It turns out Prince Harry is a jackass

[Lonestar]

If conscription does not produce good soldiers, then it becomes even less necessary to have a big conscript army. When the only means of controlling the soldiers is basically to have a massive stick with a small carrot, it creates massive problem for discipline.

I haven't once in this thread advocated a conscription force. I was taking umbrage with your statements acting as if your experience in your shitty little country's Armed Forces was at all common in most Western ones.

[ray245]

I haven't once in this thread advocated a conscription force. I was taking umbrage with your statements acting as if your experience in your shitty little country's Armed Forces was at all common in most Western ones.

I'm not stating my experiences can be applied to any other armed forces. Even Germany which had conscriptions a few years ago did allow them to choose other services if they wanted to. Less so in my country's case.

Not everyone has the right mindset to be a soldier, even if they did have the physical attributes to do so.

[Tiwaz]

Small detail on idea that armed forces should rely on volunteers. That is all fine and dandy if your nation is not under danger. But let's imagine that country X is not in such fortunate position. They have smallish, professional army. Great. And little reserve.

What if they are driven to war with a serious opponent. Not some pushover in the arse end of the world where AK-47 represents pinnacle of military tech, but someone who can really put their army through it's paces. And to make it worse, let's assume they also have some numbers.

People complain how conscription produces subpar soldiers with insufficient training, but how in hell you people assume that you can produce better quality troops by flash training volunteers when things have already gone to hell? Volunteer does not magically learn so much more efficiently that you could squeeze even that 6 months of conscript training into fast training of a week and have it stick. When your frontline is undergoing attrition, you just do not have luxury of starting regular paced training for troops, unless that frontline is nowhere near your nation or defended by someone/something else.

That is point of conscription in peacetime, giving sufficient basic training to so large reserve that it can be refreshed and activated to respond to conflict with enemy who is next door and isn't a pushover.
You do not go to war with army you would like to have, but with army you have.

[madd0ct0r]

The territorial army fills that role in the uk with more volunteers

[Simon_Jester]

For a nuclear power, the nuclear deterrent tends to remove this issue from consideration- any war serious enough to justify calling up the reserves you trained with conscription is also serious enough to justify going "OUR WORDS ARE BACKED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS" and threatening to drop an H-bomb down the chimney of the leader of the opposing nation. Which is, in the long run, rather cheaper and politically more palatable, despite the fact that it increases the risk of a world-wracking nuclear war.

That said, YES this was the original purpose of conscription. Conscription serves two purposes:

1) In a seriously threatening war where manpower is urgently needed, conscription can ensure that the army gets the recruits it needs, when it needs. Manpower in an all-volunteer war tends to come in spurts and bursts, usually right at the beginning of a crisis when nobody's ready to actually train all those volunteers. With conscription, the supply of recruits and the means to train the recruits are controlled by the same person, which tends to simplify things.

2) As mentioned, conscription means that there is a plentiful supply of reservists who can be activated in an emergency.

[Tiwaz]

The territorial army fills that role in the uk with more volunteers

Oooh... Mighty territorial army which, according to wikipedia, is whole 35000 men bringing wartime strength to whopping 120 000. Gosh.
Finland, one of the examples of conscription, claims wartime strength of 240 000. Which can be expanded at will by activating other portions of reserve and secondary reserve. Most likely total coming to somewhere around 500 000 somewhat trained men. This for nation of 5 million. Conventional war face to face with land border, I would bet on the massively bigger conscript army. Volunteers and professionals are not superhumans after all.

Sure, nukes change the equation a little. But point was more on situation where nukes for one reason or another are not an option or desirable. Likewise geography can provide ability to ignore need of reserves in conflict. Australia or New Zealand are hardly in great danger of invasion simply due to lack of nearby neighbours.

[His Divine Shadow]

It's not so much that we can win or resist any potential invader (basically Russia). We're just here to make the effort of trying to invade us too costly and bothersome, even if it would likely succeed.

