Discussion Main / Conscription

I agree, but the wording must be careful. Another potential aversion (as far as major developped countries are concerned) can be the US Army - conscription was applied in wartime (Civil War, World War I) and then the Selective Service draft from 1940 to 1973. (British National Service lasted from 1939 till 1963, i.e. ended only decade earlier).

As for the classical Ancient Greece and early Roman Army "property qualification for service cum civic rights", it's perhaps a case of Values Dissonance, and should be explained more thoroughly. (Not to mention the Sparta, where every able male of the ruling Spartiate class was obliged to be thoroughly trained full time soldier for life (de facto men over 60 were rarely actually serving in the field), which makes little or no sense from our "conscripts versus professionals" distinction point of view.)

Yeah, it needs work.

The line "As such, there is very little difference between conscription and chattel slavery" definitely needs to go, or at the very least clarified to only the Soviet conscripts at the time.

Also, the notion behind conscription being based on the supposed idea of 'every man owes his very existence to the state' definitely needs to be looked at. The entry seems to think that every society that has ever practiced conscripted since the Enlightenment held Sparta up as an ideal. Which is silly.

There's also an implication that conscripts are always inferior in training and equipment to regular soldiers. That simply isn't true.

Statement "In an extreme situation a conscript army is even capable of turning its weapons against its own people, as happened with Vlasov's Army in World War II" should be, in my opinion, removed - this simply does not apply to the conscript army only. (For the record, it's not even true for the World War II - Indian National Army, fighting for the Japanese Empire, was composed from volunteering POWs from the completely volunteer British Indian Army.)

/As noone oposed, I've removed it already. (Dec 12 2013)/

Actually, in the 19th century debates in continental Europe, one of main arguments for the general compulsory service was the right opposite - i.e. that the army of short-time drafted citizens was considered less likely to turn against its own nation than an army of long-time soldiers serving for pay (which in most European states happened during suppression of the 1848 revolutions), who were deemed essentially no better than low-class mercenaries. (Of course - these times - the nations involved had had not governments backed by the popular consent, so the loyalty to the government was not considered the same thing as the loyalty to the nation, often quite the contrary.) Similar sentiments were voiced also by Thomas Jefferson: "The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so." .... "It is more a subject of joy that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. But it proves more forcibly the necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free State. Where there is no oppression there will be no pauper hirelings."

I also can not agree with the notion that the conscription-based army is generally or typically inferior in training or equipment (or a trope maker for cannon-fodder) - for example, in the 1866 and 1870-1871 wars, the Prussian army was, not only more numerous thanks to the general conscription introduced in Prussia late in/after the Napoleonic wars (and able to draw on considerable pool of trained reservists, which other armies of the time did not have, or at least not so many of them), but also considerably better trained than the Austrian and French armies (although here it gets complicated, as in both empires peacetime conscription - with many exemptions and buying-off options - notionally existed and if there were not enough volunteers, suplemental soldiers were drafted - who then served for quite long terms and generally were perceived as more akin to "(initially) involuntary professionals" than to "long-time serving draftees") which were essentially composed of long-time professionals. Not to mention its equipment - the Dreyse rifle was far more advanced than Austrian muzzle-loaders and was in general service, unlike the French Chassepot rifle - arguably superior to the Dreyse "needle gun", but in the army service still complemented by the "Tabatière" rifles - muzzle-loaders converted to breech-loaders. Actually - Prussian 1866 and 1871 victories can be considered as the Real Life Trope Codifier (after the French revolution Trope Maker) for the practice in the continental Europe - most nations, starting with France and Austria-Hungary, followed the leader, convinced that mass conscription-based armies can be not only much numerous, but also much effective in combat than an army composed of long-time professionals.

"Armies of conscripts are often drawn from the lower classes of society - on average poorer, less educated, inferior in discipline, and less loyal than volunteer forces. [...] The rich, powerful, talented, or well-connected can often find ways to get out of serving." - that can be also played both ways, and chiefly depends on the pay and other benefits in the professional military - if the army do not offer enough (e.g. during the Napoleonic wars, an enlisted private in British Army infantry made something like a chimney-sweep apprentice or an unqualified agricultural worker, which made soldiering attractive either for people enamoured with the prospects of adventure or really hard down on their luck - leading to the Wellington's remark about the "scum of the Earth"), or do not offer additional incentives (prospect of qualification, education and other veteran benefits etc.) the better qualified, more intelligent and capable tend to find better paid jobs (and ''the rich, powerful, talented and well-connected'' have no reason to evade the - non-existent - service obligation), in which case the alternative of the general draft can actually much improve the average quality (both moral and physical) of the army enlisted personnel, who is also more imbued with sense of patriotism, and more willing to fight for the cause, rather than seeing the army merely as an alternative to unemployment.

p.s. (12/15/2013): After all - the indisputably Badass Israeli Army is based upon universal conscription, and hardly anyone would dare to argue that IDF is a Red Shirt Army or Cannon Fodder- quite the opposite.