Reply #55: You mean male and female, or just male? [View All]

[ForrestGump]

There's the Swiss model, that I think is just conscription of males, and the Singaporean version (again, I think just males). Some smaller nations have mandatory military service for a proportion of the population, male and female - done by lottery.

What about Israel? Do they have mandatory national service for both sexes?

As for the draft coming back to the US, my answer would be no way. Yes, there are very good reasons for reinstituting it, but we can almost guarantee that abuses will occur that will keep the situation Business-as-Usual for a new crop of privileged chickenhawks, with US corporate interests being served by a military (in effect, mercenaries) deployed in the name of corporate profits more blatantly than ever before.

And the argument that a new crop of the Right's upcoming élite would lose credibility should they duck and run doesn't ring true in light of the preponderance of chickenhawks - including the nominal 'president' - who are in charge of the DisUnited States of Amerika these days. They skedaddled when the time came to put their lives where their rhetoric was and they're doing just fine. Bonsai can even go AWOL/desert from his conveniently-arranged Air Guard stint, as a matter of record, and not have that fact appear in the newspapers whereas Clinton's anti-war stance was commented upon about every two minutes throughout his administration.

F***ers.