[salm]

This is the one I am having problems wrapping my head around. You have a problem with people having a trait of following rules. Ok, I guess it is a spectrum, in that at some point blindly following rules can be seen as bad. However, I don't see where you've stipulated that or have shown that the basic trait of said veterans is elevated to that level.

I could be wrong but it looks more like a clumsy justification of not liking military things and so deciding to not like this trait. But I could be wrong.

Is it really out of the world to dislike strict adherence to rules? I don´t think such an opinion is somehow all that unusual that it warrants suspecting the opinion holder to be only supporting it in order to badmouth the military.
Since you are military, IIRC, it would support my argument, though. You, as a soldier can not wrap your head around how adherence to rules is something bad, so it must be me who is just looking for reasons to attack the military out of some sort of general dislike for the military.

Now, I can not find statistics that show that military people carry this trait more than your average Joe. But I´ve layed out my line of reasoning for assuming that they do. You agreed that soldiers get molded into having certain characteristics. One of these characteristics being adherence to authority and rules. The next line of reasoning is that I doubt that people turn off such a drilled in characteristic when they are not being soldiers, i.e. on leave or retired. If this line of reasoning is wrong, then my whole point is flawed. But since I am not aware of people changing their characteristics like their underwear there is no reason for me to assume that soldiers do so.

Yeah, the more you go on the more I'm seeing you working backwards on this issue. Look, I have sympathies with your position, if I'm seeing it right, in that large military needs to do something, might as well break a country- type thing. That said, if you go that route, you need to look at leadership, not some weird thing about how positive traits in the military are really negative. lol.

No, I can look at leadership and negative traits in soldiers in general. One does not exclude the other. It´s really quite revealing, though, how you apparently have defined adherence to rules as something intrinsically positive. You are incapable of even believing that other people find this trait to be something bad so that you have no other possibility than acusing them of just twisting a good trait into something bad because of some sort of agenda.

I'm more worried about wannabe's than actual vets. People who buy into and want the prestige, glory, mythos, and grandeur of military service without actually going into the military and learning those positive traits you don't like. Nutbar militia guys running around with guns and some old training book they bought off of Amazon but have never wanted or have been trained to work as a group, follow legal orders but refuse illegal ones, fantasize about the glory of combat against evil government forces but have never really been in danger let alone be shot at to temper those fantasies. Those are the scary ones.

People you discribe as individuals are worse.
Such people as individuals are definately not likeable but are their numbers as significant as the military? I doubt it. They are not numerous enough to shift populations the way the number of armies can.
Furthermore, the presence of some loons doesn´t have any bearing on the militarys impact on societies.

[salm]

Would this assessment depend in part on the overall character and nature of the society?
I mean, if you have a society where general disorder among the civilian population is very high, perhaps they could use a dose of people who are quite orderly. Complementary opposites, and that sort of thing.
Conversely, in a place where the civilians are well-ordered, perhaps adding super-orderly soldiers to them in large numbers will cause greater problems.
Then again, one might reverse the argument equally well.

Perhaps. But the societies (at least the western world) we live in are super orderly with lots of people sheepishly following.

On the other hand, what if soldiers are more likely to end up with post-traumatic stress as a result of being sent into a combat zone in smaller numbers, and thus having to fight a longer and bloodier campaign to defeat the enemy?

Well, one has to find some sort of balance between efficiency and numbers. A large army of non conscripts will be stronger than a small army of non conscripts but if you manage to make a small army of non conscripts as good as a large army of conscripts I prefer the small army.

What made Sparta so appalling was not so much the existence of a large class of soldiers (not, proportionately, much larger than the portion of residents expected to be prepared to fight in other Greek city-states). It was how that class of soldiers was raised, and how brutally they oppressed the slaves that did all the normal civilian work.

So if you could chose between a Sparta in which there are lots of soldiers who treat their slaves badly and a Sparta in which here are few soldiers who treat their slaves bady you´d probably chose the latter.
The same is true for modern armys. If I can choose a system which requires few soldiers who influence society negatively I will prefer that to a system which requires lots of soldiers who influnce society negatively.

