Grumman wrote:Prince Harry has just said that he wants to bring back national service, which is a nicer way of saying "conscription", which is a nicer way of saying "slavery". After all, if you can't persuade people to serve in the military by honest means, by paying them a salary that makes it worthwhile or only using the military in those rare cases where you have a cause worth dying for, why not just force them to serve?
Oh,
horseshit.
Plenty of very functional,
democratic nations have used conscription ever since the 1790s as a means of ensuring that the army meets its basic, minimum manpower needs and is able to defend the republic. It is not slavery, it is not tyranny. It is simply one of the different possible definitions of what
responsibilities apply to "citizenship" along with the various rights and privileges a citizen happens to enjoy.
Arguably, conscription is in some ways actively better than the alternative,
if it is practiced consistently without regard to economic class. An "all-volunteer" military in a modern society tends to result in the white-collar middle class having virtually no collective military experience and outsourcing all its self-defense needs to the underclass and the poorer rural areas. This creates a disconnect between the military and civilian worlds that in turn screws up politics in a variety of ways.
Compare the difference in the politics of Vietnam (where the youth vote had to actually fear the consequences of being drafted) and Iraq (where they didn't). It took FAR longer for antiwar sentiment to build up any real steam in Iraq, precisely because no voting bloc with real political clout actually felt much personal stake in what happened to "our troops." The only thing the average citizen stood to lose was tax dollars- abstract, intangible things. Not blood or relatives.
What was the result? Irresponsible military adventurism! That might
never have happened with a conscript military in a democracy.
Tanasinn wrote:I'm generally inclined to quote Heinlein when it comes to conscription or 'national service.' I suppose where such an idea enjoys legitimate democratic support, it's valid, though. (Of course, for it to be legitimate, those who are its targets need to be able to have a say in the matter.)
Heinlein had his limits. He was an ideologue whose military service did not extend to actual combat against a real enemy- he was discharged for medical reasons before World War II. Moreover, he was a citizen of a state that was not under credible military threat until some time in his early forties... and where the median income was low enough that it was easy to pay soldiers enough money to be cost-competitive with the prospects available to young men in their twenties who decided to pursue education or a private job.
His opinions should be regarded as just that- the opinions of a man who was young between the World Wars, and old during the Cold War. And who probably, to be quite frank, lost his grip on what was really happening in the world some time during the Nixon administration.
This is not to disrespect Heinlein as such...
One might compare him to Churchill- who young in the Victorian era, and who never really updated his basic worldview in any major capacity after his stint in the trenches during World War One. By World War Two, he was smart, he could turn a phrase, he did his best to be responsible and make good decisions... But we should never assume he was
right without being critical and careful to think things through.
The Romulan Republic wrote:The idea that the state has a right to command people to take a job that may entail dying and killing, regardless of their feelings on the matter, is abhorrent. To say that this is a national duty is to say that the nation is more important that the rights of its citizens. That is a very fascistic outlook.
Edit: Loyalty should be given voluntarily. Otherwise its meaningless. Its not loyalty or service. Its oppression and coercion.
Your mentality appears to have
skipped the entire Enlightenment.
Either you're thinking in feudal terms: state-as-heroic-king, with the chain of authority being based on a nested arrangement of warlords prepared to fight and die on behalf of their liege lord...
Or you're thinking in twentieth-century totalitarian terms: state-as-all-absorbing-overlord, which demands unconditional obedience and coerces it with the whip and the secret police).
I prefer the nineteenth century concept of a
republic. In a republic, the state is and should be FORCED to be the expression of the rights and liberties of the people. And this end is not well served if the people are not obliged to make sacrifices for the good of the republic. If you recruit all your soldiers from the poorest among you. Or if your military is such a tiny and ignored minority of your overall culture that your citizens can vote to go to war, remain at war for ten years, and barely even
notice that you have done so.
Pelranius wrote:In this day and age, conscription is only worthwhile if you intend to fight a defensive war of attrition against a conventional invasion (though 9-12 months probably isn't enough, 24 months is more realistic, but then you could start running into economic costs and rich kids running off to aboard).
Personally I'd favor thirty or thirty-six months' term of conscription, to reflect the higher standard of technical competence modern armies require, and also the lower birth rates of modern societies compared to World War era societies- the cohort of available soldiers is not as large compared to your population.
If that sounds like too long a period of time to expect 18-20 year olds to give up... bluntly, we're already forcing many of them to burn that much time pursuing college degrees that basically say "this person is not a complete fuckup" and nothing more. Or to pursue slow-burn community college "pre-university" educations because they lack the resources to do more.
Look, on some level I agree with you. On some level, I don't. I know I did waste my time there, but honestly, the country is pathetically small and unless ASEAN ever grows some balls, we are pretty much left to our own defence.
