Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds | Hacker News Reader

Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds

telegraph.co.uk

33 pointswalterbell76 comments

Fun fact and actually the law in Germany is that if you change your gender and the army calls for war your original gender counts.

Army recruitment is when the fun is over.

> kind of a fringe take (PS: I just finished watching the movie Her and am in a weird place)

I thought we are closer to robot soldiers, Geoffrey Hinton said US army wants to have 50% robots by 2030, seems strange to invest in human soldiers when they are gonna have T-800 fairly soon. Is there some populist reason for conscription, or perhaps a weird twist to get into UBI?

Reminded me of this episode of Yes, Prime Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks

    are you worried about the raising crime amongst teenagers, do you think there is a lack of discipline in schools, do you think our young people lack authority and leadership in their lives, would you be in favor of introducing national service?

    are you worried about the danger of war, are you worried about the growth of armaments, do you think there is danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill, do you think its wrong to force people to take up arms against their will? would you oppose the reintroduction of national service?

I thought Germany already had conscription, AKA mandatory service. Does this eliminate the conscientious objector alternatives like hospital volunteering?

Germany hasn't had any mandatory service since more than a decade

Conscription in Germany is technically there, but was "paused" in 2011. It could be re-activated, or "un-paused" with less red tape than introducing it from scratch.

If re-introduced, there would likely be the same procedure in place for conscientious objectors that existed in the past (I am one, and declined military service in Germany at the time, opting for 15 months of community service instead of then 12 months of miltary service), namely stating your objection in writing when you are called to report for your conscription related health check.

EDIT: typo fixed.

Conscription was suspended (in 2011, iirc).

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/von-optimierungen-bis-hi...

^According to that article, they want to consider extending conscription to other essential services, like fire departments.

https://archive.is/mFqHI

Why don't presidents fight the war, why do they always send the poor...

This won’t happen as long as The Greens and/or FDP (continental liberals) are part of the Government.

lol what on earth is “continental liberals”? I think their equivalent in the US or UK are the libertarians.

Well yes, but also not really - I mean by no means are they as libertarian as the US eqivalent.

No, absolutely not. Libertarians are way way more extreme than the liberals here.

lol no idea, I wanted to type “classical liberals”. But no, they are not at all libertarians. They are pro-western, pro-EU, no Russia-simping and no brain-deadness.

FDP is neoliberal. They are pro business and free market.

There are people I’d describe as “neoliberal” in the party, but your description of “neoliberal” is not correct in any sense that it’s used in political science.

Also, you seem to be unaware of the point that the need to specify the type of “liberal” origins not due to the different flavours that we have in Europe, but due to the fact that “liberal” (without the “classical”) is understood as something in the US that would be considered slightly left of most “Social Democrats” in European terms.

What I find interesting in modern techowars, especially one with a declining demographics situation as Germany is ... draft older people!

From a policy standpoint, it means less "lost productive years".

I get that historically grabbing dumb and easily inspired disposable males was the way because there was almost always disposable males in the old demographics for the last 10,000 years.

But modern urbanized society isn't like that. Children are precious, old retired people are disposable.

The West is being far to passive on Ukraine. There should be large amounts of European forces in Ukraine right now. I'm talking 100,000 minimum.

Russia has openly stated its goals to attack NATO if/when it gets Ukraine. Putin views Europe as a fat pig ripe for conquest, full of weak and cowardly leaders.

Total population mobilization has to be planned now. The Polish and Balkans, the most willing fighters in NATO in the next line of countries, should likely be actively mobilized for total conventional war.

We can look at what's happening in Ukraine right now to see how well that's working. The truth of it is that no matter how much technology is deployed land can only be held with infantry.

Being infantry is still physically demanding and cannot be usefully replaced by technology. Maybe they aren't marching hundreds of kilometres on foot anymore, but they still need to endure the weather, minor injuries, and move through forests carrying heavy packs.

Physically, being infantry is beyond most people in their sixties.

That’s all true, except that something like 2/3 to 3/4 of most armies are not front line troops (support, logistics, intelligence, admin, etc.) it seems many if not most of those roles could be adequately fulfilled by people that are not particularly fit (e.g. you don’t need a 28yo doing aircraft maintenance or driving a truck)

Depends on the type of fighting being done, especially if there's a confrontation with an enemy filled with younger soldiers. You do lose agility and speed as you age.

Additionally, there's the matter of obedience. If you're being conscripted because you're "disposable" and closer to death anyway, you're more likely to ignore orders you disagree with. Even incarceration carries less of a threat.

