Introduction
How is the Military in Albania and how does it work to maintain Sucity and fight terrorism? In terms of Military and security forces, we have the Republic of Albania Armed Forces (Forcat e Armatosura të Republikës së Shqipërisë (FARSH); aka Albanian Armed Forces (AAF)): Land Forces, Naval Force (includes Coast Guard), Air Forces
Ministry of Interior: Guard of the Republic, State Police (includes the Border and Migration Police) (2025).
Ministry of Interior: Guard of the Republic, State Police (includes the Border and Migration Police) (2025).
In Albania, the Albanian Armed Forces (AAF) are responsible for defending the country’s independence, sovereignty, and territory, assisting with internal security, providing disaster and humanitarian relief, and participating in international peacekeeping missions; the AAF is a small, lightly armed force that has been undergoing a modernization effort to improve its ability to fulfill NATO missions; the AAF has contributed small numbers of forces to several NATO missions since Albania joined NATO in 2009, including peacekeeping/stability missions in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq, and multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria and Latvia; it has also contributed to EU and UN missions (2025)
Security and military information of Albania
| Military and security service personnel strengths | approximately 7,500 active-duty military personnel (2025) |
|---|---|
| Military equipment inventories and acquisitions | since joining NATO, the military has been in the process of modernizing by retiring its inventory of Soviet-era weapons and replacing them with Western equipment, including donated and secondhand deliveries (2024) |
| Military service age and obligation | 18-27 (up to 32 in some cases) for voluntary military service for men and women; conscription abolished 2010 (2024). note: as of 2024, women comprised about 15% of the military's full-time personnel |
| Military deployments | . |
| Military expenditures | |
| Military Expenditures 2025 | 2% of GDP (2025 est.) |
| Military Expenditures 2024 | 1.7% of GDP (2024 est.) |
| Military Expenditures 2023 | 1.7% of GDP (2023 est.) |
| Military Expenditures 2022 | 1.2% of GDP (2022 est.) |
| Military Expenditures 2021 | 1.2% of GDP (2021 est.) |
Terrorism
In Albania, the different Terrorist group(s) inlcude: Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps/Qods Force; Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS)
All Important Facts about Albania
Want to know more about Albania? Check all different factbooks for Albania below.
