FWIW, I worked with two year conscripts in Europe. I concede that the host nation screened them all because we were all stationed on a NATO special weapons site.
8 years in NATO and I can’t remember one bad apple among them. In the mean time, the Stars and Stripes newspaper was running stories about how “Ugly Americans” were acting around the country.
So the opinion that mandatory conscription won’t work in the US may be spot on.
IDN. Maybe culture has something to do with it?
“[It ain’t givin’ your word that counts]. It’s who you give it to!” - The Wild Bunch
OP, how does mandatory military service, as some countries have, fit into your vision here?
Motivation, desire, dedication, pride and obedience are much more important in a soldier than intelligence. We need intelligent NCOs and officers. That comes from experience and education, both formal and informal. We don’t need soldiers who think they know better.
Better to have soldiers who enlist with no degree but earn one while serving. As they progress in the military, so too does their level of education.
If your goal of the fantasy draft is to PREVENT a war rather than to PREPARE for war, then I have a better proposal: Pass a law that forbids military action or aid unless directly attacked, and pull out of NATO. I mean, since we are just waving magic wands, anyway. Go back to our pre WW foreign policy and act more like Switzerland.
And no, I don’t think poor people are dumb. The two categories you listed were college educated and rich. The inverse of that is uneducated and poor. By drafting the former, you increase the ratio of the latter among the general, civilian population.
Sorry about the marathon post. It took me a little while to get my thoughts together and the thread, obviously, was not static.
What is this “long peace” of which you speak? What is your evidence that whatever it happens to be is at its end?
Thus the full time military and reserve components we have.
Many countries still have conscription. And, of course, they have to deal with the usual fallout from that:
- Unfairness in who actually gets conscripted.
- Unfairness based on gender (not all countries conscript females).
- Mix of those who want to be in the armed forces along with those who are unhappily in the military but only because they don’t want to have a criminal record.
- Unfairness of exemptions.
Those are just a few problems.
So, you’d only conscript college graduates? That’s a great plan to make people who don’t want to be there in the first place leaders over those who do want to be in the military. 
Congress has already approved our military presence overseas. It’s called ratifying a treaty. We have treaty obligations with other countries.
Why do you suspect “VOLAR” is not enough?
Througout my military career, the most common attitude I encountered about conscription was that it was not a good thing to have someone in the unit who simply did not want to be there. And arming that person was definitely not considered a workable alternative.
We have always done this. The military issues something called a waiver. And then they work to bring the person to standards.
Yep. I’m fond of saying, “A country that needs to force people to defend it does not deserve to be defended”.
Same here. Regular Army, Army Reserve, Regulary Navy, and now retired. And I am 100% anti-conscription.
For the purposes of this thought exercise, let’s just ignore the 30 year limit, the limit on numbers of retirees who can be recalled at one time, and the age limit.
By “screw up your Army pension”, you mean “increase”, right? A retiree recalled to Active Duty is paid the full-time rate. I honestly do not recall if the ensuing Active Duty requires a recomputation of your retiree pay, but in fairness it should.
You already mentioned one of the programs the military has to bring you into size standards.
Here is some nifty readeing for you about Project VOLAR. You will note that one of the issues involved was makework. Perhaps you should consider what jobs in the military you expect all of these college graduates to be filling and at the same time avoiding makework for them compared to the skills they’ve learned at university.
Yeah, because each congressional district has the same number of people, same distribution of race, ethnicity, income level, and education as every other congressional district.
There is absolutely no way to make such a thing fair because there is no way to avoid the quotas being arbitrary.
Why do you want all of these so-called better educated soldiers? Do you see this as a magical way of making a better PV1/SR/AB/PVT/Spc?
The only way to ensure that is to prevent them from leaving the country or placing restrictions on them for leaving the country and not returning in time to serve. The case of Steve Yoo is on point here, IMHO.
And when was this? The military, like our society, has changed quite a lot, even in my lifetime post-retirement. I’d imagine that the Army is a far different critter today than when you were commanding a company. But there’s also the issue that you were not actually training those enlistees/conscripts; non-commissioned officers were.
Yep, Putin did not attack because he thought he would lose the war. He appears to think the manpower he believes is available to him is sufficient. And look at what’s happening to his military and to his society with his recent changes to the conscription laws.
For everyone! I mean, we want to be fair, treating everyone equally, right?
The length of compulsory military service in South Korea varies based on military branch.[24] Active duty soldiers serve 1 year 6 months in the Army or Marine Corps, 1 year 8 months in the Navy, or 1 year 9 months in the Air Force.[25] After conscripts finish their military service, they are automatically placed on the reserve roster and are obligated to attend 3 days of annual military training for 6 years[citation needed] (5 years from 2021).
Non-active duty personnel, or “supplemental service” personnel serve for various lengths: 1 year 9 months for social work personnel (better known as public service workers - personnel ordered to do public service work at places that require auxiliary workers such as local community centers like city halls, government agencies, and public facilities like subway stations);[26] 2 years 10 months for arts and sports personnel or industrial technical personnel; and 3 years for public health doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, or expert researchers.[27]
It’s actually possible to resign from the military. It’s not a cakewalk by any means, but it can be done and done so without generating a criminal record.
