Kevin Patterson is a physician, essayist and novelist. He served as a military doctor for three years, and also served as a civilian physician in Afghanistan.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a plan to bring back mandatory national service for 18-year-olds last week. The plan would require British teens to partake in a 12-month full-time military placement or spend one weekend a month carrying out community service. The program, which the Tories insisted shouldn’t be described as “conscription,” could be dismissed as an outlandish idea from a government likely on its way out – if, that is, you hadn’t been tuned in to the changing mood about mandatory military service in the West in recent months.
In January, Britain’s former top NATO commander warned that it was time to “think the unthinkable.” Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine could spread to other countries in Europe, and General Sir Richard Sherriff said British soldiers needed to prepare for a potential land war between NATO and Vladimir Putin’s forces. Despite Britain’s long history of relying on a volunteer army, he felt it was time to get over cultural hangups and contemplate change. “I think we need to go further and look carefully at conscription,” he told Sky News.
His comments came on the heels of similar comments from the head of the U.K.’s army, Sir Patrick Sanders, who mused about following Sweden’s lead and reintroducing mandatory military service, saying the current force was too small. A robust debate has ensued and an idea that until recently seemed preposterous was being discussed in British newspapers. (Former PM Boris Johnson spoke up quickly to support it and, in what may or may not have been self-parody, offer his service.)
From the platitudinous safety of Canada, thousands of kilometres from Kyiv and protected by both saltwater geography and interposed allies, it can be difficult to gauge just how dangerous Vladimir Putin has become. Europe, so much closer to the threat, is terrified. Europeans are spending more on their militaries, but that is only the start: Many countries are reintroducing conscription, while others are contemplating doing the same. This could take the form of a term of mandatory military service to bulk up an army during peacetime, or a specific conscription (draft) for an active conflict.
And as far-fetched as it may sound, it’s a debate we shouldn’t ignore any longer here in Canada, where our military forces are grappling with significant recruitment and retention problems.
For those subject to it, the lifting of conscription through North America and most of Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century was one of the great, if undersung, liberations.
Obligatory military service’s long history goes back to soldier-slaves in the ancient world; at one level it has never shaken off that scent. The draft in the U.S., National Service in Britain: whatever its name, conscription represents a profound abridgment of an individual’s civil rights and the curtailment of choice. Every personal freedom, extending to the freedom from moral and lethal injury, is suspended. Even in prison, the incarcerated are not compelled to run at barbed wire – escape attempts notwithstanding.
Canada hurriedly ended conscription after the Second World War in 1945, making it the first major power among the allies to do so. Its implementation had been deeply divisive and controversial, especially in Quebec. Britain followed in 1960, Australia in 1972, America in 1973 and France in 1997. This was part of a larger movement toward an emphasis on individual rights that also argued for the abolition of judicial execution, draconian drug laws, and codified discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation or race. It was also a consequence of the great “peace dividend” that followed the decline and dissolution of the Soviet Union. To most progressives, the abolition of conscription was inevitable, irreversible and an inarguably good thing. Even Milton Friedman, no friend of the left, called mandatory military service “inequitable, wasteful and inconsistent with a free society.”
This is Ayn Rand, of all people: “If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming or crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of or even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom – then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there to protect?”
Sweden and Lithuania each reintroduced conscription in the 2010s, between the Russian annexation of Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine.Tom Little/Reuters; Mindaugas Kulbis/AP
While most other civil-rights expansions have proven durable (setting aside reproductive rights in America and Poland), conscription is on the march.
Sweden stopped it in 2010 but reimplemented it for both men and women in 2017; Latvia stopped it in 2007 and reinstituted it this year. Lithuania reintroduced it in 2015. Ukraine stopped it in late 2013 but quickly returned to it when Crimea and the Donbas were invaded the following year – and it recently lowered the draft age to boost the war-battered army. Germany abolished conscription in 2011; now its Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, is calling for its restoration. Norway, Austria and Finland, modern bastions of democratic socialism, never abandoned conscription.
In 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron implemented the Service National Universel for French boys and girls aged 15 to 17. The program is not conscription as it used to exist: it is voluntary (but is intended to become compulsory), it is only for a month – and it can be done either in a military context or as social service. But it is scalable. Its name would have been chosen carefully. It’s a trial balloon.
Russia itself, not surprisingly, recently boosted its maximum age for conscription. These soldiers aren’t obligated to fight in Ukraine or other foreign conflicts, but many feel pressured to do so. Other global hot spots such as Taiwan and Israel are also beefing up their military forces by extending the length of mandatory service and expanding who can be conscripted.
