Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.

It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.

> universal conscription

No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor

Look at it more like part of the education system.

Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.

And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.

I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011. Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.

Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.

"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".

You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

Yes, but most 1st world nations have all-volunteer armies, not conscription.

> No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor

And involuntary restrictions of basic freedoms like what and when to eat and where and when to sleep.

AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.

If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.

But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.

All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.

Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.

Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.

Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.

Did you take two years of your life to go into the military in your early 20s?

Wasn’t that Mao’s idea of forcing city kids to the countryside to make them better party members?

Four years.

Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?

There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US

We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.

> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?

I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.

Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.