Those of us with young teenaged boys

[Myrobalanna]

Are you scared about what the next few years may bring?
I freely admit I am. As much as anything coming from govt or the US, it's the dismissive comments from people who aren't getting how serious these events are. We're in for a rough time.
I keep thinking of sixteen year old boys being conscripted during ww2.

[TinklyLittleLaugh]

Presumably they would conscript girls too nowadays?

But yes, my boy is early 20s and I worry.

[GreenGinger2]

Um why are boys going to be conscripted?

[Abraiid2]

Modern armies don't tend to want unskilled and possibly unfit young conscripts.

[mugglebumthesecond]

No it has never crossed my mind!

I'm assuming all future wars will be done from the air or via nuclear/chemical weapons.



But we are already at war and have been for some time- modern warfare is much more subtle.

[SexTrainGlue]

No.

We might be living in interesting times, but catastrophising isn't going to help anything.

[yeOldeTrout]

17yo DS is joining the army in about 6 weeks. What he wanted, anyway.

[Lilaclily]

You're being ott!

[TresDesolee]

I'm terrified, but as others have said I don't think the next war is going to involve sending conscripts into battle. It's going to be cyber, resources (cutting off water and energy supplies) and possibly short-range in-theatre nukes.

Not reassuring I know.

[TresDesolee]

I don't think this is catastrophising by the way. Steve Bannon, who is controlling Donald Trump, is on the record as wanting an apocalyptic war between white Christians and brown Muslims. He's a fucking terrifying and dangerous man and the narcissist in the White House is doing everything he tells him.

[sonlypuppyfat]

Talk about paranoia, when I was at school we were heading for an ice age and a nuclear war

[AllTheLight]

sonlypuppyfat that nearly became a reality during the Cuban Missile Crisis. History could easily have gone a different way.

[dementedma]

No, conscripts are not the way forward for the military,and any future wars will require Cyber and IT skills way beyond what most 16 year olds can offer.
YABU

[Myrobalanna]

OK I am happy to BU to be very honest! I am totally of the same opinion as TresDesolee though.

[BertrandRussell]

Yes. I worry about this.

[JustSpeakSense]

I don't think I worry more than my parents worried about me.

It's a worrisome job this parenting malarkey

[BackforGood]

I think you are being OTT.
There have been wars going on all around us for years, sadly.
Even if one of these escalated further, as others have said, they would no longer be recruiting teenagers as cannon fodder as they did 100 years ago. Weaponry has moved on a LOT.

[PickAChew]

Even if conscription did happen, they wouldn't have mine, anyhow.

[Abraiid2]

Sixteen-Year-olds weren't conscripted in WW1 or WW2, either.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Kingdom

[Andcake]

I have a primary school aged boy and am scared. I think trump is hugely dangerous and could ignite another war. I spent some time in Syria before the war and have friends who lived with the wars when Yugoslavia broke up I often think of how their quite normal lives fell apart and worry about thepower keg of trump, Putin and Isis. Our brexit situation and instability doesn't help in desperation we may create stupid alliances to prop up the economy.

[TresDesolee]

myro. The protests tonight and yesterday have cheered me up a bit. People who know twentieth century history are going to fight like hell to stop these fascists before they go much further.

[Badders123]

Drones innit

[Abraiid2]

Seriously, if you have teenage sons you need to worry more about alcohol, driving cars and depression. And not getting qualifications.

[Mominatrix]

Totally agree with Abraiid. I'm more worried about carelessness on social media and not at all about conscription or the long term sequelae of `Trump.

[Lessthanaballpark]

Nah, they'd reject my DS as he is such a liability. He can't even find his own shoes let alone follow instructions in a battle.

But if the war was played out in one of those multiplayer Clash of Whatevers he'd be ok.

[TresDesolee]

I've got a friend from Serbia Andcake - very clever, articulate, gifted young woman with a flat and a boyfriend and career plans. It's so dissonant to realise that when she was a baby her nation was in the middle of a genocidal war and her compatriots were murdering thousands of people just because they were the 'wrong' ethnicity. All within a few hundred miles of Italy and Greece.