1. Obviously, dramatically decreased military-spending by requiring fewer career military members; conscripts only typically receive necessary equipment, their quarters, food, and a small stipend, whereas contract soldiers receive all of the same necessities but also must be paid enough, both in terms of direct salary and post-service benefits, to justify signing up.
2. Having a populous in which most adults have served, have firearms training, and so on, means even post-service, the nation becomes far more difficult, if not impossible, to conquer with traditional weapons.
3. The military, while riddled with problems, forces an individual to bond and learn to work with others as a team; this is an invaluable aspect that increases individual productivity in the workforce among other places.
4. Forced military service, when enacted in a country with little corruption, also has the benefit of forcing people of all ethnicities, sexualities, religions, and most importantly, economic classes to work together as a unit; I think the positive impact on the issue of class divide cannot be overstated -- conscription allows the low-income kid from public housing to build connections with the child of a multi-national conglomerate; and similarly, it forces both sides to make an effort to understand and humanize eachother, which I think is highly beneficial for society as a whole long-term.
5. This may sound old-fashioned, but it also likely helps instill discipline and work ethic; 18-year-olds around the world are, well, for lack of a nicer description, underdeveloped and inexperienced -- I cannot count the amount of times during university in which my classmates truly appeared to be children in an adult's body, causing fights with professors, demanding better grades despite not doing the work, and so on; the United States, in particular, already has a serious problem when it comes to both pride in one's work, as well as the ability to accept that one's current job or situation may kind of just suck, but that doesn't mean it's okay to neglect responsibilities and force the consumer to suffer -- it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good service, in any industry, almost regardless of pay.
6. Related to kids, naturally, often being dumb kids, I do not think most people between 18-20 truly know what they want to do with their lives, nor do I think they always understand the true consequences of decisions, yet our society expects individuals to immediately head off to university the moment they graduate high school, ideally to enroll in the best four-year program they can, even if that means going out of state, and even if that means burning upwards of $50,000+ per-year in tuition alone sometimes.
As an anecdote, one of my best friends, who is slightly younger than me, an incredibly, incredibly bright, and amazing woman, one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, the best pianist I've ever met, the most humble and well-adjusted person you'll meet, has excellent critical thinking and analytic skills, and has demonstrated consistently that she is capable of learning virtually anything across many disciplines, and the list goes on.
She scored nearly perfectly on the SAT, aced the ACT, and everything else you'd expect from a top-tier prodigy. While in high school, she really wanted a chance to do AP calculus, but her father unexpectedly passed away, and they told her to just take it easy this final semester. She got accepted into several supposedly great schools, but unfortunately was not one of the lucky hundred-ish people who get to Yale's Music program, so she decided to stay in Illinois and take the offer from Northwestern.
I was worried it would be a mistake, given the nearly $60K/year in tuition, with no in-state discount, but she powered ahead. Anyway despite, naturally, wanting to go for music, her love for maths and her missed opportunity led her to take introductory calculus as an elective. However, unlike Russia, where I studied, the U.S. treats calculus as a weed-out class, with absurdly high failure rates for what I think is a subject most people can actually understand given the right teacher. In her case, unlike Russia's twelve-per-class seminar-style teaching, it was three hundred person lecture halls, where you do not get to ever realistically interact with the professor, and it was all terribly explained, pure theory, followed by homework with no feedback rather than the more practical intuitive approach taken in Russian math.
Inevitably and unfortunately, the stress of that awful, awful class, combined with everything else going on at 18 meant that one of the brightest people I knew dropped out after the first year. In exchange for burning $60,000 USD, all she got was torture and humiliation.
Personally, I think conscription is nice because it forces people to essentially take a one-to-two-year gap-year, as well as often training them in a certain field, giving them more time to really weigh their options and think about what they want to do in life plus make more responsible decisions with a more developed brain.
7. Lastly, in the same sense that conscription forces people of wildly different social classes, who would otherwise likely never interact, to live together for upwards of two-to-three years sometimes, giving them the chance to connect and bond and potentially make use of those connections once service ends, ideally, conscription should not be limited to men-only, as it is in most nations, because including women has significant potential to bring better equality for both men and women than exists today. And excluding them would make the existing inequality even worse.
---
My opinions are primarily based on the positive aspects from my experiences with Russia and South Korea. I cannot comment on other countries.
Here are the top political news stories for today.
Be the first to reply to this disagreement.
Join in on more popular conversations.
