National service won’t create real soldiers

There are strong arguments for national service in terms of national solidarity, training and self-discipline. In the end, however, the real question for any army worth the name is: would the soldiers fight? And would their families at home tolerate them being killed? It is indeed grotesque that Britain now has only one brigade immediately available in an emergency; but it wouldn’t help to have 30 brigades if they could not in fact be deployed for war.

From this point of view, it is important to realise that national service has always involved an explicit or implicit understanding between citizens and states. It is that conscripts are there to defend the homeland, or the immediate neighbours and allies of the homeland (even if defending the homeland sometimes seems to require invading someone else’s homeland). Even if the young Britons doing national service have applied to join the army as an alternative to doing community service, they will not be professional soldiers in any normal sense.