this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
120 points (91.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43898 readers
1175 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Do you think if the period demand served was shorter (6 months to a year) and it was equal regardless of gender that would be much better?
I feel like that time in a social program wouldn't be too off putting for someone's goals in life and I imagine if someone were to go the military route instead most of that time would be eaten up by basic and trade training.
Over here (Austria) it's 6 months for military or 9 months for social. The people in the social program are actually contributing labor and their work is really important.
The people going into military spend most of their time in training. While there they can learn some skills free of charge, e.g. they can do their driver's license or the truck driver's license or get some medical training, stuff like that. So it's not completely wasted time for the individual, but almost completely. They serve mostly a political/ideological purpose.
One thing to note here regarding Austria's military service that will not apply to other countries: Our military is total and utter crap when it comes to combat. Like, they aren't even pretending that they could defend the country.
Instead, the biggest part of the real usage of the military is in disaster mitigation/recovery. So for example, currently there are some severe floods in southern Austria and some villages are actually completely cut off by the floods. So the military is there to first airdrop supplies, then they built a temporary ferry service and now they are building a new road through the muddy forest. Recruits doing their mandatory service are used for these purposes. So even from a social aspect, they aren't completely useless either.
The question is whether it is fair to force people to do that, and also if they wouldn't force them, who else would do it? That's not really the point of conscription at all, but it's a major side effect over here.
If we have a system like that, it should totally be equal regardless of gender.
But if we should have a system like that, I cannot answer that.