Asklemmy

I am conflicted.

On the one hand, conscription is essentially forced labour. Some countries take that concept even further and allow the potential conscripts to choose between military service and straight-up forced labour e.g. in social jobs like emergency services or care jobs. Im my home country this goes so far that some parts of the social system wouldn't work without this system.

This is also an equality issue, since almost all counties only apply something like that to young men and not women, even though women are totally capable for that kind of work as well.

On the other hand, if a country has a military that is primarily based on carreer soldiers, it becomes much easier for an emerging dictatorship to order these soldiers to e.g. shoot at protesters. A military based on mostly ordinary people who were conscripted as young men and stay trained using a militia system (like e.g. the Swiss does) is imho much more stable against e.g. military coups.

But it is a significant and non-voluntary investment.

In the Swiss, for example, every man has to spend ~2% of their work life in the military, which can be directly equated to a ~1% loss in GDP, just for mandatory military service.

In Israel, men have to serve for a minimum of 2 years and 8 months, while women have to serve 2 years, which roughly equates to a loss of ~5% GDP.

Conscription doesn't make a military cheaper of stronger compared to a complete volunteer/carreer army.

(Take these back-of-the-napkin calculations with a lot of salt, they are just there to show a rough dimension.)

So yeah, forced labour and lots of involuntary time investment of a significant portion of the population vs higher resistance against coups.