KilroywasNOTHere
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if that's the case then the king really needs to be careful about choosing his battles.
Military Debate: Is Conscription Moral?
- Thread starter Battlegrinder
- Start date
if that's the case then the king really needs to be careful about choosing his battles.
I lived in the hood sometimes battles choose you.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
and in 99.99% of those circumstances you don't need to force people to punch the attackers they've already started flying fist. If you are so short on volunteers that you have to forceful conscript them, you really need to question the validity of your casus belli.
And then the other country loses the occupation.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
If an enemy military were actually invading my county and there was a risk of my nation being conquered or eliminated, then I’m sure that there would be huge numbers of volunteers.
If the circumstances are such that we are having trouble getting enough recruits for a war, then maybe we should reconsider whether or not we should be involved in that war.
Batrix2070
RON/PLC was a wonderful country.
That's... how to put it. An extremely naive approach. The whole point of a conscript army is, de facto, to build up a huge number of reservists who don't need to be kept in barracks all the time like professionals, but who can gain the necessary competencies to later return to civilian life and call them up in case of war.
A good example is the Polish Army of the Second Republic, it was a conscript army which, thanks just to conscription, was able to call up recruits under the general mobilization and immediately send them to units. In wartime, you won't have time to train new soldiers to the same extent as in peacetime, especially in the early stages of a war when you are the defending side.
The September campaign is a good example of this, Poland did not even have the opportunity to field new troops before it fell. And if it had relied solely on a professional army it simply would have fallen even faster than the OTL, and that was before it had trained all those volunteers, and you should know that a great many people not covered by mobilization, volunteered for the army.
The same thing happened in Ukraine, in the initial phase Ukrainians were forced to hold the front with what they had, waiting desperately for volunteers and mobilized recruits to be trained. Until then, the Ukrainian Command was forced to catcall its own soldiers in combat zones, holding them far longer than NATO standards dictate. There were no rotations of soldiers because there was no one to replace them!
Thinking, especially in this day and age where war is extremely fast and devastating that you will have time to train volunteers, is simply detached from reality for many countries. Professional armies are damn expensive to maintain and you still want them to rely solely on volunteers in the event of War? Yes, many will volunteer, but what good is that if there is no equipment for them or time to train them properly.
Conscription allows you to save a lot of money, because you only have to maintain 1/3 as many regular personnel as the Professional Army, because the rest will be filled with conscripts anyway. As a result, for the same amount of money as the Professionals you can buy more equipment to last longer.
Professional armies are good when your only goal is to bust heads abroad and wars are not popular in your society. Then you don't have to worry too much about society, because your "imperialist" actions will only be borne by those who volunteer.
When, on the other hand, your goal is not to get killed, it turns out that conscription becomes the only option, because otherwise you are just butchering your economy to keep arming your army.
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What good are volunteers when they need months to be trained even without their training facilities being shot at, and the professional army can hold off the enemy for a few weeks?
Do you have any idea how long it takes to train a decent tank commander, artilleryman, or SAM system operator?
It's only those launching offensive wars, to be done on own initiative, that get the luxury of recruiting and training necessary volunteers according to their own timetable.
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Batrix2070
RON/PLC was a wonderful country.
Although is as possible, although it has never been a reliable source of recruits. In Poland, one can immediately report to the reserves, and the status of a soldier is extremely privileged over that of a civilian. Few wanted to come (in 2018 it was a staggering 18,000 people) when they can earn much, much more for themselves in civilian life. If one were to try this through high salaries, it would very quickly become apparent that the army would become too expensive to maintain.
This brings us back to square one, well, unless you want to bring back the medieval social model.
It's more about patching holes, in times of relative peace and stabilizy missions it could function as such, but with a full-fledged war?
The other thing is that, as I say, a professional army is a huge cost to the economy because you are just taking a not inconsiderable number of people out of the economy for decades. People who don't produce or sell anything, and on whom you are forced to pay no small amount of money.
It comes out cheaper to take out young people around 18 years old, for two years, train them and deploy them in the military, and then after compulsory service pull them back every so often for training. That way you cut costs and at the same time they are not a constant net drain on the overall economy, because they won't serve for decades, but will go back to civilian life to work and increase the country's wealth.
