Service to what nation?

Why people should stop talking about conscription.

Somewhere among the detritus left in the wake of the erratic and shambolic western response to the Ukraine crisis, you have probably spotted the idea of re-introducing some kind of conscription, or national military service. The politest thing one can say about this idea is that it is not well thought out, and the reaction against it isn’t very informed either. Moreover, the argument has been disproportionately taken over by Americans, whose point of reference is the Vietnam war and reaction to it. That is such an untypical episode and of such limited value for discussing the subject that I will leave it to one side and not cover it. I will concentrate instead on three questions. Why would you want conscription, what would you use conscripts for, and is a return of conscription actually feasible? I have yet to see any of these questions addressed in any depth at all, so I suppose I had better do it.

But first, I want to make, and illustrate, one general point. As with a number of the essays I have written recently about contemporary security issues, the devil is in the detail. If you don’t like detail, or if a quick skim through this text will convince you, of my argument, that’s fine. But otherwise please stay with me.

Why? Because in the end, detail is the ultimate arbiter of whether things work properly, or even at all. Detail means thinking through the possibilities in a structured way, and at every point asking, “can we do this?” and “what’s the relationship with that?” Western society has often had an ambiguous relationship with detail, and our ability to focus on detail, or even to accept that it’s important, has declined rapidly in the last couple of generations. (If you like, substitute the word “precision” for “detail.”) This point first became obvious in the 1970s, with the arrival in the West of Japanese cars and consumer electronics. What struck people was not that they were cheap (they weren’t particularly, though precision manufacturing and attention to detail did a lot to keep prices down) but that they were designed and manufactured with a degree of precision and attention to detail that most western manufacturers could only fantasise about. Therefore they worked properly, and they lasted forever. And if you knew Japanese culture with its obsessive attention to detail this was hardly surprising. This attention was not just technical, it applied in the way that organisations and structures interacted with daily life. After all, in a busy Tokyo underground station, why not indicate where people should stand so that they will be facing the opening doors of the trains? You don’t need a PhD to work that out.

Some western cultures did approach things in a similar way. (Even today, you might walk around a city in Germany or Austria or Sweden, for example, and think that’s a clever idea! ) But the increasing financialisation of our society and the privatisation of public functions has resulted in much less attention these days to Doing Things Properly. As long as the bottom line is respected, and the task is more-or-less accomplished, that is all that matters. The difference is essentially cultural: either the top people in an organisation think that Doing Things Properly is important, or they don’t. Once they start to prefer Doing Things Profitably as an objective, decline set in . More importantly, though, this results in a loss of actual capability at all levels, to plan and carry out real tasks with precision. The people who prosper are those who know how to hit often arbitrary targets, or at least seem to, irrespective of whether this gets the job done.

This is a major contribution to the de-skilling of western governments, organisations and private companies, and we see it everywhere. How recently did you try to use a website that crashed and lost your data, or that refused even to perform the functions it claimed to carry out? How recently did you find it impossible to raise a human being, or to ask the question you wanted to ask from among twenty redundant ones? How often did government organisations fail to respond correctly to what you needed? How often did you have to send back articles to Amazon because they didn’t work? How often have parcels not been delivered because they were confided to a sub-contractor of a sub-contractor who uses casual unskilled labour? You know the kind of thing. But it applies pervasively: doors falling off Boeing aircraft and spaceships, the Gaza pier, the inability of the UK to build even a small high-speed train network, delays in building nuclear power plants, cost overruns on military equipment projects, the organisational and technical shambles that was the Covid response in so many western countries … the list is almost endless, and I’m sure you can think of many more.

So the simple answer is likely to be that western governments could not introduce conscription, because they no longer have the technical and managerial skills, or even the will, to think through and implement the detail. An entire generation of managers, leaders and politicians now wants just the “big picture.” I first heard from an American colleague nearly twenty years ago of the practice of no longer sending written briefs to decision-makers, but only Powerpoint slides. This seems to have become pervasive now, ignoring Lord Acton’s dictum that all power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely. You can’t do nuance or detail with Powerpoint: perhaps the eighth sub-bullet point on a slide will say something like “find supplier to provide X” after which the subject will just be forgotten until it bites you.

In the case of conscription, we can add the almost total ignorance of security and defence issues among ruling elites today. I don’t mean counting tanks or recognising uniforms, which can be learnt, but an intellectual grasp of the issues and the ability to discuss them and make decisions about them. Consider, what do you want conscription for, and do you even know what it is?

