Alien Shooter 2 Conscription V1.0 Cracked
Ingelore Clason
Let's look at infrastructure first: if you have conscripts, it follows that you need to provide uniforms, food, and beds for them. Less obviously, you need NCOs to shout at them and teach them to brush their teeth and tie their bootlaces (because a certain proportion of your intake will have missed out on the basics). The barracks that used to be used for a large conscript army were all demolished or sold off decades ago, we don't have half a million spare army uniforms sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and the army doesn't currently have ten thousand or more spare training sergeants sitting idle.
Russia could get away with this shit when they invaded Ukraine because Russia kept national service, so the call-up mostly got adults who had been through the (highly abusive) draft some time in the preceding years. Even so, they had huge problems with conscripts sleeping rough or being sent to the front with no kit.
The UK is in a much worse place where it comes to conscription: first you have to train the NCOs (which takes a couple of years as you need to start with experienced and reasonably competent soldiers) and build the barracks. Because the old barracks? Have mostly been turned into modern private housing estates, and the RAF airfields are now civilian airports (but mostly housing estates) and that's a huge amount of construction to squeeze out of a British construction industry that mostly does skyscrapers and supermarkets these days.
A side-effect of conscription is that it sucks able-bodied young adults out of the workforce. The UK is currently going through a massive labour supply crunch, partly because of Brexit but also because a chunk of the work force is disabled due to long COVID. A body in a uniform is not stacking shelves in Tesco or trading shares in the stock exchange. A body in uniform is a drain on the economy, not a boost.
If a notional half-million strong conscript force optimistically means losing 3% of the entire work force, that's going to cause knock-on effects elsewhere in the economy, starting with an inflationary spiral driven by wage rises as employers compete to fill essential positions: that didn't happen in the 1910-1960 era because of mass employment, collective bargaining, and wage and price controls, but the post-1979 conservative consensus has stripped away all these regulatory mechanisms. Market forces, baby!
There are a pile of vicious feedback loops in play here, but what it boils down to is: we lack the infrastructure to return to a mass military, whether it's staffed by conscription or traditional recruitment (which in the UK has totally collapsed since the Tories outsourced recruiting to Capita in 2012). It's not just the bodies but the materiel and the crown estate (buildings to put them in). By the time you total up the cost of training an infantryman, the actual payroll saved by using conscripts rather than volunteers works out at a tiny fraction of their cost, and is pissed away on personnel who are not there willingly and will leave at the first opportunity. Meanwhile the economy has been systematically asset-stripped and looted and the general staff can't have an extra 200Bn/year to spend on top of the existing 55Bn budget because Oligarchs Need Yachts or something.
Once diplomacy and economic sanctions fail, it would be good to have an option other than throwing explosives around, or assassination (assassination invariably seems to make politics worse, as witness Japan in the 1930s, or -- arguably -- the USA in the post-2016 period). But in the absence of magic lamps and djinni bearing wishes, I'm coming up blank. Hence at least considering the pros and cons of rearmament.
I was terrified that I would be forced into NS, when I was at senior school, as I knew what it would be like - 2+ years of bullying & torture, same as the football field, only lots worse.
Fortunately, it was abolished about 2.5 years before I would have been "caught".
And ... you are wrong, actually - it's only the Telegraph & some of the Mail "readers" who emote that way ... it simply is NOT a vote-winner.
It shows, yet again, how utterly out-of-touch the tories are - think, if you can bear it, of Liz Hernia & thicko Frostie?
As you say, it's utterly impossible - even more impossible than "Rwanda", not that it stops these wankers.
CORRECTION: The UK is currently going through a massive labour supply crunch, partlyalmost-wholly because of Brexit, & COVID certainly didn't help ... & we can't have those NASTY foreign workers, either (!)
Yet another tory disconnect.
The correct answer is NOT to outsource recruiting to Crapita, but, then, "Our friends" won't make any money, oops.
Charlie @ 1
Agree, our navy is woefully under-strength, & Putin seems determined to stir the pot, before he pops it ...
Scary thought, is he likely to do an Adolf & pull everything down with him?
