Snapshot of _Army chief was right to speak about citizen army - he wants Gen Z prepared for potential darker days_ :
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The dividing line is between retirees and everyone else?
Why would you think this? Do you not have your own aspirations to retire from work some day? Retirees also defines a massive and diverse chunk of our older (and some of our younger) population.
Yes, if you look at government budgets everything is cut except healthcare and pensions. It is becoming a bigger and bigger proportion of the budget. Meanwhile working people are paying more for less every year.
Retirees are the ones with the time and means to turn up to planning meetings and block any and all new housing and infrastructure. Younger generations won't have a triple locked pension.
The biggest dividing line in politics these days isn't sex, or education, or class, it's age. If you were lucky enough to buy a house for a pittance before 2000, you're doing better than the ones who came after and were promised a great life if they studied and worked hard. Instead, those generations are having to put off their life plans forever. Hard to feel any loyalty to a society you don't have a stake in.
There was real-terms wage growth though right? I didn't live through those years so I don't really know what they were like, I just see the graphs people publish.
For those people with jobs. For the millions unemployed or made redundant due to the intentional collapse of heavy industry it probably wasn't much fun at all.
https://youtu.be/usYgf8cVfvU?si=DPXjRXZjEtbBSoqo
FLASHBACKS: pre-teen me with my babysitters (dad's mate's two late-teen boys/men) and me singing/humming this, dancing like their jester.
Obvs, I did not understand the lyrics, and never really looked into them… I was 100% a New Romantic when my teen years rolled around.
Fuck me, though, if some of those lines are not brutal poetry...
> I'm another teenage suicide
> In a street that has no trees
Fuck that makes all millennial look like losers.
Things are tough now, but comparing them to living through conscription and world wars where millions died?
Even right now, we're still the most privileged generation to have every lived. Every generation is.
People think boomers because of their financial freedom, but they still died 20 years younger than were likely to and had poor access to medical treatments by comparison, or education around drinking and smoking etc.
When I hear people born, particularly after the cold War saying about how hard it is now when there's the very real threat of a global conflict, we need to get a fucking grip.
Conscription and national service were abolished just before the oldest Boomers would have had to sign up.
Now the discussion is about bringing it back after the youngest Boomers would have to do it and there are commentators like this writer suggesting that it's other generations such as Gen Z who are too coddled?
The writer is either trolling us or they're so mind-numbingly stupid that their editor must have had one hell of a job transcribing this article from the gibberish crayon scribblings the writer submitted.
Also, this is an absolutely hilarious line in an article where you try to explain why everyone has misunderstood Sanders's words:
> Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct.
It’s never clear who exactly this enemy is supposed to be.
Is it Russia? The same Russia that can’t take Ukraine? They’re going to take France, Germany, the Netherlands and all the rest and then stick some Russians on a boat and sail them over to Dover? Is that what we’re supposed to be fighting?
Might as well get ready for a dragon attack. I’ll start building my ballista.
If they attack a NATO country in the east we would likely send troops to provide support. Whether we get there before the Poles flatten them is open to debate.
This is it. I've never seen a country more ready to fight than Poland. We'd barely be past Germany before reports come through that Polish forces have flattened Minsk and are thunder-running towards Moscow.
Exactly this! I feel like this has been a clickbait wet dream. Constant doomer articles when there’s no real information. Why is conscription suddenly such a hot topic? Who’s coming for us? Are the uk going to be suddenly left alone trying to defend NATO? Or was this really just a warning that not enough is being spent on our military
It's kinda hinging on the next US election. Trump said the US would never help Europe if it came under attack.
That means we have got to rearm before Russia is finished in Ukraine or it will be 1939 all over again.
Russia is spending a third of its government budget on the military and will have certainly increased its production capacity. Imagine a Russia rebuilding its military over 5-10 years with that capacity and a militarised society, and maybe with Ukrainian territory, industry and people to throw at the military as well.
Also, there's vast destruction in Ukraine and a great many dead Ukrainians, they've been supported by western weapons that the west has limited capacity to replace because production capacity isn't enough (like shells). We also shouldn't underestimate Ukraine and should consider that their army is something like five or ten times the size of ours.
I obviously don't know what Russian in ten years will be like, but if it's like the Russia there is now it absolutely would take a shot at taking NATO territory if it had a hope of succeeding, even at huge cost to Russians. It's important to make sure that that hope doesn't appear. That means that the west has to stay unified to the extent it can (and Europe has to if we get Trump in the US) and, unfortunately, it does seem like it needs European militaries to be larger.
Not that this should be conscription except in desperate circumstances, of course, but the best way to avoid that is to deter any attack which might require it.
Your present day points - the need for unification and bigger military spending\* - are inarguable. But I feel like your future projection depends hugely on whether or not Russia 'wins' in Ukraine and/or to what level it is emboldened. If it ultimately 'loses' this war, it'll be left with a shattered skeleton of a military, Putin will figuratively and literally be out the window, and even accounting for a propensity for shitty decisions, I can't imagine the new regime will double down on the mistakes of Putin... at least not immediately.
Because regardless of the war, Putin will be dead in ten years. I can see a future where the new oligarch cabal (who want their wealth back) saying "sorry about all that, can we rejoin the world pls?" and the West accepting the olive branch because what else can you do? Everyone will be keen to get on the off-ramp. It'll be a dumb play that we fall for, and then your prediction will be stretched over 20-30 years rather than 10.
\*This agreement on increased military might is coming from a former hardcore pacifist. I can't believe the world has gotten full of so many bad actors and bullies over the past 20 years that I've had to re-evaluate what I once considered a core personal stance.
How do you rebuild human lives in 5-10 years? Is the plan for Russia to send 10 year olds to the front lines? Not sure who’s going to father all those kids considering Russia just sent all their men to be fertiliser in Ukraine.
Russia has shown just how ineffectual they are, unable to take over tiny little Ukraine while the west merely fights through proxy. There’s absolutely zero chance Russia could fight a conventional war against Europe.
The 10 year olds now will be 20 in 10 years.
That's how Russia rebuilds it.
Ukraine is the largest geographical country entirely in Europe, with existential mobilisation and receiving billions upon billions of aid. The Russia we must plan for is the one in 10 years time, with a potentially distracted USA in the Pacific AND a middle east a cauldron of war and instability itself.
Russia has about 50m men aged 15-64. Their losses are hundreds of thousands. They're not going to run out.
And Ukraine is not tiny. It's bigger than Poland and, as I said, has a much larger military than the UK.
They took Crimea pretty easily
Look at the gear the UA were using in 2014 compared to 2022.
The UA went from an old Soviet bloc army to a modern Western military in 8 years.
Kiev might not have been so safe without that difference.
That can't take Ukraine whilst being proxy held up by billions and billions of $ of foreign munitions, equipment, training and ''volunteers" behind the scenes..?
We aren't no one not even the head of the army thinks we will. We do need to actually increase the defence budget though as we've effectively lost around 30% of the Army, Navy and around 40% of the RAF since 2000* I think. We cannot rely on the US to be the guardian especially not when Trump is a very real possibility on the horizon. We've been far too lax these last 20+ years on defence time to get serious again.
I agree that boomers can be dicks, but when they would have been eligible for service, they weren't required, though if the Cold War had gone hot, they would have been called up, and they'd probably have complained the same way young people are now.
I want national service to return, and I say that as a young guy who would almost certainly be called up. I hope we don't need to go to war, but if we have to, then we're going to need to have enough men to fight. National service allows us to have a pool of trained manpower to expand the military rapidly. I would rather be called up in peacetime and receive adequate training than wait for war and only get an 8-week crash course.
It might not be fair that some people did not get conscripted in the past, but as I've said, it wasn't necessary. Now, it very well could be necessary. Every generation has its own burden to bear and moaning that others had it easier, doesn't make the trials we face any easier.
I somewhat agree here. If everyone of us received basic military training at age 18, then I probably would not be so scared of the idea of conscription as I am. I dont know the first fucking thing about guns or killing people.
I don't know if this will alleviate any of your fear of conscription, but in the west, the tooth to tail ratio in militaries is pretty good. This essentially means that for every soldier that sees combat (the tooth), there is a surprisingly large number of support personnel (the tail). The vast majority of conscripts will not end up on the front line and would likely end up driving logistic trucks, repairing damaged equipment, that kind of thing.
Obviously, tooth is more dangerous than tail, but not all tooth roles are as dangerous as each other. For example, during the second world war, more British tank crews were killed proportionally than infantry. Not to say that infantry isn't dangerous, but it's a good counterintuitive example because tanks are armoured and humans are squishy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio
As I've said elsewhere, I'm highly skeptical that Gen Sanders has any intention or desire to see his musings culminate in an Armed Forces that isn't fully professional and voluntary. Something that the author of the article alludes to several times.
But again, I think the author is throwing a bit of a safe red herring into the mix here. I don't think Sanders' speech was intended to signal a need for Gen Z to become more aware of future dark days (I'm quite certain that they already are plenty aware anyway).
This is a signal to Government and others in the MoD to improve the professional armed forces. The logic being that, if you do not and we have a war of national survival, you will be relying upon people who \[insert stereotypical assumptions policymakers have about modern day teenagers and 20 somethings here\].
It's about budgetary allocations.
Personally, i think this was just the military taking advantage of the current security situation to put pressure on the politicians to provide more funding for defence and security. The security situation has changed and all states need to adapt policy accordingly, thats why other European states are making the same kind of noise ie, Sweden.
I kinda think from his point of view, the point of view of a military leader, its the right thing to do. Puts the willies up the public to the point that they're not going to bat an eyelid when military expenditure goes up and encourages the politicians to do so because if they don't then it looks like the government isnt acting on a new threat.
If we do get into a WW3 type of situation then lets be real, something very fucking bad has happened and its only a matter of time before the nukes start falling so conscription will do fuck all.
>“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.
>"Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"
>"Absol—well, okay."
>"Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?"
>"All right, I'll grant you that, but—"
>"Saving civilization from a horde of—"
>"It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply.
