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.
Forced labor of any sort is always morally abhorrent, it is simply beyond the pale, and I would go so far as to say that it's morally mandatory to oppose it by force. In this hypothetical, sign me up for a job bombing draft offices, which I would do seven days a week to keep my daughter (who is taking a gap year before college) from being chained to the plow or whatever feudal nonsense demands free labor as a punishment for a moment's idleness.
Oh, and of course wages for teens would all drop to minimum overnight as employers would know they are a prospective employee's only alternative to the labor camps (you'd be extending the work-of-be-punished depredations of the H1B visas to tens of millions of people!), while colleges could jack tuition to the moon knowing they're selling get-out-of-serfdom-free cards. And of course you're de-facto bringing back vagrancy laws, a backbone of post-reconstruction racism.
If your national services are such a great idea, make them voluntary, pay a competitive wage, and see who takes you up on it: Putting people in jail for work-dodging (perhaps you'll sentence them to hard labor?) isn't going to make anyone better off.
Ya this is something I've thought would be a good idea since my early 20s and I kind of wish it existed for me. My gut tells me that, ironically, if there was a survey done we'd find support for it higher among men than women.
There are other forms of service to look at too instead of just military. Military-like national service programs that focus on things like infrastructure building would have great potential too.
I also strongly suggest reading William James' The Moral Equivalent of War (it's not long). He endorses national service for a "war against nature" (essentially build lots of infrastructure) for all young adults in there as well as a way to hone the virtue of the individual and the nation as a whole.
I think that he recognizes an uncomfortable truth: without something to struggle against we tend let ourselves go--men in particular. Some kind of struggle in our formative years sets up habits and character traits that will serve a person well for the rest of their lives.
The problem is it's also perfectly natural for us to refuse struggling against something especially if we see it as unnecessary. Many need a bit of a push out of the nest.
Grant Gould totally covered my moral objections, but my other thought is does any existing conscription program actually function to uplift problematic men? Don't many people get rejected from the military outside the most desperate of situations? I imagine that the military doesn't want to be saddled with problematic bottom-half or bottom-quarter men any more than the rest of society and would likely screen out the ones most in need one way or another.
"Does any existing conscription program actually function to uplift problematic men?" Individual men would say their time in the service helped them. I'm sure some would say that about involuntary service as well. I wish I had the data to say how many.
The likelihood that the military will reject the very men we most want to help hadn't occurred to me and is a very good objection.
Also a recovering libertarian. I kind of like this. I'd also propose that we use the military to build infrastructure like the Romans did. Paired with conscription, you get a constant pipeline of experienced trade employees/contractors getting pumped into your labor market, and you also get infrastructure.
They would be paid, and of course there would be exemptions for disability, etc. You are compelling them to join the military by force already, so I feel like we are beyond certain questions of consent. If they don't want to build infrastructure they can get a job doing anything else, or go to college, or start a business.
Okay. Fine. If “slavery” is too harsh a word, than I’ll say thralldom instead. You are advocating for state enforced thralldom.
I wonder what people would need to believe to be true of women in order to justify the systematic violation of their 4th and 5th amendment rights under the Constitution? Are men the only citizens who should be subjected to compulsory obligations to the state?
First, it seems that different people have very different ideas of what it means to be in "the military". As if mandatory service automatically means being put in physical danger or some sort of combat role. That is very, very far from how the military actually operates.
First of all, even in wartime, that's not the case, the vast majority of military roles are not combat roles and pose such a miniscule risk of death/physical harm as to be almost non-existent. Look for example at the US war in Afghanistan, which was active warfare and we were there for 20 years from 2001 to 2021. During that time, 800,000 military personnel were deployed there, and plenty of them had multiple deployments (my husband had six tours in Afghanistan over an 8-year period). Over that same period, slightly less than 2,000 were killed in action. So even if you don't take the multiple deployments into account, that's a 0.2% chance of death *even when you are sent into an active war zone in a foreign theater*. If you take into account the multiple deployments and calculate the odds by single deployment, it drops to like a 0.04% chance. These death rates are lower or comparable to plenty of other activities people engage in regularly...they are literally lower than the odds that we all have of dying in a car crash just living normal life, which are about 1%. And tons of people are never even deployed because that's not the type of role they're in.