On the obedience front I’m inclined to disagree, if you tell a 19yo private to go scale a wall and clear a house you don’t get a lot of questions, if you tell a senior NCO to do that, you get all sorts of questions (most very pertinent) and may likely get told to sod off unless you have good answers!

Ukraine seems to be trying to find a middle ground here. Until recently, they only drafted men over the age of 27 (last month it was lowered to 25). Of course, even that age is still going to wreck your demographics. On the other hand, I'm not sure that retired old people have enough stamina to last long on the battlefield. Many of Ukraine's units have been fighting for over a year with no R&R.

All Soviet countries fell into sharp demographic/fertility collapse in the 90s when the USSR collapsed, and most never entirely pulled out of it, including Ukraine. So most have severe demographic issues in the ~20-30 year old range. Conscripting this group is reckless for these nations, because not only are there not many of them, but they're who should be creating the next generations. Here is Ukraine's population pyramid [1]. For contrast this is what an extremely healthy population pyramid looks like. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ukraine_population_pyrami...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#/media/...

Conscription is slavery and slavery is evil. If a country has to resort to slavery then it doesn't deserve to exist.

I agree. The average person is so removed from violence and conflict so they feel no moral or survivalist need to fight; thus, governments step in and force them--or should I say, politicians. Let's have politicians' own children go to war first and then conscript people.

This is some kind of idealistic thinking.

Putin wants war, he doesn't care if your head of government/country has children or not. He just wants to expand his soviet union or to gain more influence or whatever the current reason for his invasions is.

This "let the politicians fight it out" would only make sense if there was a real disagreement between two countries, not just one guy saying "I want your land and your people" and the other one going "fuck now, I don't want anything to do with you".

> Conscription is slavery and slavery is evil. If a country has to resort to slavery then it doesn't deserve to exist.

Come on, that's nonsense logic. "Lets' make sloppy comparisons and reason from them," is never goes anywhere good. It's the same way you get to other nonsense like "taxation is theft."

If you live in a community, that means sometimes the community makes decisions for you. That's not slavery, or theft, or any inflammatory word you care to choose to describe it.

>If you live in a community, that means sometimes the community makes decisions for you.

Your logic is the nonsense logic used by every evil man to justify whatever atrocity they feel necessary, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century alone. If every human being in the world stood up and said no to taxation and no to conscription, there wouldn't have been any world wars or genocides.

It's not the "community" that decides to war, in almost all cases politicians who have a vested financial interest in war and nothing to lose, sending common people to die who have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

> Your logic is the nonsense logic used by every evil man to justify whatever atrocity they feel necessary, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century alone.

I think your problem is you're being too black and white and focusing too much on extreme examples. It's absolutely true that if you live in a community, that means sometimes the community makes decisions for you. If an "evil man" somehow gets control of that community, that's a different issue.

> If every human being in the world stood up and said no to taxation and no to conscription, there wouldn't have been any world wars or genocides.

Maybe so, but what other bad things would that impossible collective decision have caused (which is particularly true that you talk about taxation and conscription in the same breath). Everyone would certainly be living in a much lower level of technological development, without access to effective modern medical care and likely subject to famine, etc. Without taxation, you don't have law beyond custom, and without that you have no modern capitalism.

And that kind of collective decision is a fantasy. Reality means the people who "say no to taxation and conscription" become the prey of people who do and organize themselves at a higher level.

> in almost all cases politicians who have a vested financial interest in war and nothing to lose

I don't believe you grasp the intricacies of motivations of people who decided to be politicians and won the race to the top where they can start wars at will. To many of them the root cause is not money, which they already have more than they can consume in many lifetimes, but the desire to grow their power.

> Come on, that's nonsense logic. "Lets' make sloppy comparisons and reason from them," is never goes anywhere good.

Be kind. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.[1]

Conscription is slavery is not a comparison. Conscription satisfies any definition of slavery not designed to exclude conscription. Is it justifiable is a different question. Is taxation theft is a different question.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There have been plenty of moments in history where if a country doesn't resort to conscription then it won't continue to exist. If a country exists in a rough neighborhood, then its people must, unfortunately, expect to be enslaved for a few years of their life. In some ways, humanity has made little progress in the last hundred years. It's a shame that some large countries continue to have leaders that are so determined to expand the size of their country no matter the cost. It's also a shame that so many countries continue to trade with such tyrants.