Well, let’s start with the easy bit. Conscription is a system where citizens are legally obliged to serve in the armed forces for a period. It’s often been a feature of modern wars, but I think what people are talking about here is the practice of requiring young people to serve in the military for a period in peacetime, either when they reach a given age, or at least at some point during a certain period of years. Conscription can be for any period from months to years, and usually entails an obligation to do regular training and to return to active service if required. Now then, why would anyone want such a system? In some cases, it’s argued that there are social and political benefits, although that’s a separate issue, to which we’ll return at the end. But apart from that?

The usual answer is numbers, and that depends on the scale of the conflict you envisage. It’s a truism that in early societies every adult male was a warrior, and that initiation as a warrior was a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. As societies grew larger and more complex the rules changed. There are simply too many alternative models throughout history to go through even a sampling of them, and they wouldn’t add anything to the argument. I’d just say that they include the citizen soldier, the military professional, the slave army, the mercenary army and, of course the conscript army. But before plunging into a discussion of the last, there’s a prior question: on what basis do you decide?

Some of the issues are purely practical. An island or maritime power may be obliged to put most of its money into a professional navy. A republic might impose a military service obligation in return for citizenship. A heavily agricultural nation might find it hard to spare manpower for conflicts, especially at certain times of the year. A dictatorship may prefer a small professional army because it is more politically reliable. And so on.

But the really important question, not raised at all so far as I can see in what passes for a debate here, is: what do you want an army for? (The arguments for conscription into the air force and navy are different, especially these days, and I will leave them to one side for a moment.) Now there are two types of answers usually given to this question. The first could be described as normative and aspirational. The army (or the military) is there to defend our borders and national interests. It may also be there to defend our way of life, or our values, or our vital national interests, or even the Constitution, or to promote peace and stability in the region. The trouble with these conceptions of the military is that they don’t provide us with any guidance on what actual tasks the military is supposed to perform, how they would go about, say, defending our values, or for that matter what risks and dangers the military is protecting us from, or what values and interests are being protected, and how we would know when they were safe. In any event, most of these “tasks” are either too vague to use for planning, or simply impossible practically. The vast majority of African armies, for example, couldn’t begin to defend their frontiers against attack: they are also far too small, and consequently unable to pose a threat to any other country’s territorial integrity. Thus, all of these “tasks,” or “missions” as they might be labelled, are essentially symbolic and normative, and in most cases aspirational. And none of them give you any help in deciding whether conscription is the appropriate answer.

So if we get away from existential militaries, we are back to the question, What do you want your army to do? A surprisingly small number of countries have the answer to this question properly worked out, these days. In many countries, on the other hand, military tasks are essentially a matter of tradition or history, or even just a collection of things the military can actually do with the capabilities it has available. Nonetheless, we can distinguish a few important different types of missions. One is internal security, where there might be serious regional, ethnic or religious divides in a country, or even a violent secessionist movement. Another is territorial defence against a landward threat. Another is an expeditionary capacity to fight wars overseas. Another still is a capacity to take part in regional and international Peace Missions. And of course these tasks may come and go, and even run in parallel or as part of another one.

In the end, the easiest approach to the question is to adopt a semi-tautological approach to the role of the military: it’s role is to underpin the domestic and foreign policies of a state with force or the threat of force, as required. This applies at all levels: successful peacekeeping, for example, depends on the ability to escalate if necessary. Once we accept that, it becomes clear that military missions depend ultimately on the overall domestic and foreign policies of the government, and how and where they need military force to support them. Once you have a military force, of course, it becomes potentially useful for wider foreign policy objectives (ship visits are a strong political signal for example) as well as for ceremonial and domestic political purposes, supporting your strategic position in a region, cooperating with your neighbours (or conversely demonstrating your independence from them) and even things like disaster relief and humanitarian operations. But none of those are reasons in themselves for establishing militaries, let alone conscription.

So let’s go back to the point about numbers. If you live in a settled country in a stable region, and your military has historically largely been involved in Peace Missions of one kind or another, then it’s unlikely that you will see the need for conscription. Such operations are difficult and complex to do properly, and they require a level of training and experience that conscripts will not have in most cases. In addition, the number of troops you need for such missions will be relatively small, and often specialised.

So the fundamental point about conscription is numbers, and conscript armies exist largely where numbers are a factor. But why have conscripts in that case: why not just recruit more military personnel? There are a number of reason for this In principle (but see later ) conscripts are cheap. They are paid, but not much, and usually provided with free food and accommodation in lieu. You can, in principle, conscript the number of people you want, and send them where they are needed. Whilst you still need a permanent cadre (another point we’ll return to), then if your essential requirement is numbers, then might it not make sense to invest in cheap conscripts?

Obviously, conscripts come with disadvantages as well. One is the size and cost of the infrastructure required to endlessly call up and train new groups of conscripts, and the officers and NCOs who will be needed to do the training and administration. Another is morale and motivation: this will inevitably be patchier among those who have been conscripted, rather than volunteering. But of course the principal difficulty is that even substantial periods of conscription (say 1-2 years) can’t in themselves provide you with an adequately trained army, still less one that has experience of deploying and exercising together. And by the end of the Cold War, many nations had reduced conscription to six months: scarcely time to produce a trained soldier.

It’s for this reason that “conscript” militaries today, such as that of South Korea, are actually a mixture of professionals and conscripts, and in the case of the Navy and Air Force, all. but basic jobs tend to be filled by professionals. But of course adding conscripts means adding professionals as well, to train and lead them, so in practice a move to a conscript force implies an increase in the number of professionals as well, with all the associated costs.

So how did we get here? Well, for most of history, the capacity of societies to generate military forces for long periods of time was limited, not just for financial reasons, but also because the sheer logistics of raising, training, maintaining and paying armies were impossible beyond a certain size. In predominantly agricultural societies, armies were necessarily seasonal: soldiers had to be home for the harvest. The Assyrians seem to have -been the first state to move to an actual standing army, with wealth made possible by conquest, and with large number of foreign mercenaries in their ranks. It was not until the industrialisation and the state development of the nineteenth century, though, that it even became possible to recruit large number of young men and to keep them under arms for a year, or even two. As the capacity of the state increased, as societies became industrialised and communications improved rapidly, mass armies became possible for the first time. The triumph of the Prussian Army of conscripts and reservists over the professional French Army in 1870 was widely noticed, and the structures were imitated everywhere, not least in the new French Third Republic. Professional armies might be more politically reliable, but they could simply not be recruited in sufficient numbers.

So for the first time, the ability to generate numbers of troops, and by extension the size of populations, became important. One of the many reasons for France’s search for colonies after 1870 was the need for a reserve of manpower to counter the much larger population of the new Reich, and indeed colonial troops turned out to be very important in both wars. Railways made it possible to deploy these forces quickly, and the increasing sophistication of the state meant they could be quickly recalled when needed.

When needed. Because the purpose of conscription was not to generate a massive peacetime army, so much as to enable a massive army to be generated in time of war. In a world where military power was increasingly reckoned by the number of infantry divisions, having the largest army you could deploy was a necessity. Thus, an army’s Order of Battle in peacetime would partly be filled by that year’s conscripts, but massively supplemented on mobilisation by the recall of conscripts with a mobilisation obligation (perhaps the last 2-3 intakes) and even by retired officers and NCOs. In their desperate search for manpower to fight a two-front war, the Germans even resorted to entire divisions of reservists recalled to duty and sent into the front line in 1914.

All of which seemed, until recently at least, to have little to do with the modern world. These sorts of arrangements, which I will return to later, lasted in an attenuated form until the 1990s throughout continental Europe. The Cold War itself implied massive armoured battles requiring huge numbers of troops, and mobilisation and deployment were key for NATO, as the presumptive defending party, to resist a Warsaw Pact attack. It became increasingly hard to see how conscripting young men and spending a year training them to be tank crewmen for a war that could surely never happen was justified. It was also extremely expensive, because of the amount of equipment that had to be purchased, maintained and eventually replaced. It was clear that wars of the future for Europe would be wars of deployment, using small numbers of well-trained troops, and expensive high-technology weapons. From Bosnia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Mali, events seemed to bear out this prediction out. There was the theoretical possibility of a war with Russia, of course, but Russia was a declining, disintegrating country that posed no military threat, and could safely be disregarded.

Now, of course, things have changed a bit, and so western leaders and pundits turn in panic to the limited range of ideas they once heard somebody talk about. What about conscription, they ask? Well the first thing to say is that if the enemy du jour is Russia, then they are way ahead of us. The Russians never abandoned conscription, because they judged that the size of their country and the length of their frontiers required them to keep a large military, and that such a military would be impractical, and anyway far too expensive if it consisted only of professionals. The key, however, is that the Russians accordingly left the infrastructure for a conscript army in place, and continued to use it. Thus, the reporting system, the basic training establishments, the specialised training establishments, the accommodation, the uniforms, not to mention the arms and ammunition that would be used in training, and on operations if necessary, plus reserves to replace casualties and lost equipment, plus mechanisms for staying in contact with reservists and recalling them for regular training—all these were kept up to date and regularly employed. The West has none of these things, but perhaps that’s a detail, when you have Amazon and AI.

We can get a very rough idea of the problem by considering a hypothetical case of a medium-sized European country which, like virtually all others, has a professional military and, again like virtually all others, has sold or closed down the infrastructure that used to support a largely conscript force. Let us give it a military of 150,000 personnel, and we will assume that, unusually, there are no particular recruitment problems. We’ll assume that the army is 80,000 strong, and that the majority of the increase in personnel will be there. (I’ll come back to that point later.) So let’s suppose that the government announces a plan to expand the army such that instead of the four mechanised brigades it now fields, in three years it will have eight brigades and in six years twelve brigades, available on mobilisation. (That is likely to be a very ambitious target in today’s circumstances, although it is very conservative compared to say the British expansion in 1939-40.) But it also plans to form new air defence units, new electronic warfare units, and recruit more specialists in drones and information technology.

The force designers take this away and conclude that to have twelve brigades on mobilisation, together with all their support will require 350,000 personnel, of whom 100,000 will be current conscripts, and 150,000 the current professional force. This includes not just the mechanised brigades, but all their support and logistics, their administration and processing, it includes territorial defence forces, other combat units commanded above brigade level, new headquarters, medical personnel, repair and maintenance personnel at different levels, and tens of thousands of battle casualty replacements, to name only the most obvious. A small part of this increase will go the the navy and the air force.

The planners decide that in peacetime only four brigades will be fully professional. The other eight will train that year’s reservists. (The same logic applies to all the other units of the army of course.) Thus, on mobilisation they will call up a number of the the previous three years’ conscripts. (There are many models of conscription, this is just one.) This goes them a margin for error to cover people who have become ill or died or are no longer fit for military service, who have left the country, who have moved and cannot be found, or who refuse to serve. They have calculated that 100,000 conscripts will be required each year, including a margin of error for the kind of reasons given above. Now, depending on the country, junior ranks serve in the army for an average of 6-8 years, officers considerably longer. (We’ll come back to officers in a moment.) Thus, let’s say that the existing basic training organisation copes with about 8000 soldier recruits in an average year. Its capacity will therefore have to increase at least tenfold, even assuming that some training takes place in the navy and air force.

Now in most militaries, basic training—turning a civilian into a soldier—takes perhaps twelve weeks. This is followed by further training, of weeks to months, in units or in special schools, to turn that soldier into a specialist of some kind, from a mortar-man to an engineering technician. Most training systems have two intakes, in Spring and Autumn, so let us say that the system takes in 50,000 recruits twice a year, accepting that some of these will leave or be thrown out before the end of training. For a start, therefore, you will need to construct a number of establishments capable of holding thousands of trainees, together with the instructional and maintenance staff, whom you will have to find from somewhere. (As I’ve indicated one of the consequences of moving to conscription will be an increase in the officers and NCOs in the professional army.) These will have to be built, with their associated ranges and training areas (including areas for live firing.) Cooks, cleaners, security guards, IT specialists, administrators, doctors, drivers and many others will have to be found, often in remote parts of the country. But these are details.

Of course, a massive new infrastructure will have to be set up to identify and process conscripts and keep track of them once they leave. In some countries, records of addresses are reasonably current, but people move around much more now than they did in the Cold War, and just finding and staying in contact with likely recruits will itself be a problem. Then, there will be the need to notify them, process them, move them around, deal with those who can’t or won’t finish the training, deal with conscientious objectors and deserters, and pay and equip them. The personnel department of the military will have to increase massively in size. But these are details that can probably be entrusted to an outside consultancy.

Finally, of course, conscripts need equipping. Not just with shiny new tanks (a problem in itself), but with uniforms and kitbags, with body armour, with personal weapons, with documents and travel coupons, with food, and sports clothing and everything you can think of. But that’s a detail: we can buy most of this from China if we need to.

Assuming these details can be settled without too much difficulty, what about the conscripts themselves, and their motivation? What about the political context in which conscription might take place? Well, there are a number of details to bear in mind here as well. The population is considerably less static than it was in the Cold War, when many conscripts lived with, or near, their parents until they left to do their service. These days, with half of the 18-25 population of most countries at university or further education of some kind, they could be anywhere, including abroad. Detailed procedures will be needed to track down and keep in contact with potential conscripts, and, there will be have to be a fairly wide window within which military service can be done, to avoid disrupting studies. Then again, very few nations conscripted absolutely everyone in peacetime: selective service was the norm. But that itself will be much more difficult today: it will be hard to judge the medical status of someone doing voluntary work in Africa, for example.

And indeed, health is another detail that will need to be addressed. Military training requires a general level of fitness and upper body strength, which for the most part doesn’t exist among young people today. (Why, is not relevant here.) As early as the 1980s, military instructors found that recruits were being invalided out of training because of stress fractures to the knees and ankles. This was because many had only ever worn trainers all their life, and could not adapt quickly enough to military footwear. Forty years ago, most conscripts would have played sports and led relatively active lives: many would have done physical work of some kind. None of that can be assumed today. The average conscript will be overweight and unfit. This matters especially, because these days, as you may have seen from coverage of the war in Ukraine, soldiers resemble medieval knights, with body armour, helmets, vizors and ear protection. This is heavy—even basic kevlar body armour weighs several kilos—and soldiers will be trained to carry out highly physical tasks while wearing that equipment, heavy boots, and carrying a personal weapon and ammunition. Now there’s nothing inherently impossible about restoring the physical fitness of conscripts, but it takes time, costs money and requires specialist trainers. And quite likely a percentage will already be suffering from medical conditions (diabetes, for example) that mean they will have to be sent home.

Now of course one major type of declared illness among young people these days is mental illness of various kinds, and some decision will have to be made about how to deal with it. Such illnesses are mostly commonly reported (whatever the reality) among the educated middle classes: does that imply a blanket exception for anyone who claims to be suffering from ADHD, such that it’s primarily the working class that is conscripted? Does someone with recognised learning difficulties get more time to complete the basic recruit syllabus? Details like that will have to be worked out. In any event, and for even the mentally toughest, conscript service will be a challenge. We recall that for more than a hundred years, military service was a rite of passage for young people into adulthood. For young men, it marked the transition from being a net beneficiary to a net contributor to society, as marriage traditionally did for both sexes. It was one example of the passage through mild stress and potential danger which has marked the transition from boyhood to manhood in civilisations for tens of thousands of years. But then, as recently as my generation, children could not wait to grow up to enjoy the privileges and freedoms adulthood: now adulthood is frightening and they want to remain children forever.

In any event, the minimum requirements of conscription would crash headfirst into the social dogma of our time, with casualties on both sides. For example, in the past, conscription was generally limited to men, although women could volunteer. So how do we handle such a question when one group of feminists is arguing that women are essentially peaceful and should not be conscripted, and another group is arguing that women are as tough and warlike as men, and should be given the same opportunities? And if only men are conscripted, can men identify as women to escape being called up? For that matter, can a man who identifies as a woman volunteer, and demand to share women’s accommodation and showers? Now before you dismiss this all as reactionary special pleading, let me just stress that, in practice, these are exactly the kinds of human interest things that the media love, and which cause massive headache for politicians. But they are details that will have to be dealt with.

After all, consider the problems the US Army has had integrating women into combat units. Putting young men and women bursting with hormones in close proximity to each other for long periods of time and not expecting problems may strike you and me as being unreasonable, but for political reasons it has been done. I was told some years ago by a group of gender theorists that a number of women soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, because they were unwilling to drink enough water for fear of being aggressed by male soldiers on the way to the (distant) toilets.

But beyond these details, there is something that stands out as not a detail at all: what would conscription be for? What’s the point of having large mobilisable armies in today’s world? Is anyone seriously contemplating a Russian invasion? For more than a century, conscription was based on the idea of the defence of your country against a deliberate attack, which is why there were legal, and sometimes constitutional, prohibitions against deploying conscripts outside the national territory. Conscription had a story behind it: in France, it went back to the Revolution, and the People in Arms. It was always a popular cause with the Left, which distrusted a professional army, and was seen, rightly, as a way of strengthening national solidarity by forcing people from different social classes and backgrounds together. But today we no longer have nations; just temporary conjunctions of people and places, not citizens but residents. And the prevailing ideology is busy dismantling the national identities that do exist so that we start hating each other. Who’s going to fight, or even give up a year of their life, for that?

So in many ways those who will shout loudest for conscription are those who have done the most to make it impossible. (And I’ve hardly begun to go into the details of the various options.) Even if a coherent narrative could somehow be constructed to support conscription, western nations no longer have the command of detail and precision which alone would make it feasible. There are some problems you can’t Powerpoint your way out of.