10 Meaningful Pros and Cons of Mandatory Military Service

I'm on the side of mandatory national service. All US citizens and legal residents would be required to give 2 years of national service after reaching the age of 18 and before the age of 25. The military would be on option, depending on the person's passing physical, aptitude, and psychological tests, with all the Services taking in draftees. Other forms of national service could provide staffing to Federal and State agencies serving the public good. Government contracts of every type could be greatly reduced because of the influx of people needing work. The work would provide the young people some level of technical or skills training along with learning the value of work and many of the other pros in the linked article. Key to making this work is exempting as few people as possible. Only the severely disabled (physical, mental, emotional) would be exempt. The types of deferments we had in the Viet Nam era wouldn't exist for the most part. No need to exempt college students because most people would start national service after High School. Legal residents who completed national service could be offered the extra advantage of an expedited naturalization process.

This is another of those issues like the death penalty which I have struggled with over the years, altering my opinion as I wander around the subject changing my point of view. At this point, I might support compulsory national service so long as it didn't include the military. There's a lot that needs to be done that doesn't require highly skilled labor. And it seems that it would be good to get these over-aged children out of homes where they've never learned "rugged individualism". However, the military isn't the place for that. The military needs competent, highly motivated individuals and we still seem to have enough of those to maintain an all-volunteer service. (And thank God for them)

Compulsory service is institutionalized in a number of countries, hence is their "normal". So you have a self supporting argument in that it isn't normal for the USA, hence un-American. I'd dig below that surface and consider what our culture would be if say two years post high school or college compulsory service in a variety of options would be. Bottom line, we'd be different. How much better or worse would be an argument, but we'd be different. Those that want to focus only on the positives or negatives wouldn't be able to envision what the reality would likely be.

I remember the last draft having pulled the number 2. There wasn't a national emergency. The war was so unpopular, there wouldn't be near enough volunteers. So the politicians used the draft as the easy way out vs. figuring out how to buy enough volunteers.

Actually I'd take a look at some of our sentencing guidelines and consider a strong push of compulsory service a la Conservation Corps, Peace Corps, etc. with the purpose of manning up errant boys and similar for problem girls as well. I've had personal experience with kids in the wilderness programs and it seems to have a fairly positive track record. Problem nowadays is the PC/Litigation crowd has made it economically infeasible to run them, hence they've been shuttering their doors en masse.