UK: National Service is not abolished in 1960

Military Coups generally happen when you have military socially and politically isolated from the general body politic, professional military's are obviously more prone to be isolated in such a way, though the example of Latin America shows that a trend doesn't mean a rule.
 
My opinion is that time and time again training and professionalism have been proven more important than sheer numbers or even superior equipment. A relatively small, highly trained professional army will easily rout divisions of cannon fodder with very poor morale. Conscription, IMO, just results in more money spent and more wasted lives.
 

Typo

Banned
Conscription, one step to closer to authoritarianism if you ask me.
Actually there is the idea of a citizen army rather than a professional one is suppose to be one of the best guards against authoritarianism
 

Typo

Banned
My opinion is that time and time again training and professionalism have been proven more important than sheer numbers or even superior equipment. A relatively small, highly trained professional army will easily rout divisions of cannon fodder with very poor morale. Conscription, IMO, just results in more money spent and more wasted lives.
It shifts back and forth actually, 18th century professional armies were displaced by mass industrial conscript armies for example.
 
Actually there is the idea of a citizen army rather than a professional one is suppose to be one of the best guards against authoritarianism

I never understood that argument.

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Saddam's Iraq all had "citizen's armies" and yet they were all totalitarian. Today, China, Cuba, and Iran have conscription and I don't see democracy on the horizon for any of them.
 
I believe the idea was more that a professional army was a danger to liberty, and that a locally-based voluntary militia was the best way to guard against tyranny.
A conscripted army would, under that logic, have been both a potential danger to liberty in the hands of a tyrant and an immediate restriction on the liberty of those men conscripted, and thus entirely unacceptable.
 
It would have to be abolished like a shot :) when the Northern Ireland troubles started up.

Sending conscripts into that mess would have been hugely controversial - a bit like sending them to Vietnam was for the US.
 
Top