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this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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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.
Conscription is always a bad idea. Because once you have gotten to that stage. You are basically deciding to throw bodies at the problem. As russia is doing.
For a nation lacking funding. Sure it can be the only option. And for a nation at genuine risk of ground war. It can be needed. But its a bad idea. Because when you get to that stage. Other ideas and options before hand would always have been better.
Conscription is by its very nature using citizens of your own nation to absorb attacks. As in no situation can conscripts show the professional training of people who choose to invest in a military career. Hence way pretty much every nation with funding. Even the few that keep the option active like the US. Has military leaders who reject it. And just mouthy politicians and older voters who think it is a positive solution.
Edit: related but a little of topic. Another reason most nato nations and the UK reject conscription as anything but an all has failed strategy. Is MAD. As much as Russia threatens and brags. Russia knows full well attacking a NATO member nation will not result in a ground war. Russia simply dose not have the air or naval superiority over NATO nations as a whole. The only threat they have that has any chance of working in an all out war. Is nukes. And while russia may be overconfident in the effectivness of their own stock of nukes. They know full well NATOs are well maintained. So using one on a nato nation. Is the end of Russias ability to use them as a threat.
There is a reason Russia has avoided landing on NATO land. Even after they forced Finland and sweeden to join. Mutually Assured Distruction may be crap when dealing with Extremist nations using terrorism. But Russia still has enough sanity to recognise its limits.
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.