Comment on Conservatives plan to bring back mandatory National Service
ceasarlegsvin@kbin.social 5 months agoAnd the military leadership of every country where conscription is a thing disagrees with you.
All it dose is create ill motivated unskilled labour.
If you think military conscription is for the here and now you unfortunately don't know what you're talking about.
Conscription is so that if you need to mobilise quickly, all of your eligible population are already trained, have units to report to, officers etc.
If you're building a defensive military, it makes perfect sense, because in a defensive war motivation more or less ceases to be an issue.
The UK's military is far more expeditionary, so it doesn't make sense unless you build it into your long term plan, which is exactly what I said in my original comment.
HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 5 months ago
As we are talking about the UK. Where it is UK military leaders and technological investment that the leaders will be training for.
What any other nation thinks or dose is pretty worthless. As is some politicians trying to win votes from boomers. Or myself.
Only opinion that matters really is the UK military leadership. Who make it clear they do not want this.
ceasarlegsvin@kbin.social 5 months ago
This isn't talking specifically about the UK, and nor was I.
HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Yeah this is a tread about the UK government trying to sell a crap idea.
So yes the only opinion of any merit at all. Is what the military leaders of the UK armed forces think.
Other nations have different military structures. Different concentration of assets. The UK back in the 1960s ended conscription. And decided instead to invest in technology. And personal with the training to operate that technology.
Rather then using ill motivated short time troops as little more then cannon fodder.
ceasarlegsvin@kbin.social 5 months ago
Largely, but I was responding to the specific sentence I highlighted.
The UK has favored a doctrine of a small, well trained, professional army since before WW1. It's also tended to be more expeditionary. Both of these conflict with the benefits of conscription.
That doesn't mean it's an outright superior system. It has its own drawbacks and benefits compared with alternative systems. Sometimes you send that force into a meatgrinder because the fighting calls for more manpower than it can supply, regardless of technology. It depends on the war you're fighting.
Weirdly enough, fighting a defensive, existential war tends to solve the motivation problem pretty quicky.
Also, if you're calling up previously conscripted troops when shit hits the fan, they will have been trained for far, far longer than if you try to enlarge the size of your fighting force from scratch.
I feel like your knowledge of conscription comes entirely from the Red Alert 2 unit of the same name. Don't confuse peace time conscription with war time conscription. They're incredibly different things.
You're really just running down the bingo board of one-liners that betray a complete unfamiliarity with what you're trying to talk about.
No military budget is infinite. You decide the type of military you want to build, and you build it in the most effective way possible. Sometimes conscription fits in with that. Sometimes it doesn't.
Tick another one off the bingo board.
We're talking about conscription in peace time.
That's literally what a military is.
Conscripts receive the same training as career professionals.
Why wouldn't it result in a ground war? NATO isn't going to want to escalate into full apocalypse unless they absolutely have to.
There's a reason the UK didn't nuke Argentina when it took the Falklands.
The UK's two most recent trident tests both failed.