Then there's the fact that we're sometimes not in any wars (like right now), or not any substantial enough that there's much chance of any danger. What this all adds up to is that 1. The large majority of roles in the military are not actual soldier roles anyway, they're things like "medic" and "mechanic" and "data analyst", 2. The people who are in the soldier roles typically WANT to be in those roles and are suited for it, and 3. In modern times, even the actual soldiering roles are not *that* dangerous. So in general, this idea that it would be sending kids to slaughter is just extremely exaggerated. Mostly it's sending them to do mundane work and training. Check out this piece written just the other day by a guy in the military who is complaining because there are no wars and no people he can go kill, and nothing to do: https://substack.com/inbox/post/163684574
All these other countries that do mandatory service aren't actually sending anyone to die. Mostly they just wear a uniform and live and socialize together and do rote tasks. Only rarely does something happen where they get called up, like 2023 Israel. But your average mother in Switzerland is certainly not crying herself to sleep at night because she's worrying about her poor baby who has to do his national service and might die.
All that said, you know who really hates conscription? The military. And the voluntary soldiers. Because if shit DOES go down, and you do actually need to go fight, the last thing in the world that you want is some dudes in your unit who don't want to be there, and are going to turn chickenshit on you or go AWOL. The voluntarily enlisted absolutely can't stand the idea of this. It also somewhat removes whatever glamour might surround things about courage, honor, or bravery...hard to uphold that mystique if people are forced.
Some of your commenters also seem to think that conscripted people are not paid, which isn't true. Of course they're paid. Or I don't know, when they object that it's slave labor, perhaps it's not the lack of pay they're objecting to but the lack of choice.
Which gets at why I can't see this happening in the US: too many libertarians. We're way too selfish and self-absorbed and unwilling to have any restrictions or requirements put on us. It wouldn't fly, the kids would all complain and flip out about it, and the parents would back them up. It's already too late, we're too far gone, there's no sense of shared citizenship, sacrifice, or any of that here. I get that part of the point is hoping to instill those values, but if you have kids who are already intellectually dedicated to being resentful about it, and no surrounding culture instilling these types of values because it's instilling values more like "you're an island unto yourself and you owe no one anything", they're just going to dig in harder and get even more resentful.
So, good idea, but probably wouldn't fly here. Probably the best or closest you could get would be to try implementing some sort of military-style, drill-sergeant type activities into public schools, since people have already accepted we have those. Maybe in gym class or community projects, something like that. Maybe if you give grades, the libertarians won't complain about forced labor, since you have the choice of not doing the labor and just getting an F.
I do think the most compelling argument against compulsory anything is that no one wants the people we most want and need to help with this.
I think the public schools idea is really interesting. I've been thinking a lot about edu alternatives lately, but nothing along the lines of shared citizenship, sacrifice, cohesion, civic pride, etc. But why not? I actually did a year of JROTC in high school. It wasn't for me, but a lot of kids really benefitted. I'll probably keep thinking about this.
I mean. It sounds like you're saying that it would be a good idea if the government was able to provide a sort of a "default job" that you can do if you don't have anything else that you're doing (and then add some deliberate social structure to that job).
Isn't that basically the New Deal from a century ago?
I like this analysis of practical pros and cons a lot and appreciate that you thought this through. But I am not sure how I came across as advocating *compulsory* service in the comment I think you're riffing on here. For the record, I oppose the "compulsory" part on standard libertarian individual autonomy grounds, and I probably should have made that much clearer.
To clarify, what I want is:
-- that there be good options, including but not limited to military options, for 19-year-olds of widely varying capabilities (cognitive, physical etc) to do national service that molds them in the positive ways conscription has historically molded a lot of young men.
-- that there be financial, prestige, etc incentives for doing that service sufficient to convince most young people, and in particular most young men, to do it.
It won't be a good fit for a significant minority, though, and the state should not coerce that significant minority into doing it anyway.
