Military conscription

[Donotpanicoknowpanic]

There is lots of talk about if ww3 happens then military conscription will happen

This is basically people who sit in an office safely saying we need to either send ourselves or out children to fight and die in horrible conditions

Am I unreasonable to think that anyone who thinks this is a good idea

They should be the first ones to sign up and to lead by example

Any politicians who think this is a good idea, there children should be the first to go

Russia is literally sending troops in wheel chairs and crunches to the front line

So age, disability and gender will not be a problem for anyone who supports any conscription policy's, they can go first

Also the UK will not be invaded, we are not Ukrainian, If we were more like Ukraine I would be more in favour of this as the country itself is under threat

Loads of the older generation have a lot of camaraderie and would be keen I’m sure. I was chatting to an Ex soldier in the gym the other day who was about 60 and considering doing a personal trainer course for fun, he was very fit and healthy.

Tbf the Holocaust only became clear after the war. Before the war the main reason for fighting was simply to stop the UK from being invaded.

That was a good enough reason though, ofc.

On a sidenote:
How one woman lures foreign men to fight on Russia's front line

Russia seems to be trawling the world for "recruits".

I think the prospect of conscription for fighting overseas is even less likely.

Expeditionary warfare demands high readiness of complex joint integration (air, naval, cyber, allies), political sensitivity and long deployments far from home. Conscripts are bad at all of these.

You don’t send reluctant troops, minimally trained units and short-service soldiers to fight abroad and expect good outcomes.

Britain already solved this problem structurally. The UK’s military is designed specifically for overseas fighting with small, professional and deployable forces, NATO interoperability, reliance on allies for scale and high-end capabilities rather than mass.

If Britain needs more overseas capacity, the tools for the existing army are incentives and retention, reservist expansion, contractor and allied support, and longer tours or repeat deployments – not a draft.

Conscription only survives politically when people believe if they don’t fight, they may not exist. That logic can work for homeland defence, but does not work for defence abroad. Drafting people to fight overseas would trigger immediate comparisons to Vietnam/Iraq and governments are acutely aware of this history.

NATO makes unilateral mass mobilization unnecessary. If Britain fights overseas, it will almost certainly be as part of NATO in a coalition. Conscription undermines that by forcing Britain to field mass it doesn’t need and can’t sustain.

You may think many millennials will refuse to go now. Because it’s easy to think that now, that we are relatively safe in the UK.

But if the UK was being invaded ( worse case scenario and unlikely) , women abused ,civilians being killed, you really think our young men and women would just allow it and not fight ?

Until people have faced the reality of an invasion or their country being attacked , then they can’t say they will refuse to fight.

If their lives and families lives depended on it ask them then if they’ll fight..

If the US hadn’t joined in WW2, it’s likely that Germany would have achieved their outcome, with Russia controlling the East. Britain would have ran out of fighting troops and ultimately lost the war.
Europe would have fallen to the Axis forces. It would be a very different world to now.

You are completely right...to a degree. Both Russia.and Ukraine are conscripting men. That war has completely changed warfare. The tank battles we envisioned throughout the cold war and massed army's are redundant with the use of drones. But we will still need lots of boots on the ground but in much smaller units..4 to 8 per unit but they will potentially have to cover a huge area.

Article here from the Kyiv post describing how infantry are being trained to operate in the current conflict

www.kyivpost.com/post/61776

Thanks for this, it makes sense and is reassuring.

This isn’t the case. See all my other responses on this thread for the reasons.

I'm sure feminists will be up in arms at the suggestion that women stay at home while the men get to play the hero. 👀

Supporting our European allies and fulfilling our mutual agreement isn't remotely similar to Iraq and Vietnam though. You can be sure that the people who don't want to fight would mostly still want other countries to help if we were in Ukraine's position and their children were on the frontline and British women were being raped/civilians murdered etc.

Women back then not having the vote would be a fair point to not doing military conscription

It's something I did not think about

If women back then were not able to fully participate in society

But equally this does not mean that the women giving out flowers to men to shame them will get forgiveness

You’re right that people absolutely would want allies to help us if Britain were invaded.
There is a moral obligation baked into alliances, not just self-interest, and also that defending a democracy from invasion is morally different from discretionary wars.

However that still doesn’t get you conscription in the UK, because moral obligation doesn’t equal political consent for coercion.

Allies don’t expect conscription-based equality. NATO and European defence do not operate on symmetry of suffering. Britain’s role is understood to be high-end capabilities, intelligence, air, naval and cyber power, and logistics and training. Not mass infantry.
Ukraine does not expect Britain to draft civilians. It expects Britain to play its comparative advantage.

The uncomfortable truth is that if we believe the cause is just enough, maybe people should be compelled, but democracies have historically only accepted it when the threat is direct and cost of refusal is national destruction.

And that in turn takes us back to all the other reasons why Britain is not best defend by mass man-power, how conscription weakens military outcomes and spills out its own morallly-uncomfortable consequences.

Seeing as those ww1 women are long since dead I doubt they'd care about your forgiveness

A large proportion of the men would have had no vote either. Only property-owning men over 21 could vote. The poor couldn't.

Apparently the child free are third on the list. Last in line for social housing but third in line for this.

Oh sorry. Second in line

Men either needed to own property/be wealthy or undertake military service to get the vote. So arguably a lot of men had to sacrifice more to get it - PTSD, life changing injuries, etc.

If I'm not mistaken the suffragettes only wanted the vote for women who owned property so most women wouldn't have qualified.

And this is the current American system which has been in place for many years...

Registration for Men

Selective Service System registration is required by law. By registering, a young man remains eligible for jobs, state-based student aid and employment in most states, Federally-funded job training, and U.S. citizenship for immigrant men.

In a national emergency, Selective Service System will use the registry to provide personnel to the Department of War.

Penalties for Failing to Register

If required to register, failure to register is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or 5 years imprisonment. Also, a person who knowingly counsels, aids, or abets another to fail to comply with the registration requirement is subject to the same penalties.

www.sss.gov/

But that doesn't apply if you have bone spurs.

I think from the UK perspective, it's not a great optic for people who have fuck all military experience to go around telling other people they have to do it.

I thought they made them president.

Multi millionaires usually find a way of getting what they want/influencing people. But you can be sure that if only women had to sign up to the draft and men got the same privileges for free all hell would break loose!

Dealing with mansplainers is one thing but having to agree to be used as cannon fodder at your country's whim is completely another! I'd be shitting it with Trump in charge were I a young US male

Or immigration before it reaches this stage. Would need to be planned well in advance.

The suffragettes weren't a monolithic group..people like Sylvia Pankhurst did campaign for working class women to have it too. Working class women like Dora Thewlis (mill girl arrested at 16 years old) agitated for it on their own behalf.