This isn´t rocket science. I just think that we fundamentally disagree on the question if soldiers come with a negative, positive or neutral impact on society.

[Simon_Jester]

This is the one I am having problems wrapping my head around. You have a problem with people having a trait of following rules. Ok, I guess it is a spectrum, in that at some point blindly following rules can be seen as bad. However, I don't see where you've stipulated that or have shown that the basic trait of said veterans is elevated to that level.

I could be wrong but it looks more like a clumsy justification of not liking military things and so deciding to not like this trait. But I could be wrong.

Is it really out of the world to dislike strict adherence to rules? I don´t think such an opinion is somehow all that unusual that it warrants suspecting the opinion holder to be only supporting it in order to badmouth the military.

Since you are military, IIRC, it would support my argument, though. You, as a soldier can not wrap your head around how adherence to rules is something bad, so it must be me who is just looking for reasons to attack the military out of some sort of general dislike for the military.

I as a civilian have the same problem.

I mean, yes, in theory having large chunks of the population used to following orders they don't like can be exploited. But lots of civilians have that trait in a normal society, and moreover there are positive applications of the trait. Therefore, it is not true that soldiers are bad for society because they have the trait, because the trait is neither especially bad nor especially unique to soldiers.

So this strikes me as a specious objection based on anti-military stereotyping.

Now, I can not find statistics that show that military people carry this trait more than your average Joe. But I´ve layed out my line of reasoning for assuming that they do. You agreed that soldiers get molded into having certain characteristics. One of these characteristics being adherence to authority and rules. The next line of reasoning is that I doubt that people turn off such a drilled in characteristic when they are not being soldiers, i.e. on leave or retired. If this line of reasoning is wrong, then my whole point is flawed. But since I am not aware of people changing their characteristics like their underwear there is no reason for me to assume that soldiers do so.

The flaw here is the assumption that this is actually a problem, or a serious enough one that it should override other questions like "do we have enough soldiers to defend the country?"

No, I can look at leadership and negative traits in soldiers in general. One does not exclude the other. It´s really quite revealing, though, how you apparently have defined adherence to rules as something intrinsically positive. You are incapable of even believing that other people find this trait to be something bad so that you have no other possibility than acusing them of just twisting a good trait into something bad because of some sort of agenda.

The other possible explanation is that you may have built up in your mind this picture of all soldiers as arrogant rule-bound goose-stepping proto-fascists, and decided they are a threat to society, when this is in general not true. In which case the same things would happen- others would conclude that you are deliberately focusing on your "soldiers BAD" instinct and ignoring the real source of the problem.

Personally, I think that other explanation makes more sense than the "something is very wrong with Knife's mind" explanation.

I'm more worried about wannabe's than actual vets. People who buy into and want the prestige, glory, mythos, and grandeur of military service without actually going into the military and learning those positive traits you don't like. Nutbar militia guys running around with guns and some old training book they bought off of Amazon but have never wanted or have been trained to work as a group, follow legal orders but refuse illegal ones, fantasize about the glory of combat against evil government forces but have never really been in danger let alone be shot at to temper those fantasies. Those are the scary ones.

People you discribe as individuals are worse.
Such people as individuals are definately not likeable but are their numbers as significant as the military? I doubt it. They are not numerous enough to shift populations the way the number of armies can.

In the US, they are- these few hundred thousand "militia" lunatics have provided an ongoing support base for acts of domestic terrorism and organized lawbreaking in the past.

By contrast, veterans in the US have done almost nothing disruptive to the social order since the 1930s, and even then their actions (those of the Bonus Army) were arguably a positive and appropriate protest.

Would this assessment depend in part on the overall character and nature of the society?

I mean, if you have a society where general disorder among the civilian population is very high, perhaps they could use a dose of people who are quite orderly. Complementary opposites, and that sort of thing.

Conversely, in a place where the civilians are well-ordered, perhaps adding super-orderly soldiers to them in large numbers will cause greater problems.