On a less oppositional note, one of the other useful precedents to study for this is Mormon missionary practice, which anecdotally seems to help mold young Mormon men into "marriage material". I was just reading a Substack post to that effect earlier today and now I can't find it, or I'd link to it.
I don't know why I jumped to that either. My apologies for attributing to you a position you didn't take! I agree with your thoughts here more than the ones I made up.
Compulsory service doesn’t have to be limited to the military. If it were universal, it wouldn’t interfere with lifetime earnings, etc. as everyone would be in the same boat.
I have enjoyed this recent ‘bottom half men’ series a lot.
I think it would be great if either of my daughters did a year or two of national service in some capacity. The system shouldn’t just be military jobs, it could be almost any kind of federal directed work, and ideally in a new part of the nation.
Chances of chains or plows being involved seem pretty low given how actual national service looks in actual implementations in the real world.
For a culture that systemically disenfranchises them and then contemptuously mocks them for their failures and “privilege”? For a military whose prior two major conflicts were cynical pursuits for the benefit of no one but the military industrial complex? For a government whose education system subjected us to constant ridicule and dejection because we exhibited the very traits we would then be “compelled” to embody for the purposes of killing and being killed?
Why do you think that young men would acquiesce to this “compulsory service”? Let me tell ya, if Uncle Sam feels entitled to my blood, he will be sorely disappointed should he attempt to collect it. I am not State property.
But honestly, this is an excellent idea: let’s just take all the males deemed unfit, unworthy, and/or too potentially dangerous to be allowed to exist in this “progressive” society and force them to go die in some foreign conflict which they have no personal stake in whatsoever. Why consider cultural, institutional, and economic reform to proactively initiate young men into society when we can simply liquidate these undesirables?
Also: what “useful” things are young women doing? Digital prostitution doesn’t count.
Forced labor of any sort is always morally abhorrent, it is simply beyond the pale, and I would go so far as to say that it's morally mandatory to oppose it by force. In this hypothetical, sign me up for a job bombing draft offices, which I would do seven days a week to keep my daughter (who is taking a gap year before college) from being chained to the plow or whatever feudal nonsense demands free labor as a punishment for a moment's idleness.
Oh, and of course wages for teens would all drop to minimum overnight as employers would know they are a prospective employee's only alternative to the labor camps (you'd be extending the work-of-be-punished depredations of the H1B visas to tens of millions of people!), while colleges could jack tuition to the moon knowing they're selling get-out-of-serfdom-free cards. And of course you're de-facto bringing back vagrancy laws, a backbone of post-reconstruction racism.
If your national services are such a great idea, make them voluntary, pay a competitive wage, and see who takes you up on it: Putting people in jail for work-dodging (perhaps you'll sentence them to hard labor?) isn't going to make anyone better off.
These are good objections! Thanks!
Ya this is something I've thought would be a good idea since my early 20s and I kind of wish it existed for me. My gut tells me that, ironically, if there was a survey done we'd find support for it higher among men than women.
There are other forms of service to look at too instead of just military. Military-like national service programs that focus on things like infrastructure building would have great potential too.
I also strongly suggest reading William James' The Moral Equivalent of War (it's not long). He endorses national service for a "war against nature" (essentially build lots of infrastructure) for all young adults in there as well as a way to hone the virtue of the individual and the nation as a whole.
That was an interesting read. What do you like about it?
I think that he recognizes an uncomfortable truth: without something to struggle against we tend let ourselves go--men in particular. Some kind of struggle in our formative years sets up habits and character traits that will serve a person well for the rest of their lives.
The problem is it's also perfectly natural for us to refuse struggling against something especially if we see it as unnecessary. Many need a bit of a push out of the nest.
Grant Gould totally covered my moral objections, but my other thought is does any existing conscription program actually function to uplift problematic men? Don't many people get rejected from the military outside the most desperate of situations? I imagine that the military doesn't want to be saddled with problematic bottom-half or bottom-quarter men any more than the rest of society and would likely screen out the ones most in need one way or another.
