Why Europe is Reinstating Conscription

Last month, the head of the British Army caused a bit of a storm after admitting that the British public should start getting ready for a war with Russia, and introduce some kind of a conscription. But, the United Kingdom isn't the only country thinking about a conscription. So, why is everyone thinking about upping their army numbers, and what's causing the crisis?

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00:00 - Introduction
00:50 - Context
02:06 - Europe's Recruitment Crisis Explained
04:52 - Will Conscription Be Re-Introduced?
07:12 - Sponsored Content

[avakio]

Crazy how countries making it impossible for young people to get a home or job somehow expect them to enter military service.

[floppa]

As an Austrian who has gone through this nonsense I gotta say this : I get why we need it but if a country reintroduces it, they need to make 100% sure that its time well spent and that young people doing their service get fairly compensated for their time in the military.

We in Austria have neither. I got payed around 300ish € per month for over 40h per week of service (even more ~ 60h during basic training). Thats less than a third of our countries minimum wage.

And after it I felt even less prepared for a war then before. Most of us shot maybe a total of 60 cartridges down range and we spent most of our time doing menial stuff like (and I'm not joking) shoveling gravel for a new walkway at the barracks, trimming bushes and watching paint dry. All of it of course while our NCOs stared holes into the sky.

[somerandomdudeable]

It's easy for older people to support conscription when they're not the ones being drafted

[dariusalexandru]

Gouverment makes people life hard.
Also gouverment:Why you don t want to die for us ?

[antoinefdu]

Young people saw how we treat our veterans. No wonder they're not too keen on joining the army.

[doppelkammertoaster]

It is usually the people who wouldn't be affected that are in favour of this crap.

[soldatox]

If you want people to fight for their country, make a country worth fighting for

[SuperLusername]

Young European men's opinion on conscription has nothing to do with with their attitude towrds military and everything to do with with their attitute towards the system they are supposed to protect. Every man will protect his home put his life on the line as long as it is a home worth protecting.

Failing economy, new crisis starting before the previous one ends, low fertility coupled with aging population resulting in ever increasing taxes, expectations to never be able to afford to retire, the legal marriage system dissuading most men to risk (yes risk) getting married and have children, jobs requiring more years of experience than you have been alive and academic education for every stupid menial routine job one can think of...

Would YOU protect the system that obviously doesnt protect you?

[danielschauffer]

Failed to explain WHY (cause and effect) young people aren’t keen on the military. This is by far a more important question to answer.

[dorianodet]

I mean, why not, but let's make it fair then, if it come to a vote : Mandatory conscription for young people but pushed back retirement age and extra taxation on old people to pay/compensate for it. This way everyone chip in. Let's see how keen old people are on nationnal security then

[Helio_Frazao]

I was conscripted back in the 2000's in Portugal and ended up staying longer as a professional soldier. I was paid about 20€ per month, as the way things worked is that you'd get paid the national minimal wage at the time, but food, lodging, clothing, taxes, etc. were all deduced from your salary, and you'd pocket the leftover money, so technically you weren't working for free, you were just forced to be there and pay for all the stuff without any say. The service was for 6 month, one month of recruit and 2 month of an assigned specialty ( driver, infantry soldier, tank driver, etc.). But in practical terms you'd do your recruit month and then you'd spend the next 5 months doing menial jobs such as helping on the kitchen, cleaning up sidewalks, doing maintenance on equipment, just busy work. The rationale is that it was not worth the money for the state to spend 2 months prepping soldiers that would be done with their service soon. So the way things would go is that people would leave the army even more out of shape due to rampant alcohol abuse and just laying about cause no one cared about conscripts.

With the end of conscription came all of the headaches that follow any organizational adjustment. We ended up with the " national defense day" which is mandatory, in which when you turn 18 you go and visit a military institution and see the life in the military for a day, lots of videos and recruitment talk. I caught part of it, but I left the army around that time as the contracts for enlisted personnel only went to a maximum of 7 years.

What happened next is that the army career, especially in the lower ranks just wasn't attractive enough. Very low wages, the idea that you were limited to 8 years of service ( which would then put you back in the civilian world at around 30 without any other work experience than whatever you got in the military) and a shifting mentality towards the military ( when in was a kid we were all enamored with Rambo and Schwarzenegger's one man army heroes, being a badass solider was cool and fun. Now most war movies show the human toll it takes, and we get bombarded with tales of war misery every time we turn on the news... popular cultures does change perceptions). All of these factors are creating a shortage spiral because there are lots of functions that are critical in an army base that need to be fulfilled and there's just not enough volunteers. So you start closing off bases, but that's still not enough. You need people on the kitchen to cook, people to stand guard 24/7 at the gates, people to do maintenance and repairs on the equipment. So people start to have to wear many hats, doing an ungodly amount of work for shit pay. Your time off is gone because there's not enough people to rotate on guard duty ( there always needs to be someone at the gates, 24/7, 365 days per year) so you're working 6 days a week. People leave so the pool of human resources gets even smaller, forcing you to take even more roles, until you reach a breaking point and leave yourself because you'd get paid the same being a cashier at a supermarket and have half of the headaches. To make it worst maybe you were assigned to an unit that's 200km from your home and barely get to see your family cause your specialty ( which you obviously didn't pick) means you need to be assigned to a specific unit that's located in the other side of the country.

totally get why armies are considering bringing back conscription. They need cheap labor to maintain the whole infrastructure.

[freakalmighty]

The only conscription my country (Italy) should introduce is mandatory 9 month Deliveroo service for all politicians.
For those that cannot pedal for hours each day: mandatory 12 months in retail.
All parliament salaries are suspended for that duration, their bank accounts frozen and their apartments temporarily repossessed.

Give them a taste of what their citizens experience daily.

[handbanana]

Yeah I dunno what to tell you, the more you know about what your politicians actually do all the time, the more you realise it's just not worth dying for their sake.

[MatthiewPurple]

1:31 2:07 Please stop making graphs where the origin of the Y-axis isn't 0, it always makes things appear visually worse than they are

[axelwickm]

Should probably have mentioned that conscription is gender neutral in both Sweden and Norway.

[taylorshipman]

I wouldn’t want to fight for a country thats trying to replace me either

[sampohonkala]

Finland has conscription as it has had for over 100 years since 1919, but not compulsory military service as the video claims. You can also choose civil service. However, only some 7% of men choose the civil service, the rest join the defence forces. To understand how militarized Finland is, one can think about the Parliament: roughly 50% of the parliament members have a military rank. In 2019 a third of the male parliament members were officers in the reserves, the highest ranked being majors.

[DudeWatIsThis]

LMAO the "older people support it more" has nothing to do with acceptance. It's just that older people have a smaller chance to ever be recruited.

Though in an all-out war, you do get people in their 60's and up thrown into the grinder...

[theassasinboy]

If politicians want to reintroduce conscription then their children should be the first in the list. That way they may think twice about if it’s actually necessary.

[andrewdiaz]

A big reason conscription was basically phased out altogether in the US was because Vietnam soldiers of all types having enough of their officers and killing the with the easily available grenades. And that was just people who hated the "normal" incompetence of leadership during the Vietnam War; A public that hasn't had to deal with conscription for a good few generations, who are not only in disagreement with the government but actively hate it? Who could kill officers way easier now? Or who could make their military lose hundreds of thousands of dollars just by playing around with the big price tag things?