Comment by graemep
1 year ago
This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns.
In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances.
I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react.
Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
An insurgency doesn’t report to a battlefield to be slaughtered by the professional army. To see what a large-scale American resistance would look like, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan are instructive.
The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army.
They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces.
Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription.
They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
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> the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript
Generally such conscripts realize they're dooming their family to at best prison and at worst dying in the raid on their home.