"Does any existing conscription program actually function to uplift problematic men?" Individual men would say their time in the service helped them. I'm sure some would say that about involuntary service as well. I wish I had the data to say how many.
The likelihood that the military will reject the very men we most want to help hadn't occurred to me and is a very good objection.
Why are we talking about human beings as though they were parasites?
Also a recovering libertarian. I kind of like this. I'd also propose that we use the military to build infrastructure like the Romans did. Paired with conscription, you get a constant pipeline of experienced trade employees/contractors getting pumped into your labor market, and you also get infrastructure.
It could be good!
…so, slave labor?
They would be paid, and of course there would be exemptions for disability, etc. You are compelling them to join the military by force already, so I feel like we are beyond certain questions of consent. If they don't want to build infrastructure they can get a job doing anything else, or go to college, or start a business.
Okay. Fine. If “slavery” is too harsh a word, than I’ll say thralldom instead. You are advocating for state enforced thralldom.
I wonder what people would need to believe to be true of women in order to justify the systematic violation of their 4th and 5th amendment rights under the Constitution? Are men the only citizens who should be subjected to compulsory obligations to the state?
Couple thoughts.
First, it seems that different people have very different ideas of what it means to be in "the military". As if mandatory service automatically means being put in physical danger or some sort of combat role. That is very, very far from how the military actually operates.
First of all, even in wartime, that's not the case, the vast majority of military roles are not combat roles and pose such a miniscule risk of death/physical harm as to be almost non-existent. Look for example at the US war in Afghanistan, which was active warfare and we were there for 20 years from 2001 to 2021. During that time, 800,000 military personnel were deployed there, and plenty of them had multiple deployments (my husband had six tours in Afghanistan over an 8-year period). Over that same period, slightly less than 2,000 were killed in action. So even if you don't take the multiple deployments into account, that's a 0.2% chance of death *even when you are sent into an active war zone in a foreign theater*. If you take into account the multiple deployments and calculate the odds by single deployment, it drops to like a 0.04% chance. These death rates are lower or comparable to plenty of other activities people engage in regularly...they are literally lower than the odds that we all have of dying in a car crash just living normal life, which are about 1%. And tons of people are never even deployed because that's not the type of role they're in.
Then there's the fact that we're sometimes not in any wars (like right now), or not any substantial enough that there's much chance of any danger. What this all adds up to is that 1. The large majority of roles in the military are not actual soldier roles anyway, they're things like "medic" and "mechanic" and "data analyst", 2. The people who are in the soldier roles typically WANT to be in those roles and are suited for it, and 3. In modern times, even the actual soldiering roles are not *that* dangerous. So in general, this idea that it would be sending kids to slaughter is just extremely exaggerated. Mostly it's sending them to do mundane work and training. Check out this piece written just the other day by a guy in the military who is complaining because there are no wars and no people he can go kill, and nothing to do: https://substack.com/inbox/post/163684574
All these other countries that do mandatory service aren't actually sending anyone to die. Mostly they just wear a uniform and live and socialize together and do rote tasks. Only rarely does something happen where they get called up, like 2023 Israel. But your average mother in Switzerland is certainly not crying herself to sleep at night because she's worrying about her poor baby who has to do his national service and might die.
All that said, you know who really hates conscription? The military. And the voluntary soldiers. Because if shit DOES go down, and you do actually need to go fight, the last thing in the world that you want is some dudes in your unit who don't want to be there, and are going to turn chickenshit on you or go AWOL. The voluntarily enlisted absolutely can't stand the idea of this. It also somewhat removes whatever glamour might surround things about courage, honor, or bravery...hard to uphold that mystique if people are forced.
Some of your commenters also seem to think that conscripted people are not paid, which isn't true. Of course they're paid. Or I don't know, when they object that it's slave labor, perhaps it's not the lack of pay they're objecting to but the lack of choice.
Which gets at why I can't see this happening in the US: too many libertarians. We're way too selfish and self-absorbed and unwilling to have any restrictions or requirements put on us. It wouldn't fly, the kids would all complain and flip out about it, and the parents would back them up. It's already too late, we're too far gone, there's no sense of shared citizenship, sacrifice, or any of that here. I get that part of the point is hoping to instill those values, but if you have kids who are already intellectually dedicated to being resentful about it, and no surrounding culture instilling these types of values because it's instilling values more like "you're an island unto yourself and you owe no one anything", they're just going to dig in harder and get even more resentful.
So, good idea, but probably wouldn't fly here. Probably the best or closest you could get would be to try implementing some sort of military-style, drill-sergeant type activities into public schools, since people have already accepted we have those. Maybe in gym class or community projects, something like that. Maybe if you give grades, the libertarians won't complain about forced labor, since you have the choice of not doing the labor and just getting an F.
Thank you for that info! And perspective.
I do think the most compelling argument against compulsory anything is that no one wants the people we most want and need to help with this.
I think the public schools idea is really interesting. I've been thinking a lot about edu alternatives lately, but nothing along the lines of shared citizenship, sacrifice, cohesion, civic pride, etc. But why not? I actually did a year of JROTC in high school. It wasn't for me, but a lot of kids really benefitted. I'll probably keep thinking about this.
I mean. It sounds like you're saying that it would be a good idea if the government was able to provide a sort of a "default job" that you can do if you don't have anything else that you're doing (and then add some deliberate social structure to that job).
Isn't that basically the New Deal from a century ago?
To be clear: Yes, I'd be in favor of that.
That's probably a better idea that what I actually suggested haha
I like this analysis of practical pros and cons a lot and appreciate that you thought this through. But I am not sure how I came across as advocating *compulsory* service in the comment I think you're riffing on here. For the record, I oppose the "compulsory" part on standard libertarian individual autonomy grounds, and I probably should have made that much clearer.
To clarify, what I want is:
-- that there be good options, including but not limited to military options, for 19-year-olds of widely varying capabilities (cognitive, physical etc) to do national service that molds them in the positive ways conscription has historically molded a lot of young men.
-- that there be financial, prestige, etc incentives for doing that service sufficient to convince most young people, and in particular most young men, to do it.
It won't be a good fit for a significant minority, though, and the state should not coerce that significant minority into doing it anyway.
On a less oppositional note, one of the other useful precedents to study for this is Mormon missionary practice, which anecdotally seems to help mold young Mormon men into "marriage material". I was just reading a Substack post to that effect earlier today and now I can't find it, or I'd link to it.
I updated the post for future readers, fyi
Thanks, appreciate it!
I don't know why I jumped to that either. My apologies for attributing to you a position you didn't take! I agree with your thoughts here more than the ones I made up.
Compulsory service doesn’t have to be limited to the military. If it were universal, it wouldn’t interfere with lifetime earnings, etc. as everyone would be in the same boat.
I have enjoyed this recent ‘bottom half men’ series a lot.
Thank you! I agree everyone would be in the same boat, but everyone having lower earnings is still bad, all else equal.
I think it would be great if either of my daughters did a year or two of national service in some capacity. The system shouldn’t just be military jobs, it could be almost any kind of federal directed work, and ideally in a new part of the nation.
Chances of chains or plows being involved seem pretty low given how actual national service looks in actual implementations in the real world.
For a culture that systemically disenfranchises them and then contemptuously mocks them for their failures and “privilege”? For a military whose prior two major conflicts were cynical pursuits for the benefit of no one but the military industrial complex? For a government whose education system subjected us to constant ridicule and dejection because we exhibited the very traits we would then be “compelled” to embody for the purposes of killing and being killed?
Why do you think that young men would acquiesce to this “compulsory service”? Let me tell ya, if Uncle Sam feels entitled to my blood, he will be sorely disappointed should he attempt to collect it. I am not State property.
But honestly, this is an excellent idea: let’s just take all the males deemed unfit, unworthy, and/or too potentially dangerous to be allowed to exist in this “progressive” society and force them to go die in some foreign conflict which they have no personal stake in whatsoever. Why consider cultural, institutional, and economic reform to proactively initiate young men into society when we can simply liquidate these undesirables?
Also: what “useful” things are young women doing? Digital prostitution doesn’t count.