Evaluation of the armed forces websites of the European countries

The armed forces are a critical component of the national security strategy of several European countries. Despite the peace that has succeeded the cold war, several armies, in peacetime, have elements recruited with promises of individual opportunities. The countries have two forms of recruitment of their troops: by volunteering or by mandatory incorporation. Following the trends of the modern world, interconnected in a network, it becomes essential to the institutions to mark their presence on the Internet. The Armed Forces in their various branches are no exception; there are numerous sites with relevant information, being used as a channel for dissemination and fundraising. Since young people represent a large share of the population using the Internet, and this is the target population for recruitment, it becomes mandatory to use the internet as a communication channel between them. It was carried out a qualitative study of all sites of European armed forces, and their branches, in order to assess their quality and differences. The approach focused on the evaluation of sites for their ability to inform, update, quantity and quality of content, service availability, use and visual attractiveness, and ease of communication. The study has also tried to verify if the countries with volunteer incorporation were producing websites with higher levels of quality, reflecting the need to invest in order to recruit. On the other hand, countries with compulsive incorporation could have lower investments in their websites, once the satisfaction of the need for staff is guarantied. We considered 38 countries, with an initial usability study where data about the characteristics considered important for proper construction of a website as well as for a good and easy relationship with the user of this type of site were collected. This research defined the parameters to evaluate the sites and groups were created with the parameters of the different areas of analysis of those sites. The evaluation shows that there are differences in quality of sites for each of the countries evaluated in terms of graphics, usability and content, and that where there is a greater difference between the countries is on the number of existing sites by country. It is clear that there are countries that invest strategically in this area while others do not. It was also clear that there is a difference between Eastern and Western Europe in the quality and investment made in the sites of their armed forces. Dividing the countries by their incorporation system, the differences are smaller, both in terms of number of sites for the military, either as to the average assessment of each scheme. In countries where the incorporation is mandatory, investment in independent sites for each branch has not been neglected for a considerable part of the countries, a little more than half. But it is in countries where recruitment is made on a voluntary basis that there are more sites for the different branches, which may indicate an existing competitiveness for staff recruitment.