Does conscription mean sending poorly trained, disgruntled young people into battle, or can it encourage civic duty and help defend Europe?
Does conscription mean sending poorly trained, disgruntled young people into battle, or can it encourage civic duty and help defend Europe?
I’m someone who studies history a lot.
Everything you said could be replaced with 1910-14 as the current year and you’d be pretty close to prevailing opinions of the day.
Wars need men. Well trained men ideally, but he who has the numbers usually wins.
In WW1 It took 3-6 months to churn through the professionals, in WW2 I don’t recall off hand but we’re looking at months. In Vietnam it did take 5 years yes, but that’s not the kind of war that Europe is or should be preparing for. In Ukraine it seems likely to be around 9 months, for Russia at least (unless you’re paratroopers then 3 days).
Outside of huge technological and leadership gaps you need the bigger army to win and that’s why conscription is the necessary evil.
I do not deny the necessity of boots on the ground. But having a concscript sent against a technologically developed professional army is just sending the conscripts to slaughter without serious gain.
Also we see many examples in history, were a large standing army was worthless in face of superior technology and the professionals able to use it. For example the gulf war and iraq war against the army of Saddam Hussein were won decisively despite the US having much less boots on the ground.
During the six day war Israel “blitzkriegd” the larger arab armies by gaining air superiority and employing combined arms properly.
Again, nobody denies boots on the ground, but a professional army with proper equipment is superior to anyone just tossing numbers around.
Focusing on conscription instead of increasing the professional abilities is dangerous. Maybe they can drag the war out until it is really just a numbers game. But until then they’ll have killed the generations necessary to rebuild the country.
In the current conflict, at least, I think that without (conscripted) infantry to defend the artillery, the artillery would be in pretty deep trouble.
Iraq was, at the time, considered to have very strong air defenses. In practice, they got destroyed very quickly in the opening phase. But the US had prepared the American population for much higher losses in advance of the war, and was conservative in their expectations. We have the benefit of hindsight, so we know that the conflict was very much a one-sided affair, but in the runup to the conflict, the militaries involved were not so sure. Iraq definitely had a different view, else they would not have fought the war.
A video that talks about the opening air war in Iraq that I’ve enjoyed watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRgfBXn6Mg
But if Iraq actually had the strong air defenses, the war would have looked much different as you said. You cannot operate modern AA systems with conscripts. Those are professional capeabilities. And again i dont say to leave systems unguarded without infantry. but 10 professional soldiers make short work of 30 conscripted ones. Again there is plenty of videos from the current war in Ukraine, where russian conscripts lose against much smaller numbers of professional ukrainian soldiers.