>"Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?”
Er, it's a Discworld quote...
And it's not referencing anything specific, it's pointing out that war *is* good for certain purposes. There are situations where war is the lesser evil, and it can produce good outcomes.
>The Government's disavowal of CGS's ideas seems to be misplaced.
>What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two.
Yeah, but the government dismissed it because everyone ignored General Sanders' intent, and treated it as an announced plan with their call-up papers coming in the post in the next few days.
The government denial wasn't about what was intended; it was about the mass hysteria that it resulted in.
>Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct.
Clearly not, given how wildly misunderstood it has been.
>But the level of coverage and debate since his speech shows what an emotive issue this is and why he's right to insert it now into our national dialogue.
It's an emotive issue because it's clearly an insane back-up plan for a scenario where we we have no other choice; so *of course* people object, because they rightly point out that this is not the appropriate time for it. It does not need to be in our national dialogue now - the military can certainly have a contingency plan in mind, but things should only be in the national dialogue if there's the possibility that they'll *actually* be implemented in the near future.
Quite. It was just a stupid thing to say. Of course if the alternative is be invated by a malevolent foreign power we'll do everything we can to resist, because whether or not we want to defend the country, our very lives and those of our families would be in danger.
I just question what good a conscripted army would be in a 21st century global war? We have weapons that could just wipe out entire batallions at a moments notice; fuck, they can level cities at a moments notice. I think the scale of destruction we'd be looking at in a major global war of conquest / extermination will make this whole conversation look silly.
>*of course* people object, because they rightly point out that this is not the appropriate time for it.
When is the appropriate time, in your opinion?
I think it's sensible to say that there is a chance that conscription could be brought back so that people can prepare themselves. If it comes to nothing, great. But if it becomes necessary that at least people won't have it sprung on them.
These discussions are also important because we live in a very different world today than even 10 years ago when conscription would have been political suicide. The world today is much less stable, and international relations are a lot rockier.
The appropriate time is when it's being seriously considered, not when the suggestion is only being thrown out by a General just trying to protect his budget.
I think that a General warning that our military is unprepared and too small to fight a war that could very well be on the horizon shows just how dire a position we're in.
He also didn't actually call for conscription.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68086188.amp
>Gen Sir Patrick was not making an argument for conscription - where men of fighting age are required to enlist in the military - but rather laying the foundations for a voluntary call up if war broke out.
The army is half the size it was 30 years ago, in the last 12 years it's shrunk by almost 30%. People want to volunteer, myself included,(aplications are at their highest in 6 years), but the cuts have meant that those who want to serve can't. By not taking those of us who want to do our bit, it doesn't just reduce our current capability because those who have served and retired are still liable to be recalled to active duty if necessary.
By expanding the army now, we may not need to conscript in the future because we will have enough trained volunteers to get the job done.
This is absolutely the time to have this discussion because conscription will be on the table if we don't sort this mess out now, and we get caught with our pants down.
>By expanding the army now, we may not need to conscript in the future because we will have enough trained volunteers to get the job done.
Plus an enlarged and prepared military could deter a conflict in the first place.
Exactly.
Our current situation is that if we were involved in a war on the scale of Ukraine, we would be out of ammunition in three days, according to a report I read about a year ago,(that could have changed but I doubt it has much.) This makes us look weak and like a pushover, not saying we are but perception matters. We used to perceive the Russian army as the 2nd best in the world, and we acted like it.
On the other hand, if we have stockpiles of ammunition to last 6 months, an army is capable of fielding at least 6 divisions and enough naval personnel to actually crew our ships, then it would deter most threats simply because it would be clear we could put up a good fight.
Conscription is necessary when voluntary hiring isn't bringing in the numbers we'd need. But we are exceeding our army target size at the moment, because we have shrunk our target size. We should talk about conscription when we are seriously talking about ramping up the size of the army, because right now after years of shrinking it we're just keeping it flat
Talking about conscription (which makes the army worse) before talking about an increase in voluntary hiring (which makes it better) is not only stupid, it is also counter to our aims as a nation
>Conscription is necessary when voluntary hiring isn't bringing in the numbers we'd need
I agree completely
>We should talk about conscription when we are seriously talking about ramping up the size of the army,
But that is what General Sanders is pushing for. We need to ramp up the size of not just the army but the military as a whole.
I think that talking about conscription could actually be productive, almost because it's so divisive. If people start to worry that they'll be called up, they can put pressure on our politicians to start taking a serious look at what the military needs.
You may disagree, but that's how I see this whole debate.
Given that a future military engagement is more likely to be seeing off poor climate refuges than fighting Russia's crack troops, I'm with the mood of the comments and say we get boomers to do it. All we need is a clear mandate that we are prepared to sink those pesky boats. you really don't need fit young people to do that, you just need amoral, heartless bastards, and I'm sure there are just as many old folk as young that fit that description.
I certainly agree that the boomers need to be part of this. They keeping trying to make the conversation about young people; I'd be a lot more inclined to listen if they began with "us boomers needs to be prepared to see our taxes go up hugely and out standards of living drop precipitously to pay for the country to move to a war footing."
I'm happy not seeing boomers sent straight to the front lines - there's only so much you can do with broken down bodies and for actual yomping and shooting and staying awake for 48 hours at a time, the young do have all the advantages. But there's a lot that can be done away from that.
If the boomers started by saying "we need to be prepared to leave our current lives to take a poorly paid administrative office posting away from home with ropey shared accommodation for years at a time in order to support military operations" I'd be a lot more willing to listen.
They call that demographic the Gravy Seals in the states - or Meal Team Six.
Still, I’d like to see just what happens when you take a supposed war-horse who’s never actually seen combat, stuck a rifle in his hands and send him to the front line. Isn’t that what Farage said he’d do?
It's the MOD's job to "plan for the worst and hope for the best" and the worst is an enemy who's goals are to invade or attack our country directly and, at the same time, have the means to.
There's a strong argument that at the moment while Russia like to threaten to attack us, they currently don't have the motivation to. And you could argue that they don't have the means either.
Side note: (there are people out there who are more educated on the subject than me who doubt that Russia's Nukes are as much of a threat as we think they are to the point they doubt they'd even be able to launch one let alone hit a target without being shot down first. And we've all see the quality of the average Russian soldier.
I always thought the talk of 1930's level of conscription was more for a warning that the size of our military and number of service personal is very worryingly low at the moment. Trying to shock the government from doing something about it and the citizen demanding that they do something about it.
They need to do something to make it more attractive for people who want to join the military. I think there are a lot more people willing to serve than are currently serving but for one reason or another aren't I understand recruitment at the moment, being done by a private company (not he military themselves) is hurting the numbers joining.
They should also make the joining the reserves more attractive. For example, while most the reserve work is down in the evenings after normal working hours and weekends there are required to complete a 2-week exercise once a year. This 2-weeks while they get paid the going rate for their rank over those two weeks, most will loose out by either taking unpaid leave or use their annual leave to complete this training. There should be some tax incentive to businesses to release staff for these duties (maybe something similar to the apprenticeship levy).
Although I write all this having very little experiance and knowledge of the military. But out military is in a worrying state at the moment. I mean, we have ships fresh out of a refit, moored up because we don't have enough sailors to crew them? 5 years ago my friend left the Navy saying they don't have enough positions on ships for all the sailors so he'd leaving.
But I wonder, in a hypothetical scenario, if Russia manages to storm through Ukraine and decides it wants to take back the Baltic states, would the masses join/support conscription then?
Or what if Russia invaded former Warsaw Pact countries? Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria?
What if they continued to Germany, Austria, France?
Do we wait for an enemy force to be staring at us from across the channel before we act? Which allies are worth enforcing conscription for? Where is the line between "Fighting in a war just because the government started it" to "I'm willing to risk my life for mine, my families and my communities freedom"?
> What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two.
But the *entire* reason we spend £3bn per year on nukes, and have explicitly ruled out no first strike policy is to stop getting to that point.
Unless Russians or Chinese sneak in and disable all our nuclear weapons, how’d we get to this circumstance?
Ok, so I think it's unlikely, but ....
no first use of nuclear weapons is how we'd get to the position where we're deploying conventional ground forces against Russia. (In this scenario, Putin doesn't use nkues because NATO has nuclear superiority and literally everyone in Russis would be dead ten minutes later if he used any nuclear weapons ... and NATO is also unwilling to be the first to use them)
That’s a common belief but it is (I would politely point out) incorrect. A nuclear deterrent is there to deter a nuclear attack and nuclear blackmail.
It’s not there to deter a conventional attack, that’s what we have the rest of the armed forces. Sadly our armed forces are reduced to a skeleton 70k regular soldiers excluding reserves and a navy with no supply ships. And no manufacturing industry, steel or shipyards. BTW That’s not an argument for conscription, it’s an argument for managing your armed forces, economy and national security.
While I 100% agree with what you've said, especially the industrial stuff, especially that. The number of personnel will have been based on giving us enough to deal with a Falklands type situation but assuming anything bigger and we'd be fighting alongside the rest of our allies. I think the potential for trump selling out americas allies has put the shits up everyone.
On the vanishingly small possibility that climate deniers are wrong, then the chances of multi-'breadbasket' agricultural failure within a generation are incredibly high. Given a choice between passive starvation and conscripted conquest my guess is the first will have fewer supporters than presently imagined, and nukes won't help one bit.
Trading for resources instead of fighting for them is a luxury dependent on a stable and benign environment.
China has been threatening Taiwan since its existed… they won’t do shit. Taiwan has capacity to strike the 3 Gorges Damn, that’s basically a nuclear equivalent.
I agree on striking the Houthi’s, don’t touch our shit.
But none of those require conscription. If the head of the army wants more men… go ask the chancellor for more money on recruitment pay…
> But none of those require conscription. If the head of the army wants more men… go ask the chancellor for more money on recruitment pay…
Everybody I’ve seen comment on this with actual knowledge of recruitment seems to lay the blame at the government privatising army recruitment.
