Finnish Army (1939)

Finnish Army Suomen maavoimat Finlands armé
Finnish Army emblem
Active	1918–present
Country	Finland
Role	Ground defence
Size	3,490 staff 770 civilians 20,100 conscipts 25,000 reservists (2015) 27 aircraft
Engagements	Finnish Civil War Winter War Continuation War Lapland War
Website	maavoimat.fi/en/
Commanders
Commander	Lieutenant General Seppo Toivonen

The Finnish Army (Finnish: Maavoimat, Swedish: Armén) is the land forces branch of the Finnish Defence Forces. Today's Army is divided into six branches: the infantry (which includes armoured units), field artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, engineers, signals, and materiel troops. Finnish Army commander since 1 August 2014 is Lieutenant General Seppo Toivonen.

The duties of the Finnish Army are three-fold. They are

In addition to these tasks, the Army is responsible for conscription and personnel management of reserve.

Because Finland is not under direct military threat, the current Army is, as it has been since the end of Second World War, in peace-time training formation. This means that its brigades (Finnish: joukko-osasto) are not meant to be operational combat units but training formations. According to the "troop production" doctrine (Finnish: joukkotuotanto), peace-time units will train each batch of conscripts they receive for a specific war-time unit. After the end of training, the conscripts are demobilised into reserve. During regular refresher exercises and in case of a crisis, the reserve unit will be activated and deployed in the formation it trained in during conscription. Thus, the peace-time structure of the Army does not give any meaningful information about the mobilised structure or about the areas where the units would be used.

Between 1809 and 1917 Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire as the Grand Duchy of Finland. Between 1881 and 1901 the Grand Duchy had its own army. Before that several other military units had also been formed while Finland belonged to Sweden.