
Sweden brings back military conscription - sjcsjc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39140100
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chrisseaton
How do you motivate a conscript?

When I was in the British Army, which is volunteer only, commanding a basic
training troop if someone was wanted to give up we could say to them 'if this
isn't for you then you can go home' (of course we did coach and mentor people
to help them, I mean in cases where people just give up and stop soldiering
when an exercise gets tough). They usually worked extremely hard to get into
the Army in the first place because it's competitive so we know they're
motivated.

What do you do with a conscript who never wanted to be there and possibly
fundamentally isn't suited to military life anyway gives up? Threaten them
with legal action?

What do you do if they sort of do what they're told, but not really putting
any effort into it?

Conscription seems counter-productive to me. If you can't attract enough
motivated and talented people to join your military then maybe your military
is not representative of your society anymore and you should fix that.

~~~
zmb_
>'if this isn't for you then you can go home'

I did compulsory military service, including in a leadership role. "If you
don't do what you're told, you don't get go home next weekend." Worked very
well for conscripts, who usually get to go home for many weekends (unless on
exercises). There are also many smaller privileges you can take a way for
smaller infractions.

Although when you have a defensive military that does not go around the world
fighting wars, and whose only objective is to retain the independence of your
own country, most conscripts take it as their civic responsibility and don't
cause problems.

Those who are fundamentally unsuited for military usually ended up getting
discharged quickly. Most before ever stepping into service.

>Conscription seems counter-productive to me.

Britain has 150k active military personnel with 80k reserves. Now imagine
you're a country with less than 10% of the population and need to produce a
force of 200k soldiers in order to have a credible deterrent against an
aggressive neighbor. How do you do that without conscription?

~~~
BurningFrog
A credible deterrent in 2020 is not 200k dudes with guns. It's air and naval
power. Expensive and complex hi tech death machines.

Of course, a 10m country will never have a really credible defense against
nuclear super power Russia by itself.

~~~
zmb_
> 200k dudes with guns

Conscript military doesn't mean that you just teach everyone to dig a hole and
sit in it with a rifle. You train conscripts into every role you need in a
200k strong modern military. Including operators and maintainers of the hi-
tech death machines, sigint operatives, radar operators, tank crews, missile
forces, officers of all kinds, and yes, the guys that dig holes and sit in
them with rifles.

One of the strengths of a conscript military is that you get _everyone_ ,
which includes all kinds of current and future skill sets. Modern conscript
armies aim to put that expertise into the best possible use.

~~~
pilsetnieks
You literally cannot use conscripts for anything of "operators and maintainers
of the hi-tech death machines, sigint operatives, radar operators, tank crews,
missile forces, officers." First of all, most of them take at least a year to
get up to speed, if not more, and they have to maintain their competence. You
cannot just release a conscript after his year long stint, and call him up ten
years later - the ten year old tech he was trained on will probably have been
replaced, and even if not, he'd have forgotten most of his training. Oh, and
officers by their very definition cannot be conscripts.

So you're looking at guys to dig holes and sit in them with rifles and maybe
some supporting jobs (administrative, kitchen, IT, construction, etc.)

~~~
phicoh
This anecdotal, but it was suggested that after the Dutch government suspended
conscription, the military lost easy access to lots of highly educated people.
There is quite a large group of people with a university degree who can very
quickly pick up the theory behind complex systems. The same group group will
not sign up voluntarily.

~~~
javier2
This is actually true. When we took 100% of all able men in Norway, the got
the top guys as well as the lump. Now, when it's gotten a lot easier to get
out of conscription, a lot of the well people with other ambitions skip this.

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robert_foss
So to add some needed background information to this:

Every 18 year old has been forced to submit a form stating if they want to be
conscripted. That's about 100k people every year.

Out of the 100k, about 20k state that they do want to be conscripted.

Out of the 20k that say yes, 4k are selected during a screening process that
evaluates physical and mental fitness.

So there are no less than 2 points where you can opt out of being conscripted
if you so like.

~~~
pinum
That doesn't sound like conscription, then. If they didn't have enough people
saying yes, do they start drawing from the "no" pile?

~~~
yjgyhj
Yes they do - if not enough people volunteer, they will force the ones seeming
most fit for the tasks at hand.

Also, if I know the Swedish military, they'll chose the most fit for the task,
but make absolutely sure to fill the gender quotas.

~~~
kristianp
What's the required gender ratio, out of curiosity?