Then again, one might reverse the argument equally well.

Perhaps. But the societies (at least the western world) we live in are super orderly with lots of people sheepishly following.

Do we live in the same Western world?

Can you actually point to any real problem in the Western world today caused by "people are obeying the government too much?"

The only ones I can think of are caused by cases where the government is doing something bad with popular support, because a large fraction of the population already thinks it right and proper to do the bad thing. In which case it really doesn't matter whether 1% or 5% or 10% of the people have a strong instinct to obey orders. Either way, if the government has a large popular support base for oppressing or spying on people, or for tolerating economic oppression by private organizations... that support base will 'obey orders' in the sense of allowing the oppression to occur.

What made Sparta so appalling was not so much the existence of a large class of soldiers (not, proportionately, much larger than the portion of residents expected to be prepared to fight in other Greek city-states). It was how that class of soldiers was raised, and how brutally they oppressed the slaves that did all the normal civilian work.

So if you could chose between a Sparta in which there are lots of soldiers who treat their slaves badly and a Sparta in which here are few soldiers who treat their slaves bady you´d probably chose the latter.

A Sparta in which the warrior-citizen class was smaller wouldn't BE Sparta.

A Sparta in which the warrior-citizen class was less brutal and less detached from the realities of civilian life would be, well... pretty much exactly like all the other Greek city-states where that was the case.

So spending your time fixated on the number of soldiers is a mistake, because that wasn't really the problem to begin with.

The same is true for modern armys. If I can choose a system which requires few soldiers who influence society negatively I will prefer that to a system which requires lots of soldiers who influnce society negatively.

This isn´t rocket science. I just think that we fundamentally disagree on the question if soldiers come with a negative, positive or neutral impact on society.

If you think that modern soldiers treat modern civilians like the Spartans treated their helots you are a delusional fool.

If you don't think that... all I said above still applies.

[salm]

If you can´t accept that I genuinely find too much adherence to rules and authority a bad trait and keep believing that the only reason I´m saying it is to complain about the military then the discussion is useless.
My whole argument hinges on this very fact and there is no way for me to prove that my opinion is true.

So instead I´ll just claim that you don´t really believe that rules are important. I think you would love to live in some party anarchistic state where everybody does whatever he wants to without any kind of external rules to follow. You are just saying otherwise because reasons.

[Knife]

Is it really out of the world to dislike strict adherence to rules? I don´t think such an opinion is somehow all that unusual that it warrants suspecting the opinion holder to be only supporting it in order to badmouth the military.
Since you are military, IIRC, it would support my argument, though. You, as a soldier can not wrap your head around how adherence to rules is something bad, so it must be me who is just looking for reasons to attack the military out of some sort of general dislike for the military.

Yes, honestly it is kind of weird. I think I already went half way with you by agreeing in my second post that some lock step mind washed version of people blindly following rules can be bad, but that is not what is being discussed here. You have not quantified anything and continue with just a vague 'following rules is bad when done by some large group of people'. To boot, it has been 17 years since I was in the Marines, I would hardly describe myself as a soldier anymore (technically never did), and don't see how your theory would apply to me anymore. That said, whether from military training or just plain been in the work force long enough, I'm very much of the opinion that 'following rules' and 'adhering to the system' is very much in my favor in life and beneficial to me. Now I call it socialization but you can call it what you want, still weird.

Now, I can not find statistics that show that military people carry this trait more than your average Joe. But I´ve layed out my line of reasoning for assuming that they do. You agreed that soldiers get molded into having certain characteristics. One of these characteristics being adherence to authority and rules. The next line of reasoning is that I doubt that people turn off such a drilled in characteristic when they are not being soldiers, i.e. on leave or retired. If this line of reasoning is wrong, then my whole point is flawed. But since I am not aware of people changing their characteristics like their underwear there is no reason for me to assume that soldiers do so.

So you have no facts, just ideas. Ok. I agree that people who join the military get shown how to work in groups, how those groups working in concert can achieve things individuals can't, sure. Where your line of reasoning breaks down is why or how this is bad?

