Reorganizing command and civil protection is the easier sell: it sounds like competence. Revising compulsory service is harder. It touches identity. Who serves, for how long, and in what kind of force will decide whether Switzerland still has a citizen army or something closer to a hybrid professional one with a militia veneer.

The consultation will not settle those questions overnight. It does signal that the era of treating neutrality as a finished argument is over. For a country that made a virtue of being unmoved, the admission that the protective environment is eroding from three directions is itself a strategic shift.

Switzerland is not preparing to become a different kind of country. It is preparing to remain the same kind of country in a worse neighborhood—and discovering that the old tools may not be enough. 

By Paul Bumman