~~~
robert_foss
I have never heard of such a thing.

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entropyneur
I am quite surprised by the number of people here (and even larger numbers
elsewhere this is being discussed) who don't seem to have any ethical problem
with conscription. Thought the idea of killer slaves was completely off limits
in the West. Now all of a sudden we are debating cost effectiveness. Guess I
thought wrong.

~~~
samcodes
What western military doesn't pay service members? Pretty sure you mean "a
job, that rarely, but sometimes involves killing." There are many jobs like
that: policing, security, and depending on your moral framework, murdering
animals.

~~~
buzer
Well, I guess most of the countries do "pay", but at least in Finland that pay
is 5.10 euros per day for first half of year (increases first to 8.50 for days
165-256 and then to 11.90 for remaining). If someone other entity was paying
that low wages for even a normal job (let alone 24/7 availability
requirement), the employer would be facing criminal charges.

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thedevil
I'm not sure why Sweden would be concerned.

I read Russian news/propaganda occasionally. Over the last few years, Russian
news/propaganda prepared Russian minds for interfering in Ukraine. And the
propaganda includes arguments to justify a military buildup. And it seems to
be preparing Russian minds for a possible invasion of Baltic states one day.

But I don't think I've even seen Sweden mentioned in Russian news/propaganda.
I don't think Sweden is a target.

~~~
anticodon
As Russian I don't agree. I don't watch TV and read news (other than HN and a
couple of other sites where I try to avoid politics as much as I can), but why
the hell do we need these Baltic states? What do they have that Russia needs?
Territory, natural resources? Nothing.

I don't know the real motivation for annexing Crimea, but making a conclusion:
first they take Crimea, then they're going to take Sweden and Baltic states -
is nonsense.

~~~
brilliantcode
Putin wants to revive USSR without any of it's benefits but all of it's power
& resources available to him.

He might get his way-we have a "Gorbachev" in the White House or a KGB asset.

~~~
gspetr
Full disclosure: I am Russian.

Even Belarus and Kazakhstan don't really want to join, forget about the rest
ex-USSR countries.

Taking countries by force makes even less sense - there do not exist resources
or territory that make it profitable enough to offset military spending and
new rounds of economic sanctions.

~~~
brilliantcode
it gives political momentum-as did Hitler's blitzkrieg in Poland

Military wise you buy large buffer between US ground & air forces based around
there.

~~~
gspetr
If he wanted a buffer he could have easily taken over Ukraine in the fall of
2014 and spring of 2015. Both times the rebels routed Ukrainian army and the
road to Kiev was essentially clear. Reinstalling the puppet president would
have been easy.

Not to mention that during the coup itself there were reports of Ukrainian
generals sending envoys to Moscow, seeking aid and patronage to throw a
counter coup and either reinstate the former president or setup military
dictatorship. And they easily had the force too. Kremlin just said no.

~~~
brilliantcode
RussiaToday is a poor source.

~~~
gspetr
Yes, go ahead and resort to stereotypes.

RT is external propaganda, TV is the main instrument of internal propaganda.

Very few Russians use that as their information source, even pro-regime ones.

This is tantamount to Americans citing this as their source of domestic news:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America)

------
TorKlingberg
I can give a bit of context. Mandatory military service in Sweden only ended
in 2010, so this is not a huge change.

During the cold was period, almost all men did ~1 year of military service.
After that it was a regular job, but in case of war everyone could be
conscripted.

By the '90s it dropped to maybe 1/3 of young men. Everyone went to a 1-2 day
testing session, and then some were selected. In practice, it became
increasingly voluntary. Soldiers on peacekeeping missions in foreign countries
are all volunteers.

In 2010 mandatory service was dropped completely. I think the Swedish military
found it difficult to recruit enough after that, and the politicians now think
the military has shrunk a bit too much. I don't think it will be a huge growth
(that would cost money), but perhaps a return to early 2000's level. This time
it includes women.

I am not a big fan of conscription, but I can somewhat accept it as long as
it's strictly defensive. One good argument for it is that a conscript army is
unlikely to stage a military coup in a democracy. If the soldiers are more or
less random people, they will more or less support the elected government, at
least a portion of them. But, as military power becomes more about technology
than numbers, I suspect this argument becomes less important.

~~~
jcranmer
> One good argument for it is that a conscript army is unlikely to stage a
> military coup in a democracy.