No, I can look at leadership and negative traits in soldiers in general. One does not exclude the other. It´s really quite revealing, though, how you apparently have defined adherence to rules as something intrinsically positive. You are incapable of even believing that other people find this trait to be something bad so that you have no other possibility than acusing them of just twisting a good trait into something bad because of some sort of agenda.

Ok, sure you can do two (or more) things at once. The point, really, of that was your line of reasoning is weird and does not make sense. So we, the readers, are forced to try to figure out what is really going on. You find this trait bad, lets drop the rest and focus on this nugget. Why is it bad, can you elaborate and provide evidence, analogies, reasoning, something?

People you discribe as individuals are worse.
Such people as individuals are definately not likeable but are their numbers as significant as the military? I doubt it. They are not numerous enough to shift populations the way the number of armies can.
Furthermore, the presence of some loons doesn´t have any bearing on the militarys impact on societies.

Similar to above, just trying to figure out what you're really after. If you can elaborate on your actual point we wouldn't have to guess. That said, you can make lots of arguments on why the military's impact on society is positive. From various forms of research and development on technology and medical technology, down right imperialist shit of securing adequate resources for our society, a sort of social ladder for poor economic class people to access education and a better life, and a group of people who curiously enough can work together in large groups for the benefit of the whole, not the individual.

If you can´t accept that I genuinely find too much adherence to rules and authority a bad trait and keep believing that the only reason I´m saying it is to complain about the military then the discussion is useless.
My whole argument hinges on this very fact and there is no way for me to prove that my opinion is true.

Ok, it's all your opinion and you cannot prove it nor have you tried. /thread.

So instead I´ll just claim that you don´t really believe that rules are important. I think you would love to live in some party anarchistic state where everybody does whatever he wants to without any kind of external rules to follow. You are just saying otherwise because reasons.

Wha?

[Simon_Jester]

If you can´t accept that I genuinely find too much adherence to rules and authority a bad trait and keep believing that the only reason I´m saying it is to complain about the military then the discussion is useless.

My whole argument hinges on this very fact and there is no way for me to prove that my opinion is true.

My objection is that while there is a limiting case in which this becomes a bad thing, you have not established that the average military veteran has enough of this trait that it becomes a bad thing under normal conditions.

Your argument is "soldiers are used to obeying orders, that's a problem." My response is "soldiers don't obey orders in civilian life, to a sufficient degree to become a problem." I can support this by empirical reference to many societies where large populations with military experience didn't suddenly turn into mindless totalitarian dictatorships, and where soldiers reintegrated back into a fairly normal civil society. So I don't consider this a major concern.

The problem is, I can't fathom why you do consider this a major concern, and you seem to have difficulty explaining or justifying this with any reasoning other than something that runs like "obviously, veterans are a threat to society because they follow orders, which makes them a threat to society." And that's... kind of self-referential.

Perhaps I should not accuse you of bias, but it's hard for me to grasp why you would argue as you do without it.

[Broomstick]

This is the one I am having problems wrapping my head around. You have a problem with people having a trait of following rules. Ok, I guess it is a spectrum, in that at some point blindly following rules can be seen as bad. However, I don't see where you've stipulated that or have shown that the basic trait of said veterans is elevated to that level.

I could be wrong but it looks more like a clumsy justification of not liking military things and so deciding to not like this trait. But I could be wrong.

Is it really out of the world to dislike strict adherence to rules? I don´t think such an opinion is somehow all that unusual that it warrants suspecting the opinion holder to be only supporting it in order to badmouth the military.
Since you are military, IIRC, it would support my argument, though. You, as a soldier can not wrap your head around how adherence to rules is something bad, so it must be me who is just looking for reasons to attack the military out of some sort of general dislike for the military.

Funny, like Simon I, too, am a civilian with the same "problem". Yes, I do think following the rules is a good trait in a person. There are, of course, times and places where following the rules is not a good thing, but they are exceptions.