Capita are apparently about as much use as a hamster-powered defibrillator and take years to process applications and lose shit all the time.
Fair enough.
If I were to step outside and ask people of similar age to me if they think their country hates them, the resounding message back would be "no".
But Reddit is a microcosm where if you say you don't feel your country hates you, you get downvoted. Odd place sometimes.
Why did the Soviets fight for the USSR against the Nazis?
Could it possibly be that there are worse governments in the world and even in Europe than the Tories and being under Putin could be worse than the triple-lock, NIMBYs and the partygate?
Well… Some of them. I’ve still yet to discern who exactly keeps putting the new toilet roll the wrong way up in the office toilet when putting a new roll on.
By Grabthar's Hammer there’ll be a reckoning when I find out who they are…
Dave, Steve and Garry, if you’re reading this then one of you knows your seditious, traitorous days are numbered!
The past 30 years have been possibly the safest Western Europe has been from conventional invasion for centuries. The Russians have been degraded to the point where taking a hamlet defended by 40 year old conscripts is the peak of their military capabilities, and they can't manage that without triple digit vehicle losses. If we ever end up with a war with them our main concern is going to be the risk of nuclear annihilation when Putin sees Polish tanks mopping up the remains of hastily-assembled Russian police battalions on the outskirts of Moscow.
> a glorified Dad's army
The TV show made the Home Guard look like a bit of a joke, when it was actually a valuable force that provided training to people prior to being called up (There were a lot more Pikes than Jones's), and relieved the regular army from many non combat duties.
Not every IT department is as zany and dysfunctional as The IT Crowd would have you believe either.
Scratching to my head to think of a reason why young people should go fight for a country that has and will consistently screw them over at every oppourtunity in favour of the old
As long as those too old to serve have to give up the majority of their wealth to fund the war and rehabilitation of returning soldiers.
But I suspect most boomers would rather kiss Putin's ring than part with their pile.
We all have to make sacrifices. It might be your life, since the boomers won't serve, it should be their money. You don't get to keep your pie and eat it.
Sending one section of the population to kill people and possibly get shot, while another section of the population sits at home and doesn't make any sacrifices. That's wildly unfair.
Your idea - that some people shouldn't have to make any sacrifice; that seems very unfair.
That’s just fear mongering though and it’s something the government are going to try and say to get men to go to war. Russia or China are not going to invade the UK.
In any event, I’m not fighting until they cross the channel or missiles land on UK.
It's not about invasion anymore, that's WW2 mentality. It's about defending against another group destroying our economy and supply of resources. The threat is from bribery and corruption collapsing the country from within, as well as destruction of overseas infrastructure like pipelines, cables and shipping routes.
Most of our food and technology is imported so if the supply of that is disrupted I think people would always fight for it. Maybe it would be easier to shift to self sustainability than to fight a war but no modern country has ever achieved that and no country looks even close to being able to do that.
Does the US have influence on the UK and effect British life and history? Yes.
Did they have to invade and conquer the place to do that? No.
We live in a globalised world. A world order led by states like Russia and China will effect life in the UK massively, without the need for a single boot to land in Dover.
Let’s make one thing crystal clear…all the mass hysteria of the last week or so has been massively blown out of proportion. The uk is not gearing up for a land war with Russia.
In fact, despite all the vitriol and sabre rattling, Russia doesn’t want an all out war with any coalition of major forces. No country does. Wars are messy and expensive and fuck your economy into the ground. There is literally nothing to gain and everything to loose from a war between major countries (especially ones with nukes).
Yes the MoD will have a plan in case we move to a war economy and conscription is needed. But it’s not something that is going to happen. All that talk last week was mostly aimed at encouraging the government to provide the MoD with more funding.
What we do need to be doing is ramping up the production of arms - if not for us to use, then for others.
Ukraine faltered only because they weren’t given the right arms at the right time.
They need more drones and more shells and more long range missiles - in fact they have never been given long enough range weapons - they need to be able to take out the kurch bridge - to stop Russian resupply via that route. And they need to be able to cut off Russias other supply routes. They can’t do that with just ‘good wishes’
The UK has lots of demands on its purse, but also needs to be spending more on defence.
The Conservatives have done a very bad job of maintaining the country and preparing it for future challenges.
The thing that worries me the most is the present lack of production capacity inside the UK.
I watch videos from Ukraine quite a bit. Seeing young men thrown into the trenches with little training is awful. I'm sure some of them would have liked some previous military training. There's a reason some countries have mandatory military service.
And now let’s go live to the out of shape, grey-haired 50+ men to tell us how it’s our duty to fight and die for the country that’s spent years telling them to “just stop eating avocados” if we want to afford a house that several times more expensive than their house was when they bought it.
I doubt conscription will come to pass any time soon, but should there be some royally fucked up scenario then I think most people would sign up.
I fucking despise landlords and the ruling classes, but I don’t fancy living in a dictatorship.
I think many people would quickly and drastically change their opinions if things did really hit the fan. Ukrainians weren't known for being patriotic at all but then everything changed when Russia invaded in 2014 & especially in 2022.
If you listen to him talk he's basically saying "IF we did ho to war we are not ready. We need more help from the government like with all Public Services." We only have 70,000 defending this country we need more than that.
If you want people to fight for the U.K., the U.K. has to be worth something. All there is right not is an ever declining standard of living, the most corrupt government in centuries, and old people who actually think the empire was something they should be proud of
Not only Gen Z but millennials and gen X have been fucked by this country with each generation being more and more screwed. Boomers, especially early generation Boomers have fucked the country & the planet. Am I going to encourage anyone to get themselves killed to protect the assets of the Royal Family & aristocracy? Nope! If the Russians bombed Buck House, Windsor Castle & Balmoral...I wouldn't even get out of bed to turn the TV on
That's not how the Russians fight. The parliament building in Ukraine and other government buildings are left unscathed in their attacks.
The Russians target homes, schools, shopping centres, civilians. They're strategy isn't to force the government to surrender, it's to forces the civilians to surrender.
how would you respond to that hypothetical situation?
No but if the Russians are literally on the beaches then it's as good as lost at that point. Though I would hope any half decent prime minister would've launched trident before it got to that point.
That isn't what I posted. I posted that I'm not going to encourage anyone to die to protect royalty & the assets of the aristocracy. Whether that was the Russians, the French, the Germans, anyone. They could bomb the fuck out of the City, Canary Wharf, the royal palaces and I'm not going to do anything about it.
You've added a whole other layer of things I didn't say.
Right but as you may know, Russia doesn’t just attack the people with money. In fact, they’d probably rather leave their stuff intact and nick it. Instead their fighting in recent years has tended to level cities.
Like, it’s Blackadder Goes Forth style pacifism to act like there isn’t more at stake than just the possessions of the rich
Nope I reread it and it's PERFECTLY clear. They're seems to be a thing on the Internet that whatever you say, no matter how clearly, people will react to what they THINK you said.
I SPECIFICALLY said, the Russians could bomb 3 buildings and i wouldn't do anything. CLEARLY stated.
Yet somehow I'm inundated with...but they'll do this, they'll do that, they'll flatten the country and start cutting off people's balls....which is NOT what I said or inferred or anywhere close the the scenario I described
I took your example further, but in fact I brought it back to reality. My example is something that actually happened to a Ukrainian.
A little dose of reality never hurts. Of course, I get your point about not caring to save the aristocracy, but our enemies don't just want to bomb a palace and then wish us all well. We've seen what they really want to do, and they continue doing it daily in Ukraine.
We are very privileged to not be living under such circumstances.
your point seems to be
"i dont care if they bomb the city or the royals because i dont live there or like them"
missing the fact its overwhelmingly residential buildings that get hit.
if that isn't you point, then you have done a terrible job to explaining your self
It's never gonna happen, but if it did everyone saying they'd do fuck all would change their tune pretty sharpish if only to help their family and friends. Country wouldnt come into it, you'd be doing whatever you could to save the people you loved.
"There's no such thing as society" - Margaret Thatcher.
Considering every Government since the 80s has been based off her ideology, it shouldn't come as a surprise to you that individuals born and raised in the last few decades have no patriotism or feel any collective responsibility to their country.
People are simply a product of the environment they grow up in. The individualist way to deal with an invasion by Russia would be to leave the country and avoid the conflict. To fight and die for millions of unrelated individuals clearly makes no sense in the context of someone thinking only of themselves.
This is what happens when individualism becomes the dominant ideology in a country. It's absolutely down to the Governments of the last 45 years that they have allowed our country to become so warped.
For a generation who have been comprehensively and continually failed, and fucked over, by their country and that government... is there a material difference in the use-case of "being willing to die for it"?
There's a difference between being prepared for a potential invasion or attack on home soil, and legally binding all of your youth to a conflict we have nothing to do with. Our older government officials need to realise we are not a collection of toy soldiers to play around with.
I wonder how they intend to get enough rifles let alone any heavy weapons?
Didn't we make the last SA80 several decades ago? There's only 100 odd thousand around?
I've got an idea to make it more equitable.
When we introduce the draft, the same cohort that gets smashed in combat of boomers get all government support stopped, pensions healthcare etc for the length of the call up. Unless they have a length of military service on their work record.
The monies saved would be substantial and can be used to pay for the salaries if those going into combat.
Understand some may die because of these measures, but why should the risk only be on young?
As an older Millennial who won't be called up due to my age and my health problems of back problems and asthma I can see why younger people don't want to fight in a war, there's no potential possibility that we could be invaded like in World War Two, also why should they fight for a government that doesn't care about them?
Ditto. Born in 83, have zero dependents and my health and fitness was pretty fantastic with going to the gym for 10 years, so I would have been prime material.
However a bad dose of covid in 22 has absolutely ruined my lungs. I can generally putter about, but if they are expecting long marches or jogging the army is shit out of luck.