And, yes, getting lots and lots of unwilling people into basically every military unit is A Very Bad Idea From The Get Go.
Speaking as someone who’s currently working in the PRC, I still think the United Nations and the United States made a mistake in “shifting” recognition from the ROC to the PRC. That decision certainly was not made on the basis of any particular law or altruism; it was purely an economic decision and, IMHO, showed just how little our country’s government can be trusted to uphold our stated ideals. South Vietnam learned that lesson and quite quickly.
And inaccurate.
Perhaps you could share why that is something someone should be obligated to ask themselves such a question?
Agreed.
Nobody is saying that. What they are saying is that your idea to get the better educated into forced military service is not viable.
Back to the Duty, Honor, Country platitude. That’s basically all it is. If it were more than that, the country would honor its duty to its citizenry.
Pretty much everybody in the Navy was there voluntarily. There were still a lot of people who, for one reason or another, decided they really did NOT want to be there. They became the shitbirds that you had to spend 90% of your time on. Best thing the Navy did around 1980 or so was to cull out the worst of them and simply discharge them. It didn’t eliminate all the problems, but it got rid of a lot of the really dead weight.
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Modnote: This is not the pit, there is a current thread in the pit for such comments if desired. Do not do this again outside of the pit.
For all of those that posted in this thread, I appreciate your input.
Considering current events, it’s good to know which way the wind blows.
I might have missed a post or two, but I only remember one post declaring (paraphrasing) that they would step up if US territory was threatened.
-Domestic threat only? Check.
No post even hinted that if a large scale war broke out on allied territory that they would support conscription if necessary. After all, we only have unwilling, lazy and fat losers to offer.
This message is being processed by every foreign diplomat and passed up the chain. Friend and foe alike.
It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that our nation is divided and is unlikely to muster enough determined re-reinforcements to push back.
Countries that wish us harm are taking notes.
Somehow I doubt that, when Putin wants to gauge the gumption of the people of the west, his first stop is an obsolete mode of communication used mostly by old farts who are well past the age of military service.
(No offense intended, geezers.)
Not even in comic books and cheap action-adventure novels do they take notes, let alone make decisions, based on message boards like this one.
Because a country as large as the U.S. does not need conscription to have an effective military, and conscription actively reduces the effectiveness of our military. Asking about conscription is like asking about our military’s supply of horses and mules. The military doesn’t need or want conscripts.
What the military “wants” or needs doesn’t factor one bit. If you hadn’t noticed.
Horses and mules?
From Selective Service FAQ
America’s leaders agree that despite the success of the All-Volunteer Force, registration with Selective Service must continue as a key component of national security strategy. As President Clinton informed Congress in 1994, “Maintaining the Selective Service System and draft registration provides a hedge against unforeseen threats and a relatively low-cost ‘insurance policy’ against our underestimating the maximum level of threat we expect our Armed Forces to face.
(my bold)
Wiki says that the 2023 annual budget is $31.7 million.
If a draft is so far beyond the realm of possibility, why do we spend time and money on it?
But now you’ve set them straight. Thank you for your service.
$31.7 million is a rounding error for the Defense budget. Keeping up with new registrations would eat up nearly all of that.
Getting rid of it entirely would cost much more time and money in the wailing and gnashing of teeth from people who want to keep or even expand it (parts of this thread are a good indication).
The idea of getting rid of it has been floated (even some actually bipartisan action in Congress in 2021) but there’s been enough opposition that it never got anywhere. It’s not exactly such a burden that it’s worth a big fight over. At least so far.
So the compromise is to fund it minimally but let it keep existing, at least on paper, even though it is effectively a dead program.
Thank you for the snark.
If one had the time to scour various opinions about this subject across the ether, I suspect that they would get the same basic message that there is no stomach for a draft.
Risk Managers have the time and they get paid to do it.
You are miscaracterizing things. I believe what you will find is a deep contempt for and revultion over the draft.
I think the military is an evil thing. I am aware that it is necessary because other countries also have their evil things, but necessity doesn’t make an evil thing less evil.
We also have very little appetite for building a Maginot line. Certain ideas are simply obsolete. Drafting legions of cannon fodder being one of them.
Other ideas are simply laughable. Such as that other despotic nations will judge our government’s willingness to fight existential battles by the ramblings of random citizens, even millions of them. The USA, both the sitting government and the citizenry at large, has more than adequately demonstrated its willingness to expend vast blood and treasure over comparative trifles. FI shit gets really real, the public will respond appropriately; they always have, they always will.
A different perspective:
Back in the 1950s, the Selective Service system consisted of millions of paper records and a vast bureaucracy of local branches to collect them in advance and a national bureaucracy to store them for later.
Today we could reinstitute a draft in a matter of days from scratch with a website and phone app. We don’t need to keep a creaking 1950s bureaucracy alive in its original form to accomplish its original goal. All we really need is the statutory authority to implement such a system. Which we have.
So US public opinion wouldn’t be a factor in a potential foe’s decision making process and the whole concept is laughably stupid.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance.