Maybe young men need compulsory military service

Memorial Day seems like as good a time as any to publish just enough info on compulsory military service to (hopefully) provoke a few people who know a lot more than me about it into commenting with helpful corrections and context, thus getting me much closer to having an informed opinion on whether or not it could or would be worth the cost.

If you’re new here, I write a lot about young, bottom-half men and the problems they both endure themselves and cause for others.

High-quality commenter Nicholas Weininger has suggested compulsory military service as a solution to young, bottom-half male malaise (and the many problems associated with it). [Update: Nicholas suggested some kind of optional national service, not compulsory military conscription. I hadn’t bothered to find his original comment when I wrote this and misremembered what he’d written. My apologies to you and him.]

If you’re short on time, here’s my TL;DR on conscription: I think a program wherein any 19-year-old resident of the United States who is not currently employed, in training, in school, or spending a large percentage of their day caretaking for a dependent is compelled into a two-year term of national service of some kind is worth considering. If I’m wrong, tell me why.

If your answer boils down to, “I don’t like this idea for aesthetic reasons,” girl I am right there with you. I don’t like this idea at all. I’m a recovering libertarian and (military, not trade) isolationist. I still self-describe as a civil libertarian. I’m reflexively anti-nationalist and self-consciously cosmopolitan.

Yet, for some reason, I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it’s that Weininger is very smart, and doesn’t seem generally inclined to the kind of… bumfuck Egyptian jingoism I associate with words like military and compulsory.

Maybe it’s that the status quo is so bad that even an idea I personally find distasteful could end up improving on it.

I’m not sure. Either way, here are a few things I learned about conscription.

Conscription is pretty common

According to Sky News, some form of National Service or conscription exists in 80 out of 195 countries. According to a 2005 working paper, fewer than half of all countries rely entirely on professional volunteers. The rest draft at least some of their military personnel. “According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in 1995 the militaries of the countries that used conscription ranged from 25% draftees in South Korea and Denmark to 89% draftees in Switzerland and Senegal,” the authors wrote.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, many OECD countries ended or limited their conscription policies. But within the past decade, it looks like that trend has reversed. I couldn’t find any examples of countries that have recently ended, suspende, or limited their military conscription.

Several countries have reintroduced or expanded their conscription policies in recent years, These include Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, and Serbia. Sweden recently expanded conscription to include women. Denmark plans to do the same in the near future. The Conservative Party in the UK promised compulsory participation in National Service for young people if they won the last general election.

Conscription offers benefits

“Conscription significantly extends the obligations of male citizens and the reach of the state,” The authors of a 2016 paper wrote. I would argue the former is good and the latter is bad.

Something I’ve written about kind of a lot is that boys tend to need grown men to help them grow up into worthwhile human beings. Boys need this more than girls, on average.

“Socialized, responsible, civilized men do not just happen naturally,” Kryptogal (Kate, if you like) wrote. “Women kind of do. Even the wild child girls, or the ones from shitty families, pretty much all eventually grow up and become contributing members of society on their own. Boys…not so much. They actually need to be initiated, and encouraged, and trained, and given respect and status and authority when they do what society wants them to.”

Unfortunately, boys are more likely than girls to lack access to same-sex role models. This hole is often filled by manosphere grifters and podcast bros.

Bottom-half young men have the least contact with adult men from their families and communities and the most contact with the criminal justice system. “In this class setting, state power is no abstraction,” RW Connell wrote in Masculinities. Not one of the five unemployed bottom-half men he surveyed “has found the state an asset in any substantial way.”

Compulsory service could offer young people a positive experience with the state.

I read somewhere once that Americans really, really like the military. Current and former service members are especially likely to hold it in very high regard. It’s probably worth paying attention to institutions that buck the trend of declining trust in institutions, especially among the working class.

A well-executed conscription program would provide participants with structure, work experience, and skills that they could take into the rest of their lives.

Conscription also can provide rapidly scalable, broad-based national defense in emergencies.

This is what states like Finland, Israel, and South Korea use it for.

I like to think I’ve grown past my naive libertarian views on foreign policy, which basically came down to “When goods cross borders, armies don’t.” And “If we leave the rest of the world alone, it will leave us alone too.” The world is uncertain. Many countries are run by people who have bad information and make bad decisions even when their data is good.

Conscription can also foster unity and bridge divides by bringing people from different backgrounds into continuous close proximity.

A well-executed conscription program could also boost nationalism and foster civic engagement, since sacrifice tends to breed affinity.

Conscription’s drawbacks

Conscription distorts labor markets. To the extent that it pulls young people out of education and work, it is generally bad for wages or economic growth. Conscripts tend to have lower lifetime earnings because service reduces their working years and disrupts their educational and career trajectories. It may also reduce national labor productivity by making young people miss out on opportunities for higher education or vocational training.

Male-only national service might also foster sexism.

“Pure economic rationality is incompatible with men’s categorical authority over women,” wrote Connell. “In however limited a way, the instrumental rationality of the marketplace has a power to disrupt gender.” In other words, to the extent that national service takes men out of mixed gender schools and workplaces and puts them into a male-only context, it would delay the point at which these men came into close continuous proximity to women and institutions that increasingly disrupt gender.

Conscription also involves “a substantial fixed cost on top of what is already being spent recruiting volunteers,” according to a 2005 working paper. Conscription’s costs include:

• Drafting and passing legislation

• Taking a regular census of potential draftees

• Setting up and running offices throughout the country, staffed with draft officials, administrators, medical doctors (to deal with medical exemptions), and enforcers to pursue dodgers

These inefficiencies, along with social disruptions, moved many OECD countries to end or limit their conscription policies in the 1990s and early 2000s.

However, it doesn’t appear that any countries have ended or suspended conscription within the past decade.

Conscription’s limits

While conscription can boost a nation’s readiness to respond to emergencies, it can’t replace professional volunteers. Military experts tend to agree that professional volunteers are more effective than conscripted warriors. This is especially true of more technologically advanced militaries.

Also, I wrote about a hypothetical “well-executed” conscription program in the benefits section.

In practice, many conscription efforts are executed quite poorly. For instance, many conscription programs disproportionately include young people who are poor and members of ethnic minority groups. This undermines their ability to heal divides or foster national unity. To the extent that people believe that a state provides exemptions unfairly, it can undermine, rather than boost, trust in and affinity for the state and/or military. The same is true of the extent to which people support the wars and conflicts in which the state involves itself.

My take

As I said, I favor limiting my hypothetical conscription to any 19-year-old resident of the United States who is not currently employed, in training, in school, or spending a large percentage of their day caretaking for a dependent.

This would do a few things.

First, it (mostly) solves the labor market distortion problem by exempting everyone who’s already doing something productive.

Second, it gives young NEETs who want to avoid compulsory national service a new incentive to leave their parents’ basements and get busy doing something that’s either productive or at least might become productive. NEET men, especially, are a huge and growing problem.

Third, it solves the sexism problem by including women. I expect it would still be majority male, since more young men are doing nothing useful with their days than young women. To the extent that it gives young men and young women who aren’t in college a way to be in close physical proximity to each other and to observe each others’ work ethic, personality, character, etc. up close and over time, it might actually turn out to be very useful for boosting marriage rates.