Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sweden brings back military conscription

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 418 posts

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#241

Post by LordKano »

BurningFrog wrote: post #29
zmb_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>'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 do…

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.

Depends on the threat you're facing.

If you're worried about NATO or former Warsaw Pact aggressors, no, men with rifles are not a deterrent.

If you're worried about a neighboring region's warlords sending people to steal your food, kill the men, rape the women and conscript the children, yes, men with rifles can convince them that their activities will be more fruitful somewhere else.

For a threat like Russia or the USA, your only recourse is to ally with one or the other.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#242

Post by ptaipale »

carsongross wrote: post #8
vspecnur wrote: post #2

It's not like they havent been invaded already...

All joking aside, it will be interesting to see if refugees will tolerate conscription. One quarter of the population (and a significantly higher percentage of the younger fighting age male population) is either foreign born or the child of someone foreign born. Conscription is always controversial and the questions of national identity that have in the past provided a social framework for supporting it are much fuzz…

My son is now a conscript (Finland has roughly 21 000 at any one time, plus 12 000 professionals in service) and having seen the troops, it looks like the black skins are just as happy or unhappy there as the white skins, if not happier. The conscript army is a melting pot where everyone's former life becomes not very relevant; whether you come from a rich family or poor, whether you have high school education or not, you start with the same kit and stand in the same line taking the same orders. Often shit, but it's the same shit for everyone.

I believe there is some racism as there is everywhere, but overall I think the armed forces are a place where someone who came as a refugee in on more even terms with others than anywhere else before that.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#243

Post by 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?

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#244

Post by alkonaut »

Animats wrote: post #220

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?

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.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#245

Post by johansch »

Animats wrote: post #220

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?

Not exactly what you are looking for but in terms of having a fit population Sweden is doing (comparatively) well:

http://www.worldobesity.org/resources/world-map-obesity/?map...

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#246

Post by entropyneur »

ocschwar wrote: post #197
entropyneur wrote: post #57

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.

As others have pointed out, if the nation state you live in does not have a secure hold on its territory, then you can either lose some of your freedom to conscription, or lose a whole lot more in foreign occupation.

> lose a whole lot more in foreign occupation

I don't think that's the case in modern times. Unless you believe Russia (that's what we are talking about here, right?) would enslave swedes or subject them to genocide this argument doesn't work.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#247

Post by ValentineC »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #145
zmb_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> 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.

The Singapore military puts their men in the reserves after they're done with mandatory service, and calls them back for 10 years of reservist training or until they hit 40 [1].

> Oh, and officers by their very definition cannot be conscripts.

Why do you say this?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservist#Singapore

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#248

Post by buzer »

samcodes wrote: post #121
entropyneur wrote: post #57

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.

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.

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.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#249

Post by hindsightbias »

chrisseaton wrote: post #6

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 th…

> not representative

That's where we are in the US with an All Volunteer Force (AVF).

Some thought an AVF would lead to a smaller professional force and would give the President less flexibility to do dumb things (political & military leaders wanted fewer Vietnams).

That hasn't really worked out, and it's easier for a President to commit forces knowing protests will never reach the scale of the 1960s. Few who don't have skin in the game care about our FP and those who do don't have a say in it once they put the uniform on.

Re: Sweden brings back military conscription

#250

Post by entropyneur »

Nokinside wrote: post #212
Asooka wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we're talking about one modern country invading another. It's just the land changing owners - you, as a citizen, never really owned it anyway. It belongs to the ruling class and it doesn't really matter who they are. We're all one people, we should have one language and one culture. Every modern country has the concepts you outlined above. If the new government doesn't treat you humanely, you can always take civ…

>The system is always the same, Russian and Finnish systems are not the same. Not even close.

Yes, but the difference between them is nowhere close to the difference between slavery and freedom or life and death.
Post reply on HN