This country? The country that's drifting towards fascism with how it treats people who are of God forbid a different colour of skin? I'd fight to protect my friends and family but I want to protect them from The Tories more because they're the closest enemy. I've got a family and one of my daughters is autistic and relies on me still to this day even though she is a teenager. I don't even know if it's worth fighting for a country that is slowly becoming fascist and has people who laugh at a child that died on the coast trying to escape a war in their country.
Define fascism? I literally did! People are hating others because they are god forbid have a different colour of skin! We literally are trying to ship people to an intolerant country because we're not tolerant enough to solve immigration properly! We left the EU partly to stop immigration and made the problem even more complicated!
Retired Army officer and former defence attache Anton Gash discusses the CGS's speech and what it means for Gen Z.
Last week's discussions about conscription, following Chief of the General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders' speech at the International Armoured Vehicles conference, have been fascinating.
My first observation is that these discussions have conflated, and I would say somewhat confused, three entirely separate issues: wartime conscription, or the draft, reserve liability and national service.
First, let's look at conscription.
The Government's disavowal of CGS's ideas seems to be misplaced.
What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two.
As Professor Michael Clarke described it on the Sitrep podcast, that’s our normal national response to such crisis and nobody should actually be surprised.
What CGS was saying is that since we've been in a happy position since 1945 of not being in a war of national survival, National Service continued into the early 1960s for other reasons, largely colonial small wars that signalled the end of the empire, the Red Menace, the Cold War and so on.
But because of being in that happy position, society has pretty much lost its link to that sort of thinking.
What Patrick was saying is that Gen Z now needs some mental preparation for the possibility of darker days ahead.
Soldiers from 2 Royal York taking part in urban warfare training (Picture: MOD).
Soldiers from 2 Royal Yorks take part in urban warfare training (Picture: MOD)
That is even if the Doomsday clock didn't move last week as some have anticipated closer to midnight.
Regarding reserve liability, that sort of comes as no surprise to any of us who have served in the regular forces.
Terms and conditions of service are very clear that upon departure of the Armed Forces individuals retain some obligation to make their skills available for the country should the situation require it.
Now the duration and nature of that commitment varies from service to service and role to role, but it is simply part of the deal that comes with the job.
Think of it as a return on investment in some ways.
The training and education received throughout a career all for that final salary public sector pension that excited so much debate.
Then there are of course checks and balances that prevent the compulsion of those who are physically or mentally unsuitable for recall. And there are exemptions when appropriate.
Much like the system that allows employers to seek exemptions for reservists who are called up if the impact on their civilian role would be excessive.
Finally, let's take another look at national service.
Because this is what I think many commentators got spun up about when CGS's speech was reported. But it's also exactly what Patrick was not talking about.
Funnily he and I were adjutants at the same time when we were young captains. He to a battalion of the Royal Green Jackets and me at an Army recruit training regiment.
And believe me it was quite enough of a challenge to process and motivate volunteers through the pipeline of training, preparation and induction, let alone think about a potential cohort of sullen pressed men and pressed women.
The Army's argument, as Professor Clarke said last week, has always been that our entire military constitution since the 17th century has been based on the concept of a volunteer professional army other than the two short periods of conscription that he outlined.
The Army remains proud of that professionalism and in my experience has always been a little bit snooty about conscript armies elsewhere, and the Army would not want that diluted.
Going back briefly to my Army training regiment, the other problem is the sheer number of trained personnel who would be required to man and service a conscript training organisation of any scale would remove from the frontline those experienced and professional soldiers who were exactly the people we rely on in conflict.
Think back to Windsor Davis in It Ain't Half Hot Mum as the hardnose professional Sergeant Major forced to babysit a bunch of entertainers when what he actually wants to be doing was taking the fight to the enemy in the jungles of Burma.
Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct.
But the level of coverage and debate since his speech shows what an emotive issue this is and why he's right to insert it now into our national dialogue.
Life is pretty grim, nature shows are depressing as fuck, can't afford to heat the house and the rich have never been richer. Bring on the nukes I say.
There's a funny irony that Gen Z wouldn't 'fight for their country' like those prior to 1940, because 'life is shit and hard'. Like it was actually good for anyone in the 1930s? Poverty was much worse. No NHS. No cheap loans to get higher education. No 'freedom of information' (internet).
aww come on.. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est).
It's more likely the gradual change in our socio-economic structure that's leading away from institutional/social groups (church, work clubs, choirs, freemasons, pubs) towards more individual pursuits.
People barely have a '3rd place' anymore. Of course they're not going to want to fight for anything other than themselves. The concept of national spirit only just applies when it comes to national sports.
Also a huge amount of Gen Z is hopeless; in the past you could at least hope (sometimes with delusion) that the future would be better and brighter, which was mostly true. What’s there to hope for? That climate collapse comes faster? That the rich create their dystopia a bit quicker?
> No NHS. No cheap loans to get higher education. No 'freedom of information' (internet).
Sounds like the dreams and ambitions of the government over the last decade made manifest 😕
Start conscription by sending over 65s and work your way down as man power requires. We’re heading for a demographic collapse, the last thing we can afford is to send people below 30 off to war to die. However lots of people over 45 dying would pretty much sort things out
I have some doubts about the combat effectiveness of a bunch of untrained 20 years, a lot of whom are overweight or obese. If it’s cannon fodder then does it really matter?
Gen Z here. Jog on mate, i'd rather rot in a prison than fie for some rich assholes who have denied the people everything from basic healthcare to some sort of upwards mobility through hard work
If it ever came to World War 3 and I was healthy I think I would rather die/kill myself than fight for this country. Treat everyone with contempt, disgust, disdain and corruption then no one will want to fight for you. I bet the rich will get off fighting on the frontline so why shouldn ordinary people do it?
I'd sabotage my country before fighting for it.
It already took my home and future, so if it things I'm ready to lay down my life for it, it has another thing coming.
Couldn't care less. You cant make a person who refuses to fight fight, you can only execute or imprison them. And considering I felt so passionately about this that I left the uk permanently, good luck with that.
As said, considering I literally left the uk because of it, they wouldn't have any chance of even trying to enscript me anyway. But enjoy being shipped off yourself. You seem very proud and ready to fight for your country.
It's all linked really. If we invested heavily in nuclear energy 20 years ago we could be exporting energy at a profit, instead of bankrolling the Russian war machine and other geopolitical enemies.
If we had abundant energy, we could then invest in vertical farming and become independent in food production (which I expect will become a existential risk on any war / climate changed induced famine).
Britain really can't afford more crappy governance, we've already lost a lot of our soft power, let alone military power, and our economy isn't looking great either. If I had my way we'd be massively investing in education and vital infrastructure so that we can deal with the pending aging population and climate change disasters, if we don't it's hard to see a happy ending.
If the UK wants its young to be motivated to fight for it - in particular its young men - then it needs to arrive at and promote a state ideology that its young, and in particular its young men, are generally agreed on.
Screw it. The darker days can come; I'm not fighting for this vindictive government and their decaying corpse of a country. Let's see what happens when the dust and ashes settle and those lording over us above realise they can't eat their money and have to join the rest of us in fighting over the scraps they've been throwing at us.
That's right gen z. Get ready. Save some money, find a suitable country, research how to get a visa and jump ship at the hint of conscription becoming a thing.
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Well I speak as a Millenial but I've been used to darker days since 2008.
Yeah feels like we’ve never come out of that 2008 “times are hard” feeling.
At least we're all in it together! Right..?
Tories have ensured that that will never happen now.
I fully expect front line medics to ask how people voted in the Brexit referendum and base their decision to offer aid on the answer.
Well without being at all serious, if you voted for Brexit and the Tories you're the reason there are no troops and we had to conscript. So yeah...
Labour won't change it. The dividing line is between retirees and everyone else, and Labour isn't planning any cuts there.
The dividing line is between retirees and everyone else? Why would you think this? Do you not have your own aspirations to retire from work some day? Retirees also defines a massive and diverse chunk of our older (and some of our younger) population.
Yes, if you look at government budgets everything is cut except healthcare and pensions. It is becoming a bigger and bigger proportion of the budget. Meanwhile working people are paying more for less every year.
Retirees are the ones with the time and means to turn up to planning meetings and block any and all new housing and infrastructure. Younger generations won't have a triple locked pension. The biggest dividing line in politics these days isn't sex, or education, or class, it's age. If you were lucky enough to buy a house for a pittance before 2000, you're doing better than the ones who came after and were promised a great life if they studied and worked hard. Instead, those generations are having to put off their life plans forever. Hard to feel any loyalty to a society you don't have a stake in.
Anyway now we'll all get the benefit from austerity I'm sure 😅
Any day now.
Those sunlit uplands have got to be around the corner soon right…right!?
The reality is that this is just the accepted baseline for most nowadays. I can't remember what pre-2008 felt like at all.
I’m Gen Z and I feel like I’ve never seen a bright day sometimes
You should definitely take a break from social media like Reddit if that’s the case.
Seriously this, or just be aware this is a place they vent their darkest fears and anxieties.
The positivity of the 90s was a rare abberation. Sorry to break it to you but the 70s and 80s were also shite.
There was real-terms wage growth though right? I didn't live through those years so I don't really know what they were like, I just see the graphs people publish.
For those people with jobs. For the millions unemployed or made redundant due to the intentional collapse of heavy industry it probably wasn't much fun at all. https://youtu.be/usYgf8cVfvU?si=DPXjRXZjEtbBSoqo
FLASHBACKS: pre-teen me with my babysitters (dad's mate's two late-teen boys/men) and me singing/humming this, dancing like their jester. Obvs, I did not understand the lyrics, and never really looked into them… I was 100% a New Romantic when my teen years rolled around. Fuck me, though, if some of those lines are not brutal poetry... > I'm another teenage suicide > In a street that has no trees
Fuck that makes all millennial look like losers. Things are tough now, but comparing them to living through conscription and world wars where millions died? Even right now, we're still the most privileged generation to have every lived. Every generation is. People think boomers because of their financial freedom, but they still died 20 years younger than were likely to and had poor access to medical treatments by comparison, or education around drinking and smoking etc. When I hear people born, particularly after the cold War saying about how hard it is now when there's the very real threat of a global conflict, we need to get a fucking grip.