This is why it's so important to have a nuclear deterrent. If Russia were to invade the UK, and there was no hope of a volunteer military defending us, I strongly hope our politicians would have the courage to use our entire nuclear arsenal. Regardless of death toll, this is morally superior to enslaving people.

I understand this, to some extent, but I would rather learn Russian and get along with a new set of completely uncaring oligarchs, not that dissimilar to the ones we have now, than end all life on earth.

It wouldn't even end all life in the involved countries. Submitting to military aggression is also morally wrong. Nuclear retaliation is a heroic sacrifice that does good to the rest of the world by discouraging future wars.

Furthermore, it's no longer medieval times, where the citizens are personally loyal to a king who is expected to be replaced by another king some time. The invention of nationalism guarantees civilian resistance, so the only way to safely rule a subjugated country in modern times is with a brutal North Korean-style regime.

Imagine the conditions for German 18 year olds if a country like Russia, which has no qualms about conscription, or forced labor for non-Russians starts to take European countries.

Required military service sucks, but so does Putin.

This is wonderful. Democracies should use mercenary armies sparingly. Conscription should be broad and blind. Remember a small fraction of the military is actually in combat. Most of the military is logistics at scale.

I completely disagree. Military service should be voluntary considering the risks and long term mental health effects.

If my country ever implements conscription, the first thing I’m doing is getting another country’s citizenship at all cost, maybe the “enemy”’s out of spite.

You would most likely be doing IT or writing code to support logistics.

Maybe with conscription you would be more involved with how your country uses the military?

You both have very valid takes. If we had to implement any system like this, I would prefer it to be some type of national service system where each young person could chose an area of social welfare or military service to give back in a way that aligned with their goals and moral view.

It may surprise you that the happiest country in the world, Finland, has universal conscription.

Well, Finland has generally good governance and I would assume less racism. I wouldn’t mind getting conscripted if I actually supported my country and had confidence that the military isn’t used to carry out evil.

Its been a while since germanys army has been used for evil.,.

I wasn’t talking about Germany specifically.

Broad conscription solves the kind of problems that are best solved when an large army and the soldiers have been trained for a only few months. It's not clear to me that Germany has that sort of problem.

This should not be necessary. By paying enough you can have a volunteer army, as the U.S. does.

The US military itself reports it’s experiencing a severe recruitment shortage.

The US Army all-volunteer force only seemed like it was working well in the 1980s and 1990s because of persistently high unemployment, low opportunity, and general discrimination against African Americans in the civilian economy. With unemployment at or below 5% for all races, military recruiting must be effectively impossible.

Correct. The primary beneficiaries of conscription are the working class.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

The veterans for those conflicts often went in enthused, and came back entirely disillusioned. Pretty much created a machine for damaging their reputation, which ran for decades.

This is an interesting take and it sounds sensible. I wonder what the labor market looks like in Germany.

As far as the US goes, I'm also curious how the dawning changes led by AI technologies in the workplace and budding trends in the labor pool will affect their military's posture recruitment-wise.

We've seen them attempt to appeal to more diverse crowds in the last few years, but I think that the particular demographic(s) in question are most likely to equate serving the armed forces in general as bad.

A generation comprised of mostly men without college educations who are not satisfied with Door-Dashing or "Twitching" for a living may not feel the same.

By giving up enough you can have the possibility of having the U.S. army help you. Unless they for some reason don’t want to.

Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince talks about mercenary armies. Briefly, as everything in that book.

Russia has a huge army. Its use of mercenaries is not brandishing the russian flag for invasions

"Mercenaries" in pre-modern times were people whose career was soldiering. They were available to any principality that would pay them. Not the same as volunteer military now who only fight for their own country.

Russia is a different case altogether.

A different way to think about it: if the army has to use everyone (in this case, an IDF-style gender-blind everyone?), it has an incentive to ensure that everyone gets educated.

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

EDIT: looking at non-Telegraph news, it appears there are three options on the table, going from completely volunteer to universal obligation: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/von-optimierungen-bis-hi...

Ultimately the Prussian education system did a pretty poor job at that, considering that the Prussian/German army lost two world wars.

I'd read somewhere a hypothesis that Germany would've done better to have just kept the peace and (at least by pre-1914 growth paths) outcompeted the British economy. I guess (a) people at that time thought growth wasn't possible without colonies, and (b) people in all times seem to lose any commitment they might have had to free trade once a serious economic competitor emerges?

"outcompeted the British economy."

This was why GB wanted the war.... it is called Thucydides Trap.

True, they lost both times.

Im no expert on ww1, so i can't comment there, but the German army of ww2 was (by far) the most well trained, and effective, fighting force of the war.

Yes, their politics were terrible, and the leadership at times questionable, and losing is never going to win accolades, but the reasons for losing had nothing to do with skill, ability, or execution.

They had world-leading technology and arms, well respected general officers, and a battle tested force that occupied all of Europe (and came within a whisker of invading the UK). But for the fairly obvious strategic error of invading the Soviet Union, the outcomes may have been very different.

Maybe Germany wouldn't have invaded Russia if more officers had spoken up about how bad of an idea it was; conformity and following orders is something the Prussian education system instills in people.

> conformity and following orders

Citation needed. MCDP 1 "Warfighting" is basically a tl;dr of Clausewitz.

What the USMC called "Mission tactics" ca. 1989 was, by the Prussians, called "Auftragstaktik" over a century earlier.

as to "conformity", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildung

Finally, Germany needed to invade Russia for the oil. (eg Maikop, Grozny, Baku, and fields to their southeast) No oil, no Blitz.

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Blue )

To some degree all military ideas are bad, so there is very limited scope for "speaking up".

Militaries are not democracies. Orders flow downhill.

In this specific case the guy on top wanted to invade for reasons. Yes, What objections the generals would have had would have been partly suppressed by the natural military doctrine (but that exists in all militaries) but equally the nature of their leader's personality would have suppressed objection. He was not known for changing his mind.

Equally after the successes of 1940 it Likely wasn't as obvious a mistake then as we see it now.

Had the UK fallen in 1940, and there being no second front, (and hence no North Africa) Barbarossa would have like succeeded as well.

Russia lost in WW1...

I once heard it summarized like this: Hitler inherited the best army of the world. It took him a decade to run it down.

Pay might be motivation for some, but it's not the only source. People also join for reasons such patriotism, sense of duty, or family history of service. Boosting pay could certainly help, but I think its effect would be limited if it's facing cultural headwinds.

It isn't working for the US.

https://www.ausa.org/news/paper-recruiting-crisis-national-s...

https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...

The US is struggling to maintain numbers. It does not pay that well in most circumstances.

But the U.S. is spreading propaganda endlessly just like China. Remember, Germany is a real democracy with freedom of speech and press freedom.

> Remember, Germany is a real democracy with freedom of speech

I don't know about that.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/4/30/germanys-crackd...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arr...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/world/europe/germany-pro-...

If your country is unfortunate enough to lack a strong volunteer military or nuclear weapons, here's how to implement military slavery ("conscription") while minimizing harm:

1. Abolish all arms control laws.

2. Formally establish as many independently operating armies as you have civilian citizens.

3. Enslave all civilian citizens (including babies).

4. Assign one to each army.

5. Promote them all to general.

6. Order them all to prosecute the war as they see fit.

This is IMO marginally ethically superior to submitting to military aggression.

this comment is so bizzare and pointless that i'm strugling to understand why someone decided to write this

Horrible.

As someone currently in a military I can wholeheartedly claim I work with absolutely amazing people. If there were conscription that would entirely go away because then it just be whiny entitled people off the street who don’t want to be there. Really, at that point it just be like a low paid ghetto software job.

You apparently believe most humans are whiny and entitled.

Most people don’t like to be forced into the military, so I would not judge from their everyday behaviour to how they would behave when forced to be in the military.

Not humans, just my fellow countrymen. Military service plus traveling abroad has fully demonstrated just how comparatively whiny and entitled many of my fellow countrymen are.

When I was 17 I was conscripted.

Obviously my anecdotal experience isn't data, but I would (somewhat) push back on the notion we were whiny or entitled.

Ok, granted, some were whiny. But there are plenty of toilet blocks to clean, so that problem tends to become minor.

On the other hand I wouldn't have described us as "entitled"? (Entitled to what?) We were the opposite of entitled. Naturally we were also the lowest ranks, so frankly got all the undesirable jobs.

Were we "effective"? Well, I guess so. But that's a function of training (and equipment).

There was a clear social distinction between regular (permanent) members and conscripts. Somewhat delineated by rank (permanent members got stripes within a couple years, conscripts typically didn't.)

Now, personally, I'm against conscription.(I'm also against volunteer recruitment, that tends to have the side effect of sending mostly poor people to fight.) So I concur that it's a horrible idea (but then again, Germany may have no choice given the neighborhood). Sometimes horrible ideas become necessary.

Perhaps if the sons and daughters of the privileged have to go and fight, perhaps those in charge would be less keen to start wars. Or maybe not.

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