Turkey has mandatory military service and suffered an attempted coup less than
a year ago. Napoleon came to power in France after the levée en masse, really
the first major mass conscription act in history. Egypt, last coup being ~4
years ago, again has mass conscription. As does Thailand. And Eritrea, Sudan,
Chad, and Equatorial Guinea, although I don't know if mandatory military
service dates back before the time of those coups.

Coups are often instigated by the officer class, whereas mass conscription is
primarily used to fill out enlisted ranks. There's definitely room for the
upper echelons of a military to support a coup while the lower echelons remain
largely apathetic.

------
ChuckMcM
It is sobering to think that if you have the technology you can conscript a
workforce to build war fighting robots more effectively than you can conscript
a force to fight for you.

I believe one of the developments in Syria and Iraq that is under appreciated
by strategists is the force multiplication efforts of "cheap drones with hand
grenades". Assuming that 50% of the videos on these things are fake, that is
still a good case that it is getting easier and easier to turn money into
usable offensive capability.

In my estimation, THAT pivot is going to have as much impact on conflicts as
the machine gun did.

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armenarmen
When the US had conscription (at least in ww2) it supposedly had the effect of
creating a "we're all in this together" mentality. I wonder if, in addition to
the threat of a perceived expansionist Russia, the influx of new immigrants
has anything to do with this. A year of servitude might may assist in
integrating new swedes. Or in part help the indigenous swedes see the new
arrivals as somehow more Swedish for having served?

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Animats
9 to 12 months is short. The first six months are lost to training. The US
used to draft people for 2 years (Vietnam) or, in WWII, "for the duration,
plus six months".

About 75% of the US military-age population couldn't qualify for the US Army
today. Too fat, too criminal, too sick, too crazy, or too dumb. This worries
some military manpower planners. What are Sweden's stats like?

~~~
alkonaut
It _is_ training. Traditionally the 18 year olds were all trained 8-15 months
and then return to civil life immediately.

Now they want those who do the training to stay as employed soldiers
afterwards - but traditionally Sweden had only a conscript army, no standing
army in peacetime apart from those employed in the organization to do the
training.

This makes sense as we don't have wars, don't have large foreign bases to
staff etc.

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frabbit
So who are we at war with today? Oceania?

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coldcode
We should have this in the US, starting with the children of Congress and the
Senate. I think Mark Twain or Will Rodgers said something like this.

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nateberkopec
What's the point of conscription? Surely there must be a good reason. Boosting
the numbers of your military by forcefully bringing in some barely-motivated,
hardly-trained conscripts that are discharged just a few months after
completing basic training seems ineffective.

Is there some larger "get the public used to military service" social goal?

~~~
yjgyhj
We have a long history of conscription. I think it's a good thing. I think
it's the moral choice when it comes to defence (but obviously not enough).
That is because a conscript is not a professional soldier - and a conscript
will never invade another country without good reason. Conscripts will defend
their land, but not unjustly attack others.

~~~
fwn
Then I'd be a bad conscript. I don't even own land.

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randyrand
If you're having trouble getting volunteers, the solution is simple. Pay them
more.

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theBobBob
The trend seems to be lately to end conscription or national service, as
Sweden did itself, but is this the first time in recent history that a country
introduced or reintroduced conscription?

~~~
627467
You'll see that many European nations ended conscription during the last
decade(Sweden in 2010)[1]. If anything this seems to signal a new trend:
reactivating conscription.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_service)

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johan_larson
"In Russia all men aged 18-27 have to spend a year in the armed forces."

I don't think that's correct. College graduates only have to serve a few
weeks, IIRC.

~~~
degorov
Not true. Graduates serve for 1 year just as all other men. People who
graduated from colleges with military departments get the rank of lieutenant
and indeed serve a few weeks, but as of 2017 not too much universities have
those departments and even if they do, not every student can enroll there as
there are certain requirements for health and physical abilities.

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whatnotests
Bork bork!

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smb06
How is this post not flagged and anything negative related to Trump gets
flagged and downvoted because it is "too political for HN"?

Has HN started to take political sides now?

~~~
grzm
If you think this submission (or any other) are inappropriate for HN, please
do flag. As for political sides, humans are generally biased to see actions
against their own beliefs and miss those that are congruent. Political
submissions in general regardless of political persuasion tend to attract
flags, and this one likely has as well: it has 170 points and is only 8 hours
old, yet is no longer on the front page.

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valuearb
4,000 troops? Ok.