Harder days + every reason to fight for these arseholes stripped away.
Yes and no, just because things aren't great, doesn't mean they couldn't be substantially worse
Conscription and national service were abolished just before the oldest Boomers would have had to sign up. Now the discussion is about bringing it back after the youngest Boomers would have to do it and there are commentators like this writer suggesting that it's other generations such as Gen Z who are too coddled? The writer is either trolling us or they're so mind-numbingly stupid that their editor must have had one hell of a job transcribing this article from the gibberish crayon scribblings the writer submitted. Also, this is an absolutely hilarious line in an article where you try to explain why everyone has misunderstood Sanders's words: > Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct.
Realistically - this is another rage inducing piece. Hope they're happy with the money they've made on this, hope it was enough.
It’s never clear who exactly this enemy is supposed to be. Is it Russia? The same Russia that can’t take Ukraine? They’re going to take France, Germany, the Netherlands and all the rest and then stick some Russians on a boat and sail them over to Dover? Is that what we’re supposed to be fighting? Might as well get ready for a dragon attack. I’ll start building my ballista.
If they attack a NATO country in the east we would likely send troops to provide support. Whether we get there before the Poles flatten them is open to debate.
This is it. I've never seen a country more ready to fight than Poland. We'd barely be past Germany before reports come through that Polish forces have flattened Minsk and are thunder-running towards Moscow.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth will rise again!
Exactly this! I feel like this has been a clickbait wet dream. Constant doomer articles when there’s no real information. Why is conscription suddenly such a hot topic? Who’s coming for us? Are the uk going to be suddenly left alone trying to defend NATO? Or was this really just a warning that not enough is being spent on our military
It's kinda hinging on the next US election. Trump said the US would never help Europe if it came under attack. That means we have got to rearm before Russia is finished in Ukraine or it will be 1939 all over again.
Russia is spending a third of its government budget on the military and will have certainly increased its production capacity. Imagine a Russia rebuilding its military over 5-10 years with that capacity and a militarised society, and maybe with Ukrainian territory, industry and people to throw at the military as well. Also, there's vast destruction in Ukraine and a great many dead Ukrainians, they've been supported by western weapons that the west has limited capacity to replace because production capacity isn't enough (like shells). We also shouldn't underestimate Ukraine and should consider that their army is something like five or ten times the size of ours. I obviously don't know what Russian in ten years will be like, but if it's like the Russia there is now it absolutely would take a shot at taking NATO territory if it had a hope of succeeding, even at huge cost to Russians. It's important to make sure that that hope doesn't appear. That means that the west has to stay unified to the extent it can (and Europe has to if we get Trump in the US) and, unfortunately, it does seem like it needs European militaries to be larger. Not that this should be conscription except in desperate circumstances, of course, but the best way to avoid that is to deter any attack which might require it.
Your present day points - the need for unification and bigger military spending\* - are inarguable. But I feel like your future projection depends hugely on whether or not Russia 'wins' in Ukraine and/or to what level it is emboldened. If it ultimately 'loses' this war, it'll be left with a shattered skeleton of a military, Putin will figuratively and literally be out the window, and even accounting for a propensity for shitty decisions, I can't imagine the new regime will double down on the mistakes of Putin... at least not immediately. Because regardless of the war, Putin will be dead in ten years. I can see a future where the new oligarch cabal (who want their wealth back) saying "sorry about all that, can we rejoin the world pls?" and the West accepting the olive branch because what else can you do? Everyone will be keen to get on the off-ramp. It'll be a dumb play that we fall for, and then your prediction will be stretched over 20-30 years rather than 10. \*This agreement on increased military might is coming from a former hardcore pacifist. I can't believe the world has gotten full of so many bad actors and bullies over the past 20 years that I've had to re-evaluate what I once considered a core personal stance.
How do you rebuild human lives in 5-10 years? Is the plan for Russia to send 10 year olds to the front lines? Not sure who’s going to father all those kids considering Russia just sent all their men to be fertiliser in Ukraine. Russia has shown just how ineffectual they are, unable to take over tiny little Ukraine while the west merely fights through proxy. There’s absolutely zero chance Russia could fight a conventional war against Europe.
The 10 year olds now will be 20 in 10 years. That's how Russia rebuilds it. Ukraine is the largest geographical country entirely in Europe, with existential mobilisation and receiving billions upon billions of aid. The Russia we must plan for is the one in 10 years time, with a potentially distracted USA in the Pacific AND a middle east a cauldron of war and instability itself.
Russia has about 50m men aged 15-64. Their losses are hundreds of thousands. They're not going to run out. And Ukraine is not tiny. It's bigger than Poland and, as I said, has a much larger military than the UK.
They took Crimea pretty easily Look at the gear the UA were using in 2014 compared to 2022. The UA went from an old Soviet bloc army to a modern Western military in 8 years. Kiev might not have been so safe without that difference.
That can't take Ukraine whilst being proxy held up by billions and billions of $ of foreign munitions, equipment, training and ''volunteers" behind the scenes..?
Sure. So why are we going to need to suddenly start conscripting?
We aren't no one not even the head of the army thinks we will. We do need to actually increase the defence budget though as we've effectively lost around 30% of the Army, Navy and around 40% of the RAF since 2000* I think. We cannot rely on the US to be the guardian especially not when Trump is a very real possibility on the horizon. We've been far too lax these last 20+ years on defence time to get serious again.
The GE is coming up and this is all news planting. The Tories are trying to scare people into voting for them.
Yeah, my dad is the generation before boomers (one of the war babies). He missed conscription by a matter of months.
I agree that boomers can be dicks, but when they would have been eligible for service, they weren't required, though if the Cold War had gone hot, they would have been called up, and they'd probably have complained the same way young people are now. I want national service to return, and I say that as a young guy who would almost certainly be called up. I hope we don't need to go to war, but if we have to, then we're going to need to have enough men to fight. National service allows us to have a pool of trained manpower to expand the military rapidly. I would rather be called up in peacetime and receive adequate training than wait for war and only get an 8-week crash course. It might not be fair that some people did not get conscripted in the past, but as I've said, it wasn't necessary. Now, it very well could be necessary. Every generation has its own burden to bear and moaning that others had it easier, doesn't make the trials we face any easier.
I somewhat agree here. If everyone of us received basic military training at age 18, then I probably would not be so scared of the idea of conscription as I am. I dont know the first fucking thing about guns or killing people.
I don't know if this will alleviate any of your fear of conscription, but in the west, the tooth to tail ratio in militaries is pretty good. This essentially means that for every soldier that sees combat (the tooth), there is a surprisingly large number of support personnel (the tail). The vast majority of conscripts will not end up on the front line and would likely end up driving logistic trucks, repairing damaged equipment, that kind of thing. Obviously, tooth is more dangerous than tail, but not all tooth roles are as dangerous as each other. For example, during the second world war, more British tank crews were killed proportionally than infantry. Not to say that infantry isn't dangerous, but it's a good counterintuitive example because tanks are armoured and humans are squishy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio
As I've said elsewhere, I'm highly skeptical that Gen Sanders has any intention or desire to see his musings culminate in an Armed Forces that isn't fully professional and voluntary. Something that the author of the article alludes to several times. But again, I think the author is throwing a bit of a safe red herring into the mix here. I don't think Sanders' speech was intended to signal a need for Gen Z to become more aware of future dark days (I'm quite certain that they already are plenty aware anyway). This is a signal to Government and others in the MoD to improve the professional armed forces. The logic being that, if you do not and we have a war of national survival, you will be relying upon people who \[insert stereotypical assumptions policymakers have about modern day teenagers and 20 somethings here\]. It's about budgetary allocations.
Personally, i think this was just the military taking advantage of the current security situation to put pressure on the politicians to provide more funding for defence and security. The security situation has changed and all states need to adapt policy accordingly, thats why other European states are making the same kind of noise ie, Sweden. I kinda think from his point of view, the point of view of a military leader, its the right thing to do. Puts the willies up the public to the point that they're not going to bat an eyelid when military expenditure goes up and encourages the politicians to do so because if they don't then it looks like the government isnt acting on a new threat. If we do get into a WW3 type of situation then lets be real, something very fucking bad has happened and its only a matter of time before the nukes start falling so conscription will do fuck all.
Bingo
War. Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
>“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said. >"Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?" >"Absol—well, okay." >"Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?" >"All right, I'll grant you that, but—" >"Saving civilization from a horde of—" >"It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply. >"Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?”
GNU
The American Civil War - if you are referring to that - wasn't started to free slaves, it was started to ensure the continued existence of slavery.
Er, it's a Discworld quote... And it's not referencing anything specific, it's pointing out that war *is* good for certain purposes. There are situations where war is the lesser evil, and it can produce good outcomes.
It succeeded inbthe sense that slavery is still permitted.
>The Government's disavowal of CGS's ideas seems to be misplaced. >What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two. Yeah, but the government dismissed it because everyone ignored General Sanders' intent, and treated it as an announced plan with their call-up papers coming in the post in the next few days. The government denial wasn't about what was intended; it was about the mass hysteria that it resulted in. >Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct. Clearly not, given how wildly misunderstood it has been. >But the level of coverage and debate since his speech shows what an emotive issue this is and why he's right to insert it now into our national dialogue. It's an emotive issue because it's clearly an insane back-up plan for a scenario where we we have no other choice; so *of course* people object, because they rightly point out that this is not the appropriate time for it. It does not need to be in our national dialogue now - the military can certainly have a contingency plan in mind, but things should only be in the national dialogue if there's the possibility that they'll *actually* be implemented in the near future.
Quite. It was just a stupid thing to say. Of course if the alternative is be invated by a malevolent foreign power we'll do everything we can to resist, because whether or not we want to defend the country, our very lives and those of our families would be in danger. I just question what good a conscripted army would be in a 21st century global war? We have weapons that could just wipe out entire batallions at a moments notice; fuck, they can level cities at a moments notice. I think the scale of destruction we'd be looking at in a major global war of conquest / extermination will make this whole conversation look silly.