You can't have a civilization without rules, or people willing to follow those rules the majority of the time.

[Grumman]

It might not be precisely what Salm is talking about, but I do think it's dangerous for the government to round up young adults as a group and tell them they are not allowed to publicly express political opinions, or that publicly denouncing criminals in government is espionage and potentially punishable by death.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but soldiers are only very temporarily required to refrain from expressing political opinions, so long as they remain on the job, basically.

Denouncing crimes that unambiguously happened and are not purely a matter of a policy decision (as opposed to making political assertions) is supposed to be part of a soldier's duty anyway and there are supposed to be whistleblower protections in place.

If those things aren't respected, the divide between civilian and soldier makes little difference- the only reason Snowden is better off than Manning is that Snowden escaped arrest.

[salm]

@Simon Jester and Knife:

I think you are right. I did base my assertion too much on gut feeling and not enough on evidence.
I did some research on comparing obedience of off duty and retired soldiers to obedience of non soldiers and simply couldn´t find any scientific studies. I find that rather odd because it seems like a pretty obvious and interesting field.

The only thing I found that is somehow connected to this was a military site warning soliders of the dangers of online scammers. This site argued that soldiers are esspecially susceptible to fraud because - among other things - they are conditioned to accept authority more easily than other people. But I can´t find it anymore and it wasn´t a scientific source anyway.

[Knife]

No worries man.

[Beowulf]

It might not be precisely what Salm is talking about, but I do think it's dangerous for the government to round up young adults as a group and tell them they are not allowed to publicly express political opinions, or that publicly denouncing criminals in government is espionage and potentially punishable by death.

There's a decent amount of training in the US that reminds service members that they can express political opinions. Just not in uniform, and not military decisions by the chain of command.

[Tiwaz]

It's not so much that we can win or resist any potential invader (basically Russia). We're just here to make the effort of trying to invade us too costly and bothersome, even if it would likely succeed.

Which is all it requires. Guarantee sufficient attrition and you make cost/profit-ratio of invasion unacceptable for invader. After all, wars are fought to gain something not just for shits and giggles.

And sufficient military reserve in my view is better deterrent than nukes. Even if you had nukes, you might not want to use them even if you are losing. This assuming that there is no reason to presume invader to be planning anything genocidal and having means to nuke you back. For society not run like North Korea, leaders might if forced to choose may very well consider it better to have their land and people to be better off occupied than annihilated. Of course, this would require invader who is willing to call the bluff but else being quite civil.

[Simon_Jester]

The only thing I found that is somehow connected to this was a military site warning soliders of the dangers of online scammers. This site argued that soldiers are esspecially susceptible to fraud because - among other things - they are conditioned to accept authority more easily than other people. But I can´t find it anymore and it wasn´t a scientific source anyway.

There is arguably a more important reason- soldiers join the military at a relatively early age; many go directly from living with their parents to living in a barracks in a very regimented lifestyle.

There IS a well-known tendency for veterans to have trouble adjusting to the wide array of possibilities and options in civilian life, to not having a sergeant to ask for an opinion, to being exposed more heavily to scammers and tricksters.

[PainRack]

Does your country also go on silly imperial adventures for dumb reasons?

I saw Singaporean naval vessels all over the Gulf and Northern Arabian Sea. It's safe to say that Sinagpores adventures are limited by their physical population limits more than anything.

FWIW, whenever our VBBS team visited fishing boats the locals would complain about how "the Chinese" were stopping them and beating the shit out of them. I don't think the Singaporean navy was very professional in terms of conducting MIO.

That's....surprising. my understanding is that we conducted relatively few inspection parties during the Somalian piracy crisis.... Or are you referring to Operation Iraqi Freedom ? That was a LST with commandoes on board and we kinda went for max force protection since the war was so politically unpopular...the professionalism of the Timor patrols were generally well liked by the villagers, remarkable when one considers the racial factors...


And frankly. It's just Prince Harry using the good old moral fibre argument...what's new about that?