In the U.S., although compulsory military service ceased in 1972, men aged 18 to 25 are still required to register with the Selective Service System, which exists to make the rapid reimplementation of conscription feasible.
There remain regular calls to resuscitate conscription to address challenges ranging from recruiting shortfalls, to political and cultural polarization, to loneliness and building communitarianism and social capital. Author and former marine Elliot Ackerman, writing in Time, argued that the draft would stop America from becoming mired in the forever wars of the 21st century by increasing the ruling elites’ skin in the game. Or more precisely: their children’s skins.
President Vladimir Putin celebrates his re-election, and the 10th anniversary of the Crimean annexation, in Red Square on March 18. He thanked Russian troops fighting in Ukraine and boasted about the damage they were inflicting on Ukrainian forces.Alexander Zemlianichenko/The Associated Press
The Russian invasion of Ukraine abruptly recalibrated the perceived risk of war in Europe. Apart from the country Russia is mauling, the European nations with which it shares a border include NATO members, and conflict between Russia and any of them would bring the likelihood of conflict with all of NATO.
In the autumn of 2022, it appeared as Russia would be stymied in Ukraine and there was discussion of Mr. Putin learning a lesson of some sort. Now, the defeat of Ukraine seems likely; if Donald Trump is re-elected, that outcome becomes nearly certain. An emboldened Mr. Putin, who carries the humiliation of the Soviet collapse like a goad, has learned a different lesson.
It is possible that the dismemberment of Ukraine will not be his last ambition. The Baltic republics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – became Russian possessions when Peter the Great took them from the Swedes in the Great Northern War. That war ended in 1721, before the U.S. even existed. In 1809, Russia went on to take Finland from the Swedes. If Mr. Trump makes it clear that America really will not intervene to defend certain European NATO members – and he said this unambiguously in February – then the unimaginable becomes possible.
Among the mildest of consequences of Russian conflict with a NATO member would be conscription becoming usual, even universal, in the Western democracies. That may be on its way already. Mr. Macron has already stated that deployment of French ground troops to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia is a possibility.
In the space of two days at the end of February, Finland gave Ukraine the go-ahead to use missiles it had provided against targets within Russia, Estonia announced it would consider providing troops to fight in Ukraine, and it emerged that there are British troops in Ukraine already.
One needn’t be a military hawk to fear the worst now, for Europe and for NATO.
Conscription today would look different than a Napoleonic industrial-age levée en masse. Armies in the last century impressed huge quantities of men and a smaller number of women and made few assumptions about their skill levels or even their literacy. Riflemen were expected to run at the enemy in great numbers; in great numbers, they would die. In Operation Bagration in 1944 – the liberation of Byelorussia – 580,000 were killed; at Stalingrad, an estimated 1.2 million. Numbers were needed, and one thing conscription provides are numbers.
Though homicide remains war’s essence, modern armies are different. Soldiers in technologically advanced armies need to operate drones, computers and missiles. They don’t die at the same rate they used to – though high-intensity conflict between modern armies has been rare until the invasion of Ukraine. Those battles have been bloody, but the battle dead there have numbered in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands. In two years of fighting, about 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, according to American intelligence agencies, with Russian deaths estimated to be between 66,000 and 88,000.
In 20 years of fighting, ending in their defeat, the Americans lost 2,400 dead in Afghanistan and 4,400 in Iraq. In Kandahar, almost every NATO soldier who made it to the military field hospital with a pulse survived. Soldiers are valued in a way they were not in previous eras, by both the public and their commanders.
It takes longer to train an infanteer enough that they are able to operate modern communication and locations systems or highly technical weapons such as the Ukraine-famous Javelin anti-tank missile, and are ready to go into battle. In the microchip era, more is needed than four limbs, a strong back and an aiming eye. Soldiering has become a profession in a way that it wasn’t always, especially for the rank-and-file. Grunts became operators, and soldiers became beefier variants of aircrew: highly skilled, and intensively and expensively trained.
This all represents a possible limitation of the effectiveness of conscription, with its typically briefer periods of training than that which volunteers serve. This argument contends that unwilling draftees may not engage enough for long enough with the kind of technical training now necessary to be useful. Conscription brings bodies to armies but it does not necessarily bring much more. Countries may turn to conscription, but they will also need to invest in career soldiers and technology to succeed in modern warfare.
It may seem odd that the famously liberal Scandinavian countries all have conscription – save Iceland, which has no military – but there is a way of seeing military service that rejects the left-right dualism that the North American political discourse is prone to. The idea, after all, of collective communitywide responsibility to support and defend one another is a touchstone for liberals when it concerns health and education.