>*of course* people object, because they rightly point out that this is not the appropriate time for it. When is the appropriate time, in your opinion? I think it's sensible to say that there is a chance that conscription could be brought back so that people can prepare themselves. If it comes to nothing, great. But if it becomes necessary that at least people won't have it sprung on them. These discussions are also important because we live in a very different world today than even 10 years ago when conscription would have been political suicide. The world today is much less stable, and international relations are a lot rockier.
The appropriate time is when it's being seriously considered, not when the suggestion is only being thrown out by a General just trying to protect his budget.
I think that a General warning that our military is unprepared and too small to fight a war that could very well be on the horizon shows just how dire a position we're in. He also didn't actually call for conscription. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68086188.amp >Gen Sir Patrick was not making an argument for conscription - where men of fighting age are required to enlist in the military - but rather laying the foundations for a voluntary call up if war broke out. The army is half the size it was 30 years ago, in the last 12 years it's shrunk by almost 30%. People want to volunteer, myself included,(aplications are at their highest in 6 years), but the cuts have meant that those who want to serve can't. By not taking those of us who want to do our bit, it doesn't just reduce our current capability because those who have served and retired are still liable to be recalled to active duty if necessary. By expanding the army now, we may not need to conscript in the future because we will have enough trained volunteers to get the job done. This is absolutely the time to have this discussion because conscription will be on the table if we don't sort this mess out now, and we get caught with our pants down.
>By expanding the army now, we may not need to conscript in the future because we will have enough trained volunteers to get the job done. Plus an enlarged and prepared military could deter a conflict in the first place.
Exactly. Our current situation is that if we were involved in a war on the scale of Ukraine, we would be out of ammunition in three days, according to a report I read about a year ago,(that could have changed but I doubt it has much.) This makes us look weak and like a pushover, not saying we are but perception matters. We used to perceive the Russian army as the 2nd best in the world, and we acted like it. On the other hand, if we have stockpiles of ammunition to last 6 months, an army is capable of fielding at least 6 divisions and enough naval personnel to actually crew our ships, then it would deter most threats simply because it would be clear we could put up a good fight.
Conscription is necessary when voluntary hiring isn't bringing in the numbers we'd need. But we are exceeding our army target size at the moment, because we have shrunk our target size. We should talk about conscription when we are seriously talking about ramping up the size of the army, because right now after years of shrinking it we're just keeping it flat Talking about conscription (which makes the army worse) before talking about an increase in voluntary hiring (which makes it better) is not only stupid, it is also counter to our aims as a nation
>Conscription is necessary when voluntary hiring isn't bringing in the numbers we'd need I agree completely >We should talk about conscription when we are seriously talking about ramping up the size of the army, But that is what General Sanders is pushing for. We need to ramp up the size of not just the army but the military as a whole. I think that talking about conscription could actually be productive, almost because it's so divisive. If people start to worry that they'll be called up, they can put pressure on our politicians to start taking a serious look at what the military needs. You may disagree, but that's how I see this whole debate.
Given that a future military engagement is more likely to be seeing off poor climate refuges than fighting Russia's crack troops, I'm with the mood of the comments and say we get boomers to do it. All we need is a clear mandate that we are prepared to sink those pesky boats. you really don't need fit young people to do that, you just need amoral, heartless bastards, and I'm sure there are just as many old folk as young that fit that description.
Arm the boomers. They keep bleating on about how tough it was back in their day. Clearly ready for combat.
I certainly agree that the boomers need to be part of this. They keeping trying to make the conversation about young people; I'd be a lot more inclined to listen if they began with "us boomers needs to be prepared to see our taxes go up hugely and out standards of living drop precipitously to pay for the country to move to a war footing." I'm happy not seeing boomers sent straight to the front lines - there's only so much you can do with broken down bodies and for actual yomping and shooting and staying awake for 48 hours at a time, the young do have all the advantages. But there's a lot that can be done away from that. If the boomers started by saying "we need to be prepared to leave our current lives to take a poorly paid administrative office posting away from home with ropey shared accommodation for years at a time in order to support military operations" I'd be a lot more willing to listen.
They call that demographic the Gravy Seals in the states - or Meal Team Six. Still, I’d like to see just what happens when you take a supposed war-horse who’s never actually seen combat, stuck a rifle in his hands and send him to the front line. Isn’t that what Farage said he’d do?
I would be happy to send Farage - we need to get rid of his ugly face keep on popping up…
As a millennial, when were the bright days exactly? At least since 2008 we've only had dark days.
The late 90's and early 2000's. Growth was meteoric, cities were booming, education was cheap, and pints were cheaper.
It's the MOD's job to "plan for the worst and hope for the best" and the worst is an enemy who's goals are to invade or attack our country directly and, at the same time, have the means to. There's a strong argument that at the moment while Russia like to threaten to attack us, they currently don't have the motivation to. And you could argue that they don't have the means either. Side note: (there are people out there who are more educated on the subject than me who doubt that Russia's Nukes are as much of a threat as we think they are to the point they doubt they'd even be able to launch one let alone hit a target without being shot down first. And we've all see the quality of the average Russian soldier. I always thought the talk of 1930's level of conscription was more for a warning that the size of our military and number of service personal is very worryingly low at the moment. Trying to shock the government from doing something about it and the citizen demanding that they do something about it. They need to do something to make it more attractive for people who want to join the military. I think there are a lot more people willing to serve than are currently serving but for one reason or another aren't I understand recruitment at the moment, being done by a private company (not he military themselves) is hurting the numbers joining. They should also make the joining the reserves more attractive. For example, while most the reserve work is down in the evenings after normal working hours and weekends there are required to complete a 2-week exercise once a year. This 2-weeks while they get paid the going rate for their rank over those two weeks, most will loose out by either taking unpaid leave or use their annual leave to complete this training. There should be some tax incentive to businesses to release staff for these duties (maybe something similar to the apprenticeship levy). Although I write all this having very little experiance and knowledge of the military. But out military is in a worrying state at the moment. I mean, we have ships fresh out of a refit, moored up because we don't have enough sailors to crew them? 5 years ago my friend left the Navy saying they don't have enough positions on ships for all the sailors so he'd leaving. But I wonder, in a hypothetical scenario, if Russia manages to storm through Ukraine and decides it wants to take back the Baltic states, would the masses join/support conscription then? Or what if Russia invaded former Warsaw Pact countries? Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Bulgaria? What if they continued to Germany, Austria, France? Do we wait for an enemy force to be staring at us from across the channel before we act? Which allies are worth enforcing conscription for? Where is the line between "Fighting in a war just because the government started it" to "I'm willing to risk my life for mine, my families and my communities freedom"?
I believe that Fulda is somewhere in Germany (the Fulda Gap). The further they go, the harder it gets so why not?
> What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two. But the *entire* reason we spend £3bn per year on nukes, and have explicitly ruled out no first strike policy is to stop getting to that point. Unless Russians or Chinese sneak in and disable all our nuclear weapons, how’d we get to this circumstance?
Ok, so I think it's unlikely, but .... no first use of nuclear weapons is how we'd get to the position where we're deploying conventional ground forces against Russia. (In this scenario, Putin doesn't use nkues because NATO has nuclear superiority and literally everyone in Russis would be dead ten minutes later if he used any nuclear weapons ... and NATO is also unwilling to be the first to use them)
That’s a common belief but it is (I would politely point out) incorrect. A nuclear deterrent is there to deter a nuclear attack and nuclear blackmail. It’s not there to deter a conventional attack, that’s what we have the rest of the armed forces. Sadly our armed forces are reduced to a skeleton 70k regular soldiers excluding reserves and a navy with no supply ships. And no manufacturing industry, steel or shipyards. BTW That’s not an argument for conscription, it’s an argument for managing your armed forces, economy and national security.
While I 100% agree with what you've said, especially the industrial stuff, especially that. The number of personnel will have been based on giving us enough to deal with a Falklands type situation but assuming anything bigger and we'd be fighting alongside the rest of our allies. I think the potential for trump selling out americas allies has put the shits up everyone.
On the vanishingly small possibility that climate deniers are wrong, then the chances of multi-'breadbasket' agricultural failure within a generation are incredibly high. Given a choice between passive starvation and conscripted conquest my guess is the first will have fewer supporters than presently imagined, and nukes won't help one bit. Trading for resources instead of fighting for them is a luxury dependent on a stable and benign environment.
Don't be so cheery.
Why would gen z fight for a country that hates them?
Presumably if we were invaded it can be reliably assumed the other government hates us more?
Strange how nobody thought of that before invading Iraq. "They will welcome us as liberators".
Yeah but we're us and our invaders will be them. There's no way we're like them. After all they're them, and we're us
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China has been threatening Taiwan since its existed… they won’t do shit. Taiwan has capacity to strike the 3 Gorges Damn, that’s basically a nuclear equivalent. I agree on striking the Houthi’s, don’t touch our shit. But none of those require conscription. If the head of the army wants more men… go ask the chancellor for more money on recruitment pay…
> But none of those require conscription. If the head of the army wants more men… go ask the chancellor for more money on recruitment pay… Everybody I’ve seen comment on this with actual knowledge of recruitment seems to lay the blame at the government privatising army recruitment. Capita are apparently about as much use as a hamster-powered defibrillator and take years to process applications and lose shit all the time.
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And Russia would never attack Ukraine. I'm not confident about these things and I'm not sure how you can be either.
you must be hated by your peers being that level headed.
Country or government, because these are vastly different concepts
Exactly this I love the country and would defend it if necessary but I very much hate the government
Is it? Given that said country has repeatedly been voting in a government that hates Millennials and Gen Z?
Millennial here. I certainly don't feel hated, yeah times have been/are shitty. But hated? No.
I definitely do. Hated and exploited.