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King Arts
Well-known member
What do you mean by medieval social model? You mean give extra rights to veterans? Yeah that could work you only can vote or have other rights if you have joined reserve.
Batrix2070
RON/PLC was a wonderful country.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what current societies find unacceptable.
And what would that be? Say, money? Congratulations, you have reinvented the professional army, now with less training. Other than that, good luck with the politics and culture involved.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
Thing is people create societies and give up the right to their own bodies to avoid becoming ground meat in the first place.what is the point then to do that if said society is going to dump you head first into the grinder anyway?
Batrix2070
RON/PLC was a wonderful country.
Here, unfortunately, we crash into the fact of how society is not a collection of atoms. The more it is just a collection of individuals and not united, the more it seems like a torture to them and they try to avoid service.
Unfortunately for atomized invidualist societies, they always fall prey to more united, more collectivist societies. Because in such, compulsory service is not a problem but an honor and duty for every member of that society. If a society does not force itself into the meat grinder voluntarily, reality will force them to do so, or they will be conquered by a nation that does not have their dilemmas. And then they too will be forced to serve but for a stranger who will not care about them as much as his own, and will even use this as a tool to destroy and absorb this community into his own.
In shorter terms, the ultimate reason for conscription is, live on your terms or die on someone else's. Which do you choose?
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
You're operating under the assumption that your King/ society actually cares about you I almost guarantee it doesn't even know who you are and will gladly sacrifice you to save it's own... let's just say spine so the question is ultimately die on your own terms at the hands of an enemy or die on the terms of someone pretending to be a friend. Personally I choose the former.
Obviously the point of conscription is not supposed to be that they die either way, contrary to what ideas some may have...
Others stick with Patton's "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his".
And yet again, this is a branching point regarding that this topic cannot have an universal answer, it has to be based on both internal and external situation of a given country.
In some, conscription is just a pointless waste of everyone's time and money so that the government can show it can and some people can feel important and skim some resources. It's probably true for many third world countries.
In other's it's more or less a matter of survival as a people. Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, even current Ukraine. Don't keep the military big and functional enough, and soon enough your not so dear neighbor will show up and make you a glorified serf at best, a slave or tortured corpse at worst. Many are somewhere in between. Obviously that depends completely on the country in question and its neighborhood island nations and isolated countries generally have little use for conscription, as even if they do have serious enemies, or are interested in some degree of expeditionary warfare, navy and air force will be their primary tools in this, and those aren't very compatible with conscript armies in modern technological paradigm, unlike the times of artillery armed ships with crews in high hundreds or even thousands, most of them doing manual labor.
KilroywasNOTHere
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Perhaps but pardon the skepticism regarding my own nation considering that for the last century we've mostly been ruled by warhawks who fancy themselves as third world warlords and/or histories next Alexander the Great. (Whom was assassinated for a reason btw) as far as Patton's philosophy goes, it sounds great. Too bad his superiors and successors never got the memo.
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King Arts
Well-known member
Alexander the Great wasn’t assasinated though he died of fever.
Simonbob
Well-known member
It's a strange thing, when the people of a nation aren't seen as the power of the nation by their own leaders.
We're seen more as a threat to the "Elite" than the mark and proof of their power and authority.
It's quite strange, in a bunch of ways. How can you be a leader if nobody is following you?
We're seen more as a threat to the "Elite" than the mark and proof of their power and authority.
It's quite strange, in a bunch of ways. How can you be a leader if nobody is following you?
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
I thought there was still some question of if he was poisoned or not?
because sadly people have no spines anymore. People have become so afraid of conflict after the likes of the French and Russian revolutions and the world wars that they will cow-tow to anybody with an aura of authority for the sake of "The greater good" when you aren't constantly challenged you eventually get a sense of entitlement. (That's not just with leaders BTW) Eventually it gets to the point where these rulars start to think the people need them a lot more than they need the people. Eventually they get so high on thier own farts they think thier of divine blood.
so to answer your question: Dellusion.