The North American left became anti-military with the Vietnam War, but it certainly wasn’t during the wars against fascism, whether in Spain or subsequently. And the idea that cultural and economic elites would not share in the responsibility to defend the nation would have struck that generation of progressives as anathema. During the American Civil War, corruption in the application of conscription prompted riots in New York. The rich then could buy for US$300 – the annual wages of a labourer – a commutation that would get them out of military service. Dick Cheney’s five deferments, Donald Trump’s heel spurs, and George W. Bush’s National Guard service were modern but only slightly less on-the-nose versions of this.
The withdrawal of conscription in America in 1972 relieved the elite of the obligation to go through such manoeuvres. Subsequently, for the most part, they just haven’t involved themselves. Harvard, Columbia and Yale University banned the military’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program from their campuses at various points.
This has created a profoundly distorted relationship between the U.S. military and the U.S. public. The accent of the U.S. Army as it was spoken in Kandahar was Oklahoman. The former Confederate states, especially their rural areas, provide its people. Eighty per cent of inductees come from families with other military members in them.
Southerners make up a large share of U.S. army recruitment, and celebrate their military ties, such as at this football game in Nashville where a soldier walks with a flag-waving Tennessee Titans player.James Kenney/The Associated Press
In Slate, Amy Schafer argued in 2017 that the fact that America’s all-volunteer army is drawn from a narrow demographic risks creating a warrior caste within the broader society. The bulk of the military is drawn from a community that bears a disproportionate burden to providing recruits. It might be anticipated that such a red-state-based caste will want a greater voice in discussion about the use and funding of the military. It might be that military affiliation will be one of the most polarizing issues in national politics and debate, and could become a dog whistle for ideas about tolerance and social justice. And a military that feels highly separate from, superior to, or holds profoundly different values than the mainstream society supporting it becomes a potential threat to that society.
But the evidence that conscription would actually address these concerns is lacking. The limited research on the matter indicates that conscription has a militarizing effect on a society that implements it. In Europe, ex-conscriptees seem to feel less trust in national institutions, which anyone who has done any version of basic training might well understand.
The polarization crisis in American politics proceeds from and advances a deep skepticism about national institutions – every institution except the military. And it is the polarization crisis in America that has given the world a Donald Trump administration once already. There are costs to everything – and taking two years of someone’s youth is going to change them.
Imagine the worst-case scenario, which the Europeans have already done. Ukraine has collapsed and the Russians are triumphant there. Already the borders of Mr. Putin’s Russia more closely resemble that of the czars. Mr. Putin turns his eye upon Latvia. Russia’s state-owned news agency has been claiming that ethnic Russians there have been abused for years. Mr. Putin says the Baltic republics are within the Russian sphere of influence. Mr. Trump announces that no American soldier will die for Latvia. The Latvians decline to capitulate, invoking NATO’s Article 5 to get help from other NATO allies. (Earlier this year, Canada increased its military presence in Latvia to around 2,000 people.)
When the fighting breaks out, the one mistake every Western leader resolves not to make is to respond too gradually and incrementally, as they did when Crimea was annexed, or when Kyiv was surrounded the first time.
What is needed is more. Many more Swedes, Germans, French – and Canadians.
Would Canada introduce conscription? Would it, even in such extremity as this, be politically possible? Would it include women? Would we really send unwilling young people to die fighting the Russians? Or would the discrediting and failure of NATO be seen as inevitable, given Mr. Trump’s position?
Despite the stark reality, the direct impact would be limited for many North Americans. Canadians would be under tremendous pressure to contribute more to our military and to NATO and to solve the cultural and recruitment problems that are plaguing our forces. We are still a long way off from introducing any sort of mandatory military service in this country. For thousands of European youth, however, the situation would impact them meaningfully – costing them a year or two of their youth – and possibly much more than that, if they are unlucky.
Much will hinge on the U.S. election this fall, when it seems that a man determined to destroy the alliance and world order that has stabilized postwar Europe for 79 years will likely be re-elected. And it’s all for no discernible reason except pique – and an arsonist’s appetite for chaos.
Conscription won’t make Western societies more cohesive, and it won’t reliably convince conscriptees that they owe that service to the state, or that that service serves a purpose. It is still going to be implemented. The argument for it, for European states, is horrible but compelling.
Mr. Putin’s Russia is on the march. We can look away because others stand between his army and us. But young people standing in front all across Europe have already been drawn in. And looking away is what got us here.
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