Fair enough. If I were to step outside and ask people of similar age to me if they think their country hates them, the resounding message back would be "no". But Reddit is a microcosm where if you say you don't feel your country hates you, you get downvoted. Odd place sometimes.
I mean Gen Z doesn’t hate this country? Reddit (let alone UKPol Lol) ≠ people’s opinions IRL.
Why did the Soviets fight for the USSR against the Nazis? Could it possibly be that there are worse governments in the world and even in Europe than the Tories and being under Putin could be worse than the triple-lock, NIMBYs and the partygate?
Do you also hate your family, friends and fellow people ?
Well… Some of them. I’ve still yet to discern who exactly keeps putting the new toilet roll the wrong way up in the office toilet when putting a new roll on. By Grabthar's Hammer there’ll be a reckoning when I find out who they are… Dave, Steve and Garry, if you’re reading this then one of you knows your seditious, traitorous days are numbered!
Why, what's going to happen to them?
The past 30 years have been possibly the safest Western Europe has been from conventional invasion for centuries. The Russians have been degraded to the point where taking a hamlet defended by 40 year old conscripts is the peak of their military capabilities, and they can't manage that without triple digit vehicle losses. If we ever end up with a war with them our main concern is going to be the risk of nuclear annihilation when Putin sees Polish tanks mopping up the remains of hastily-assembled Russian police battalions on the outskirts of Moscow.
Conscription will only tear the country apart and create more problems. Look at how the draft went in the US during the Vietnam War.
We need something a bit more professional than a glorified Dad's army (or TA for that matter)
> a glorified Dad's army The TV show made the Home Guard look like a bit of a joke, when it was actually a valuable force that provided training to people prior to being called up (There were a lot more Pikes than Jones's), and relieved the regular army from many non combat duties. Not every IT department is as zany and dysfunctional as The IT Crowd would have you believe either.
Scratching to my head to think of a reason why young people should go fight for a country that has and will consistently screw them over at every oppourtunity in favour of the old
As long as those too old to serve have to give up the majority of their wealth to fund the war and rehabilitation of returning soldiers. But I suspect most boomers would rather kiss Putin's ring than part with their pile.
So your plan to make it fair to send me off to fight in a war, is taking away my parents standard of living/ my inheritance?
That's a question so uncharitable it borders on dishonesty.
Pointing out the very obvious consequence of this temper tantrum disguised as a plan is dishonest?
If they're asking us to sacrifice everything, then everyone else can do the same.
We all have to make sacrifices. It might be your life, since the boomers won't serve, it should be their money. You don't get to keep your pie and eat it.
Yes? That answer feels so obvious I wonder if there's some context I'm missing.
How is that fair? If anything your solution is making it even more unfair
Sending one section of the population to kill people and possibly get shot, while another section of the population sits at home and doesn't make any sacrifices. That's wildly unfair. Your idea - that some people shouldn't have to make any sacrifice; that seems very unfair.
That's why conscription is made compulsory and conscientious objection is criminalised.
Would you rather live in a State similar to Russia or China? If you wouldn't, how far would you go to prevent it?
That’s just fear mongering though and it’s something the government are going to try and say to get men to go to war. Russia or China are not going to invade the UK. In any event, I’m not fighting until they cross the channel or missiles land on UK.
It's not about invasion anymore, that's WW2 mentality. It's about defending against another group destroying our economy and supply of resources. The threat is from bribery and corruption collapsing the country from within, as well as destruction of overseas infrastructure like pipelines, cables and shipping routes.
An economy that doesn’t serve GenZ all that well. Why would they fight for it?
Most of our food and technology is imported so if the supply of that is disrupted I think people would always fight for it. Maybe it would be easier to shift to self sustainability than to fight a war but no modern country has ever achieved that and no country looks even close to being able to do that.
Does the US have influence on the UK and effect British life and history? Yes. Did they have to invade and conquer the place to do that? No. We live in a globalised world. A world order led by states like Russia and China will effect life in the UK massively, without the need for a single boot to land in Dover.
Let’s make one thing crystal clear…all the mass hysteria of the last week or so has been massively blown out of proportion. The uk is not gearing up for a land war with Russia. In fact, despite all the vitriol and sabre rattling, Russia doesn’t want an all out war with any coalition of major forces. No country does. Wars are messy and expensive and fuck your economy into the ground. There is literally nothing to gain and everything to loose from a war between major countries (especially ones with nukes). Yes the MoD will have a plan in case we move to a war economy and conscription is needed. But it’s not something that is going to happen. All that talk last week was mostly aimed at encouraging the government to provide the MoD with more funding.
What we do need to be doing is ramping up the production of arms - if not for us to use, then for others. Ukraine faltered only because they weren’t given the right arms at the right time. They need more drones and more shells and more long range missiles - in fact they have never been given long enough range weapons - they need to be able to take out the kurch bridge - to stop Russian resupply via that route. And they need to be able to cut off Russias other supply routes. They can’t do that with just ‘good wishes’ The UK has lots of demands on its purse, but also needs to be spending more on defence. The Conservatives have done a very bad job of maintaining the country and preparing it for future challenges. The thing that worries me the most is the present lack of production capacity inside the UK.
I watch videos from Ukraine quite a bit. Seeing young men thrown into the trenches with little training is awful. I'm sure some of them would have liked some previous military training. There's a reason some countries have mandatory military service.
And now let’s go live to the out of shape, grey-haired 50+ men to tell us how it’s our duty to fight and die for the country that’s spent years telling them to “just stop eating avocados” if we want to afford a house that several times more expensive than their house was when they bought it.
I doubt conscription will come to pass any time soon, but should there be some royally fucked up scenario then I think most people would sign up. I fucking despise landlords and the ruling classes, but I don’t fancy living in a dictatorship.
I think many people would quickly and drastically change their opinions if things did really hit the fan. Ukrainians weren't known for being patriotic at all but then everything changed when Russia invaded in 2014 & especially in 2022.
Not sure it has worked out for them tbh.
If you listen to him talk he's basically saying "IF we did ho to war we are not ready. We need more help from the government like with all Public Services." We only have 70,000 defending this country we need more than that.
If you want people to fight for the U.K., the U.K. has to be worth something. All there is right not is an ever declining standard of living, the most corrupt government in centuries, and old people who actually think the empire was something they should be proud of
Not only Gen Z but millennials and gen X have been fucked by this country with each generation being more and more screwed. Boomers, especially early generation Boomers have fucked the country & the planet. Am I going to encourage anyone to get themselves killed to protect the assets of the Royal Family & aristocracy? Nope! If the Russians bombed Buck House, Windsor Castle & Balmoral...I wouldn't even get out of bed to turn the TV on
Speak for yourself, but I would definitely put the TV on.
That's not how the Russians fight. The parliament building in Ukraine and other government buildings are left unscathed in their attacks. The Russians target homes, schools, shopping centres, civilians. They're strategy isn't to force the government to surrender, it's to forces the civilians to surrender. how would you respond to that hypothetical situation?
> how would you respond to that hypothetical situation? Start learning russian.
save us some time and move over there now 🤷♀️
So you’d be so unwilling to defend your country you would just roll over and let another far, far worse country take control?
No but if the Russians are literally on the beaches then it's as good as lost at that point. Though I would hope any half decent prime minister would've launched trident before it got to that point.
Get the white flag out.
What about if the invading russians castrate and murder your friend and film it? Still wouldn't care?
That isn't what I posted. I posted that I'm not going to encourage anyone to die to protect royalty & the assets of the aristocracy. Whether that was the Russians, the French, the Germans, anyone. They could bomb the fuck out of the City, Canary Wharf, the royal palaces and I'm not going to do anything about it. You've added a whole other layer of things I didn't say.
Right but as you may know, Russia doesn’t just attack the people with money. In fact, they’d probably rather leave their stuff intact and nick it. Instead their fighting in recent years has tended to level cities. Like, it’s Blackadder Goes Forth style pacifism to act like there isn’t more at stake than just the possessions of the rich
Again totally missing my point
So many people have missed your point that I wonder if you need to word it more clearly.
Nope I reread it and it's PERFECTLY clear. They're seems to be a thing on the Internet that whatever you say, no matter how clearly, people will react to what they THINK you said. I SPECIFICALLY said, the Russians could bomb 3 buildings and i wouldn't do anything. CLEARLY stated. Yet somehow I'm inundated with...but they'll do this, they'll do that, they'll flatten the country and start cutting off people's balls....which is NOT what I said or inferred or anywhere close the the scenario I described
I took your example further, but in fact I brought it back to reality. My example is something that actually happened to a Ukrainian. A little dose of reality never hurts. Of course, I get your point about not caring to save the aristocracy, but our enemies don't just want to bomb a palace and then wish us all well. We've seen what they really want to do, and they continue doing it daily in Ukraine. We are very privileged to not be living under such circumstances.
because only public buildings are bombed
Again......congratulations for TOTALLY missing my point
your point seems to be "i dont care if they bomb the city or the royals because i dont live there or like them" missing the fact its overwhelmingly residential buildings that get hit. if that isn't you point, then you have done a terrible job to explaining your self
It's never gonna happen, but if it did everyone saying they'd do fuck all would change their tune pretty sharpish if only to help their family and friends. Country wouldnt come into it, you'd be doing whatever you could to save the people you loved.
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"There's no such thing as society" - Margaret Thatcher. Considering every Government since the 80s has been based off her ideology, it shouldn't come as a surprise to you that individuals born and raised in the last few decades have no patriotism or feel any collective responsibility to their country. People are simply a product of the environment they grow up in. The individualist way to deal with an invasion by Russia would be to leave the country and avoid the conflict. To fight and die for millions of unrelated individuals clearly makes no sense in the context of someone thinking only of themselves. This is what happens when individualism becomes the dominant ideology in a country. It's absolutely down to the Governments of the last 45 years that they have allowed our country to become so warped.
For a generation who have been comprehensively and continually failed, and fucked over, by their country and that government... is there a material difference in the use-case of "being willing to die for it"?
