Is there conscription in Britain? Gen Z won’t touch it with a barge pole.

“We… need to be trained and equipped as a citizen army.”

These were the words of General Patrick Saunders, the Secretary of State for War, who spoke at Twickenham earlier this week, lamenting declining recruitment numbers for the British Army and why we must prepare for a “whole-of-nation effort” against Russia.

A heated debate about conscription ensued.

I have been in or around the military for 20 years, first as a soldier and then as a defense journalist, including traveling to Afghanistan in both roles.

From my many years of experience, I will now tell you that British militarism has an annual rhythm that repeats itself endlessly.

This pattern includes thought pieces and speeches by generals and politicians crying about underfunding an already grotesquely overfunded military. They have nothing to cry about – they usually understand.

And proposals for conscription are also regularly made.

General Patrick Sanders argued: “We have no immunity, so we have to prepare as well as the pre-war generation. And it is a whole-of-nation effort.” Ukraine has brutally shown that regular forces can go to war. The militia will defeat them. ”

It is worth mentioning that General Sanders himself is not in favor of conscription.

Asked about the proposal, both the Ministry of Defence, and Rishi Sunak’s official spokesperson, confirmed there were no plans for conscription. Despite this, there has been a lot of debate online and in the press.

I believe these calls must be read in the same category of moral panic as “stop the boats” or “bring back the noose.” These tired summonses move forward from the scene of irony and bring out the British style of nostalgic perversion that colors our entire politics.

Embarrassingly, the UK still operates on Windows 1945. In other words, conscription, as practiced during World War II (WW2), is viewed idealistically by some as something bracing, or as a process for national improvement. about it. Disciplined.

Look at Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, who said on Wednesday that “the world now has the feel of 1939”, the year conscription was introduced in the Second World War.

These declarations of war occur in part because generals and politicians mistake their personal nightly fantasies for matters that have little to do with national security.

But the main reason is that the military and the state have to endlessly justify their huge and wasteful war spending while Nan is frozen for five months of the year.

It should be noted that a few hours before General Patrick Sanders’ speech, Palestine Liberation protesters painted Twickenham Stadium red to draw attention to the ongoing massacre in Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces (well, conscripted forces) appear to be performing very poorly in this massacre, which is supported by both major political parties.

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However, as the Secretary of War said in his speech, we are by no means the “prewar generation.” We are post-war people.

Just ask the millennial veterans of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the War on Terror veterans I meet view their war with cynical eyes.

Or you could ask young people who simply refuse to participate. It is a great achievement that so many politically switched-on British young people are not going to touch a recruitment office with a barge pole. That was before the various crises in the military.

Of course, privatized and clunky recruitment processes are also having an impact. According to reports, it took 321 days from application to basic training, but 47% of applicants dropped out midway through.

Racism, sexual violence, and fungal housing, to name a few others, also play a role. In the first case, a British military report found that the military was full of bias and prejudice. Meanwhile, the prevalence of sexual violence seems to defy attempts at reform. And from a material point of view, living in moldy privatized accommodation has little appeal for new employees.

My sense is that the young people are not criticizing the military, as some believe, but that they are too calm, too woke, and that they would rather shoot Afghan farmers. Because they want to spend time on TikTok. But that’s because it’s objectively a bad, backward institution.

And any proposal to force people into military service must be used against the fact that people of draft age are often anti-war and anti-authoritarian.

This is before we even get to the question of whether conscription is effective. There’s a reason most Western countries don’t have military conscription. And that’s because in the process you turn out substandard soldiers who don’t want to be there.

It is also a bureaucratic and expensive waste of labor and human resources. Conscription does not simply conscript a literal group into combatants, but tends to conscript the broader society in the struggle against conscription.

One of the reasons we have a professional military is that wartime conscription has radicalized and backfired. During the Vietnam War, soldiers tended to shoot their own officers and sailors sabotaged ships, causing terrible chaos.

A volunteer army means that only a small, insular section of society is involved, and the fact that most of them are drawn from the lower classes of society means that in most cases the military is completely It is suitable. Look like they’re participating until they stop participating.

Personally, I don’t believe that the news organizations whose job it was to deceive, trap, and conscript young people into military service will be revived anytime soon. Especially since compulsory military service may ultimately be the only thing that makes this sad, timid country ungovernable.

More than that, if Russian and British generals and politicians really want to fight, they should fight themselves and leave the rest of us alone.

Read more: Putin provokes Western nations by flying near NATO countries as fears of war grow

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