(Although admittedly he was talking to the Daily Telegraph about it, and you know what they're like: all "fellow billionaires: when shall we eat the poor?" and "why not tax oxygen instead of bizjet fuel?")
I'm kind of biased here, but we do still have (male) conscription here and it seems not to be a big factor anyway. Nobody really talks about getting rid of it, but, uh, we do have some land border with Russia. Also some history of special military operations and imperialism. There is some risk of there being a shoot-out in some years' time. Still, I'm not sure half a million UK conscripts are the best you could do, if Finland or the Baltics (for example) get attacked.
This has also increased militarism here, obviously. I can imagine it's good for the arms industries, too. I'm not happy about it, but, uh, I kind of like to have an independent Finland and Russia sadly is still there on the other side of the border. Of course everybody would've been better off with them not doing what they are doing, but that's not what happened.
I think NATO should have some kind of plan and maybe some actions done for it (see: artillery shells), in regards to Russia. I think there have been a couple of years when maybe somebody could have done some more to help Ukraine, if only to lessen the risk of Russia getting ideas about some other real estate near its borders.
Oddly enough, it is compatible with a failing labour market, insofar as the government of the day might regard mass unemployment and a permanently immiserated underclass as a successful social and economic strategy.
The problem with that economic structure is that the numbers add up to slums, malnutrition, endemic disease and mass illiteracy, for at least the bottom quartile of the population and probably more than half.
...And that's not a sufficiently productive economy to feed and house the conscripts well enough to maintain discipline and train an effective army. Or even an adequate one, for the widespread repression required to keep order in such a society.
The people beating the war-drums today are in the late 50'ies, they are the widest bit of the age-pyramid in most western countries, so there are 25% more 57 year olds, that there are 18 year olds here in Denmark.
Really, the correct response to the current crisis should be for the generals to badger the government not for conscripts but to place bulk orders for NATO-spec artillery ammo (and a few new tubes and tanks to throw it with), then start rotating the older stockpile out to parts east (Ukraine, Moldova) at a very steep discount, easy credit terms apply. Call it Military Keynsianism. Build up the reserves, send support where it's needed right now, boost British manufacturing industry, train more munitions workers. That is an achievable goal and can be ramped up relatively fast and the CBI will approve of it ... but, as Boris Johnson said, "fuck business" (and that's still the order of the day for the current Tory party).
Indeed. And they can have us: mass emigration of the workforce - especially people in their late teens and early twenties - as undocumented migrant labour in the building sites and care comes of more successful societies is A Thing; and I maintain that the likeliest future for Urban Brexitstan will resemble Dublin and Cork in the 1960's and 1970's.
A side-effect of the austerity economics, social cuts, and class war waged by the Tories since 2010 is a relative collapse in the British birth rate; women of childbearing age can't afford to start a family, especially given the cost of housing.
This was also the case under Thatcher (my wife has anecdata about her classmates from school, who either never had children or deferred childbearing until the late 1980s/1990s) but the pressure was less severe than it is today.
Also women who want children base their desired family size (within the constraints of their income) on how many kids their cohort are averaging. In a culture where 4 children is the average, having 6-7 doesn't put you wildly outside the mark; but if the average has dropped to 1 child, then having 2 represents a 100% overshoot and 3 kids is bizarre cult-level fecundity. In other words, demographic changes come with inertia attached.
China's being bitten by that one right now, South Korea's TFR has collapsed to 0.6 children per women (and they're looking at having to conscript women to keep the numbers up, or abolish national service within a generation). The UK had a TFR of roughly 1.7 last time I looked, but that was pre-2020 and I suspect post-Brexit social changes haven't improved the picture.
BTW, during Soviet times, the lower echelon NCOs in the Warsaw Pact army were conscript soldiers deemed as having leadership qualities during the initial couple weeks of service and then provided with just a couple of months of basic NCO training.
I'd be wary of suggesting the General Staff were not advising just that.Ukraine is fighting the war my generation trained to fight, and sending the equipment for that seems entirely sensible.We expected the front line to start on the Inner German Border (and with 5th columns disorganising and weakening the bonds within snd between NATO states, stirring up the Middle East etc, /of course/ ) so a front line further from home is better than it might have been.
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