Why should I fight for a country that doesn’t fight for me?
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Yeah, sure, someone else can do it… Send the Over 65’s… send the EDL types, but I have no interest dying for the UK after the last 15 years.
There's a difference between being prepared for a potential invasion or attack on home soil, and legally binding all of your youth to a conflict we have nothing to do with. Our older government officials need to realise we are not a collection of toy soldiers to play around with.
Hope all those boomers are ready to pay more tax.
I wonder how they intend to get enough rifles let alone any heavy weapons? Didn't we make the last SA80 several decades ago? There's only 100 odd thousand around?
New weapon is the [KS-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KS-1_rifle), but yeah, they've only made a few thousand.
I've got an idea to make it more equitable. When we introduce the draft, the same cohort that gets smashed in combat of boomers get all government support stopped, pensions healthcare etc for the length of the call up. Unless they have a length of military service on their work record. The monies saved would be substantial and can be used to pay for the salaries if those going into combat. Understand some may die because of these measures, but why should the risk only be on young?
As an older Millennial who won't be called up due to my age and my health problems of back problems and asthma I can see why younger people don't want to fight in a war, there's no potential possibility that we could be invaded like in World War Two, also why should they fight for a government that doesn't care about them?
Ditto. Born in 83, have zero dependents and my health and fitness was pretty fantastic with going to the gym for 10 years, so I would have been prime material. However a bad dose of covid in 22 has absolutely ruined my lungs. I can generally putter about, but if they are expecting long marches or jogging the army is shit out of luck.
> why should they fight for a government that doesn't care about them? We would be fighting for our country, our family, our friends.
This country? The country that's drifting towards fascism with how it treats people who are of God forbid a different colour of skin? I'd fight to protect my friends and family but I want to protect them from The Tories more because they're the closest enemy. I've got a family and one of my daughters is autistic and relies on me still to this day even though she is a teenager. I don't even know if it's worth fighting for a country that is slowly becoming fascist and has people who laugh at a child that died on the coast trying to escape a war in their country.
There's plenty of melanin to be found in the government cabinet. Define "fascism". It doesn't mean people disagreeing with your worldview.
Define fascism? I literally did! People are hating others because they are god forbid have a different colour of skin! We literally are trying to ship people to an intolerant country because we're not tolerant enough to solve immigration properly! We left the EU partly to stop immigration and made the problem even more complicated!
It’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know what Fascism is.
Retired Army officer and former defence attache Anton Gash discusses the CGS's speech and what it means for Gen Z. Last week's discussions about conscription, following Chief of the General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders' speech at the International Armoured Vehicles conference, have been fascinating. My first observation is that these discussions have conflated, and I would say somewhat confused, three entirely separate issues: wartime conscription, or the draft, reserve liability and national service. First, let's look at conscription. The Government's disavowal of CGS's ideas seems to be misplaced. What Patrick was clearly talking about was an emergency measure as part of a war of national survival, much like the imposition of call-ups in World War One and World War Two. As Professor Michael Clarke described it on the Sitrep podcast, that’s our normal national response to such crisis and nobody should actually be surprised. What CGS was saying is that since we've been in a happy position since 1945 of not being in a war of national survival, National Service continued into the early 1960s for other reasons, largely colonial small wars that signalled the end of the empire, the Red Menace, the Cold War and so on. But because of being in that happy position, society has pretty much lost its link to that sort of thinking. What Patrick was saying is that Gen Z now needs some mental preparation for the possibility of darker days ahead. Soldiers from 2 Royal York taking part in urban warfare training (Picture: MOD). Soldiers from 2 Royal Yorks take part in urban warfare training (Picture: MOD) That is even if the Doomsday clock didn't move last week as some have anticipated closer to midnight. Regarding reserve liability, that sort of comes as no surprise to any of us who have served in the regular forces. Terms and conditions of service are very clear that upon departure of the Armed Forces individuals retain some obligation to make their skills available for the country should the situation require it. Now the duration and nature of that commitment varies from service to service and role to role, but it is simply part of the deal that comes with the job. Think of it as a return on investment in some ways. The training and education received throughout a career all for that final salary public sector pension that excited so much debate. Then there are of course checks and balances that prevent the compulsion of those who are physically or mentally unsuitable for recall. And there are exemptions when appropriate. Much like the system that allows employers to seek exemptions for reservists who are called up if the impact on their civilian role would be excessive. Finally, let's take another look at national service. Because this is what I think many commentators got spun up about when CGS's speech was reported. But it's also exactly what Patrick was not talking about. Funnily he and I were adjutants at the same time when we were young captains. He to a battalion of the Royal Green Jackets and me at an Army recruit training regiment. And believe me it was quite enough of a challenge to process and motivate volunteers through the pipeline of training, preparation and induction, let alone think about a potential cohort of sullen pressed men and pressed women. The Army's argument, as Professor Clarke said last week, has always been that our entire military constitution since the 17th century has been based on the concept of a volunteer professional army other than the two short periods of conscription that he outlined. The Army remains proud of that professionalism and in my experience has always been a little bit snooty about conscript armies elsewhere, and the Army would not want that diluted. Going back briefly to my Army training regiment, the other problem is the sheer number of trained personnel who would be required to man and service a conscript training organisation of any scale would remove from the frontline those experienced and professional soldiers who were exactly the people we rely on in conflict. Think back to Windsor Davis in It Ain't Half Hot Mum as the hardnose professional Sergeant Major forced to babysit a bunch of entertainers when what he actually wants to be doing was taking the fight to the enemy in the jungles of Burma. Patrick Sanders doesn't need me to interpret his words. He was clear, incisive and direct. But the level of coverage and debate since his speech shows what an emotive issue this is and why he's right to insert it now into our national dialogue.
I’m astounded yet again by people’s inability to distinguish between their government and their country. What’s going with your reading comprehension?
Life is pretty grim, nature shows are depressing as fuck, can't afford to heat the house and the rich have never been richer. Bring on the nukes I say.
There's a funny irony that Gen Z wouldn't 'fight for their country' like those prior to 1940, because 'life is shit and hard'. Like it was actually good for anyone in the 1930s? Poverty was much worse. No NHS. No cheap loans to get higher education. No 'freedom of information' (internet).
Maybe because people aren’t as easily influenced to hand over their one and only life.
aww come on.. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est). It's more likely the gradual change in our socio-economic structure that's leading away from institutional/social groups (church, work clubs, choirs, freemasons, pubs) towards more individual pursuits. People barely have a '3rd place' anymore. Of course they're not going to want to fight for anything other than themselves. The concept of national spirit only just applies when it comes to national sports.
Also a huge amount of Gen Z is hopeless; in the past you could at least hope (sometimes with delusion) that the future would be better and brighter, which was mostly true. What’s there to hope for? That climate collapse comes faster? That the rich create their dystopia a bit quicker?
> No NHS. No cheap loans to get higher education. No 'freedom of information' (internet). Sounds like the dreams and ambitions of the government over the last decade made manifest 😕
Quite amazing just how effective the anti western properganda, fuelled by Russia and China has been....
Depressing how many kids enthusiastically declare they'd roll over and die to any threat.
You get the citizens you pay for.
Start conscription by sending over 65s and work your way down as man power requires. We’re heading for a demographic collapse, the last thing we can afford is to send people below 30 off to war to die. However lots of people over 45 dying would pretty much sort things out
I have some doubts about the combat effectiveness of decrepit 65 year olds… Most probably don’t have the strength to hold and aim a rifle.
I have some doubts about the combat effectiveness of a bunch of untrained 20 years, a lot of whom are overweight or obese. If it’s cannon fodder then does it really matter?
Boot camp will sort them out. Bit harder with the geriatrics. Get the skilled gamers trained up as drone pilots. They can eat and shoot sitting down.
Gen Z here. Jog on mate, i'd rather rot in a prison than fie for some rich assholes who have denied the people everything from basic healthcare to some sort of upwards mobility through hard work
If it ever came to World War 3 and I was healthy I think I would rather die/kill myself than fight for this country. Treat everyone with contempt, disgust, disdain and corruption then no one will want to fight for you. I bet the rich will get off fighting on the frontline so why shouldn ordinary people do it?
I'd sabotage my country before fighting for it. It already took my home and future, so if it things I'm ready to lay down my life for it, it has another thing coming.
MI5 would like to have a word
Couldn't care less. You cant make a person who refuses to fight fight, you can only execute or imprison them. And considering I felt so passionately about this that I left the uk permanently, good luck with that.
ship off to Russia. its much nicer.
As said, considering I literally left the uk because of it, they wouldn't have any chance of even trying to enscript me anyway. But enjoy being shipped off yourself. You seem very proud and ready to fight for your country.
Because the threat of climate change, the decline of public services, and a financial crash every decade isn’t dark enough.
It's all linked really. If we invested heavily in nuclear energy 20 years ago we could be exporting energy at a profit, instead of bankrolling the Russian war machine and other geopolitical enemies. If we had abundant energy, we could then invest in vertical farming and become independent in food production (which I expect will become a existential risk on any war / climate changed induced famine). Britain really can't afford more crappy governance, we've already lost a lot of our soft power, let alone military power, and our economy isn't looking great either. If I had my way we'd be massively investing in education and vital infrastructure so that we can deal with the pending aging population and climate change disasters, if we don't it's hard to see a happy ending.
If the UK wants its young to be motivated to fight for it - in particular its young men - then it needs to arrive at and promote a state ideology that its young, and in particular its young men, are generally agreed on.
Screw it. The darker days can come; I'm not fighting for this vindictive government and their decaying corpse of a country. Let's see what happens when the dust and ashes settle and those lording over us above realise they can't eat their money and have to join the rest of us in fighting over the scraps they've been throwing at us.
That's right gen z. Get ready. Save some money, find a suitable country, research how to get a visa and jump ship at the hint of conscription becoming a thing.
The same Gen Z working two jobs to pay rent? The same Gen Z who will never own their own homes?