Failed weapon system R&D costs are kind of one time thing. With military pensions and health care costs the US is paying like 700 billion $ every year. I’m not saying they shouldn’t pay that, I’m saying perhaps they should downsize a tiny bit. Maybe stop getting into wars all the time.
The thing is, for a country that attacks others, like the US, volunteer army is of course the way to go. You couldn’t do what the US is doing with a conscription army. For countries that have a military for defensive purposes, like the Finnish Defense Forces, conscription is a good thing (and for Finland, you can check the support for conscription, the majority support it and are happy to keep it).
The countries that are getting backlash from bringing conscription back are places like Germany, where people are a bit weird about that, for understandable reasons, sort of. But it does seem like they think that they might slip back into nazism at any point if they are careful, which is a bit weird if you ask me.
Anyway, Germany is not bringing conscription back because they want to go abroad and fight futile wars, they are planning on doing that because the security situation in Europe has changed, thanks mainly to russia attacking Ukraine and doing annoying hybrid warfare stuff, and also a bit because the US is being unstable, unpredictable and unreliable ally.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Hello from Portugal!
We’ve had our little forays into bringing back conscription a few years back and the sentiment was not great. Bad, to be sincere. Conscripts are viewed as essentially cannon fodder; very bad pay, poor conditions and because they have to be there, they can be abused at will. The numbers of conscious objections sky rocketed until it was replaced with voluntary service. And we want volunteer, professional, military personel. Better to have one volunteer than ten unwilling, roughly translated, is a common saying.
Back to the US.
Their weapons programs run for years and several dozens at the same time, across the four branches. It is a lot of money being spent, on a yearly basis.
You are, of course, correct that they should stop getting themselves into wars and instead keep themselves busy with internal affairs. But regardless all of the expenditure with health care and pensions, I remember reading somewhere that a great majority of the homeless population are military veterans, many of which struggle with mental conditions. Doesn’t seem they are spending what they should, how they should. We can also risk a fair degree of corruption, with some confidence.
Meanwhile, in Europe, conscription is not the way forward. Volunteer forces, well trained, well equiped, ready and capable for the kind of modern warfare the Ukrained x Russia is producing is the future. We won’t be seeing trench or open field combat as it was in the past. We’ll have operators controlling remote weapons systems for far away.
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 1 day ago
I mean with Portugal, I remember reading a book about conscripts being used to defend colonies and putting down rebellions of locals in Africa and such. For that sort of bullshit I agree, conscription is not the way to go. But for purely defensive purposes, I do not see anything bad about conscription. But thats me with my Finnish background, we havent gone to other lands trying to conquer places. We’ve fought mostly defensive wars, in which the survival of the nation was at stake. The only time we went on a offensive, was to get back areas we lost a few years before. So obviously there is a difference in thinking there and I completely understand the reluctance of places, that used their military to go out and about, to have conscription back. So perhaps the way to do it is to make the laws so that it would be illegal to use conscripts in a non-defensive operations. Like, if Portugal wants to take part in bombing some militants in a ex-colony, that has to be done by volunteers etc. Even russia does (or pretends to do) it like that, I don’t know if they changed it yet, but at least it used to be so that conscripts were not allowed to be sent outside russian borders.
And back to US, what I meant is that once a weapons program is done, its done. Of course they go on for years, even decades, but sometimes they don’t. I wasn’t really arguing that they are not a waste of money, most of them are, mostly, a waste of money. But once they end, they end. Paying pensions and stuff only ends when the person dies. But of course, people live longer than weapons R&D programs, some R&D programs live longer than people. But I think we agree that both are a huge cost and both are kind of unnecessary in different ways. Weapons programs are unnecessary because most of them are completely useless or dead ends, paying soldiers is unnecessary because the US doesn’t have to go and start bombing Iran, they choose to do so and it costs a stupid amount for a long time.
And a final point on the conscription, I’m not saying that its good. I’m saying it MIGHT be necessary. At least in some capacity. Maybe having a purely defensive force is the way to go, like I said, make it illegal for the government to send soldiers to fight, unless they were attacked first. But of course the politicians will find a way around that. Its a complicated subject and I tend to not get into it too much, because I don’t live in these other countries, I don’t know the history, I don’t know the culture. All I know is that our defensive conscription model works for us and it works extremely well for us and nobody wants to get rid of it. But like I said, I completely understand that other places are a bit suspicious about it and I won’t blame them.
kettuli@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Visiting American soldiers praise the finnish conscript every time they visit.