> Anyway, I agree that mandatory drafting should not be reintroduced.
Why not? Why should the burden only fall on the poor and the desperate?
For reference, Finland has universal conscription. The question over here is, why are women excluded?
Why not? Why should the burden only fall on the poor and the desperate?
For reference, Finland has universal conscription. The question over here is, why are women excluded?
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
In Romania around 2008 mandatory drafting was removed from the constitution and yet we still have an army. The reason why we have such a small army is in a significant part due to pervasive corruption in all of the state's structures, low salaries and abusive higher ups. We have an interesting documentary about the subject (has english subtitles) about the ridiculous state of the army due to reasons mentioned. https://youtu.be/0_YnxJJcC7M?feature=shared
Because the army is the employer of last resort. It is what you do when you have no other options.
In my country we don't have mandatory military service. The "employer of the last resort" is the unemployment office and welfare, not army. I have never heard of anybody going to the army for any other than duty/ideological reasons, desperation for a job might even disqualify you - they want people who are motivated to join the army, not poor desperate people looking for money.
It’s almost a trope here. I expect that’s why the original commenter said that the military is the employer of last resort. In the US that is often the case for many young people.
The entire culture around the separation of state, its components and citizens is very different here. We really don't want another 40 years of dictatorship - best to stop it right at the beginning.
If we really reach a point where conscription is required, it also means that carrying an uterus is probably irrelevant: it's either kill or be killed.
Hopefully that's never going to be a thing again in as many countries as possible