Wednesday 29 April 2020

Why National Service is a fucking stupid idea and you should stop promoting it

Discipline. A sense of purpose. A sense of self worth. Developing a worth ethic. Fostering a greater national and community spirit. And so the list goes on.

These are just a collection of some the tired old shite cliches that have been trotted out in recent days since the spectre of bringing back National Service has risen once again from its grave, this time in a report commissioned by the MoD. Allegedly this will boost public understanding of defence, which given the frequently shambolic state of the MoD is probably something it should be actively trying to avoid, not promote.

In essence the MoD appears to be trying to compensate for its complete and utter fucking inability to communicate its message effectively to the public by simply forcing young people to come and serve with them, eschewing the difficult process of honest self-reflection, understanding, and making the hard choices needed to evolve, in favour of just shitting on someone elses doorstep and hoping that will solve the problem.

So before we get any deeper into the other arguments, let's be clear that this is the real story here. This is a manifest form of organisational cowardice, an utter point-blank refusal to accept its failings, and demonstrates a complete lack of creativity and innovation. Forget about the rights and wrongs of National Service, this is simply yet another demonstration of the parlous state of the MoD as a corporate body. If it were a private company it would have collapsed in a heap many, many years ago. 

But onwards and upwards we go. Let's talk freedom.

It would be a bizarre position for service chiefs to find themselves in if, on some remembrance day in the future, they found themselves standing at a podium exhorting the sacrifice of fallen service personnel to defend our freedom, only to then find themselves on a different podium the next day defending the rationale behind enforcing the latest cohort of "yoof" to give up said freedom "for their own good...."

Those last four words are quite terrifying, as they should be to anyone who values our modern freedoms. At the core of modern conscription - for let's not beat around the bush any longer and call it what it actually is - appears to be this maternal/paternal desire to do good, blinded by the quite staggering level of arrogance that always accompanies such aims. "They don't know what's best for them these bloody kids. But I do. So here is my one size fits all plan to hopefully turn kids into my concept of what a young person should be."

There is a quintessential fear at the heart of thinking like this, an inability to comprehend that not everyone is like you, thinks like you, behaves like you, and nor do they wish to, or would it even be desirable in a free society. And most frightening of all; the realisation that maybe you're not all that? 

Well guess what? Depriving young people of their freedom and trying to hold yourself up as some paragon to aspire to is not going to change that. It's not going to make it any better, so best to come to terms with that early and save yourself a lot of hassle and sleepness nights.

Young people have a myriad of paths available to them in the modern age. Some will go on to become writers. Some will become actors. Some will enter medicine, some law, some finance. Some will design video games, or new smartphone apps. And yes, some will end up in jail, or on the dole, or flitting from minimum wage job to minimum wage job. 

As such you can't just lump all these people into one group and cast your authoritarian eye over them and decide that they all need to follow the same path. "Young people these days," is a trite, meaningless phrase used to absolve oneself (for one is in posh mode) of having to do any kind of deep and complex critical thinking. Easier to just label all of them as a homogenous generation of good for nothings, as I'm sure our parents labelled us when we were younger, and their parents labelled them. 

Thus each year you would deprive an entire class of young school leavers (because you simply cannot have conscription for the few, not unless you enjoy continuously quelling riots) of their most basic of human traits: their individuality. You would be lumping the kid from a council estate made good, who earned a place at a good school and worked hard for his or her grades to get the opportunity to go to a good university, in with the kids who fell into a bad crowd and fell otherwise by the way side.

It is fundamentally a mindset in opposition to what modern Britain is built on; the dual concepts of aspiration and opportunity. You would consign every young person - no matter how naturally talented or how hard working - to the same sentence of state servitude "for their own good", irrespective of whether or not they actually require the medicine you propose will cure all their alleged ills, simply because you're an intellectually lazy cunt. 

Or in the case of the MoD, massively incompetent at communication on an organisation wide scale. But let's move on to some of the practical issues.

For a start, the MoD can't even adequately house all of the personnel it currently has in accomodation that meets certain minimum criteria for being fit for human habitation. That is partly why I'm surprised the MoD would support the idea of conscription, because if the parlous manner in which it looks after some of its personnel became more widespread knowledge it would end up having to answer some serious questions.

So let's assume it can find housing for all these fresh young recruits, the question then becomes what does it actually do with them? 

If we're going for a French style system, which has some utterly bizarre characteristics more at home with a country like North Korea than a western democracy, then what are the military supposed to do with the recruits for four weeks? They can't train them, not in that short period of time. They can't let them loose on ranges. So drill? Mow the lawns? Stand around all day watching crew fix an engine? How is any of this supposed to develop a sense of purpose or a work ethic?

If we're going full blown, old school conscription, then I hate to be the one to point it out but modern warfare is a long way removed from the Napoleonic era. One of the major issues conscript based armies have been having is that it's actually quite expensive to train modern soldiers, sailors and airmen, and if you only have them for say two years that investment begins to look rather silly once you realise that some will have as little as 12 months remaining on their service terms by the time you've finished training them up.

The MoD has a myriad of problems to deal with. The last thing it needs now is to annually have a large cohort of reluctant warm bodies dumped on it that it has no space for, little use for, and little time and resources to bring them up to a usable state. In small countries, where manpower is at an absolute premium, then conscription can make sense, especially when the alternative is to have virtually no defence capability what so ever. 

But that argument doesn't really apply in the UK, at least not under current circumstances. And if circumstances happen to change then that's one thing, but at least then let's be realistic and clear in explaining the purpose of conscription, not trying to fob people off with a stack of bullshit about how really they're the ones who will benefit, the lucky souls.

And if you're really that concerned about the welfare of the younger generations then why not put your mind to something a little more productive? Rather than pissing money up the wall on some ridiculous, idealised vision about what National Service was or could be, why not use the money instead for greater opportunities for training and education that might actually be of some benefit?

Worried that young people lack a work ethic? Then turn to schools, and help connect them better with local charities and other organisations that can help give young people opportunities to earn experience and develop said work ethic. Charities are normally crying out for more help, and they can offer much greater flexibility than I suspect the armed forces could provide.

Want to give young people a sense of purpose? Then how about instead of dumping them on the forces and forgetting about them, you make more funding available for proper skills training. Give young people who might slip through the academic cracks better options to learn a trade and do an apprenticeship, something that combines work ethic building with the opportunity for a solid earning, life long career path, one that also helps develop a sense of pride in the quality of one's handy work.

For those worried that young people lack "community spirit" how about you get off your arse first and show them how it works then? I find this particular desire to see other people made to do unpaid work for abstract reasons which of course naturally absolve yourself from having to partake in it to be particularly odd and not a little selfish. 

For those worried about "resilience", that newest of buzz words that every bastard currently has on their lips and will no doubt be a feature of every government document for the next couple of years, but nobody really seems to be able to elucidate, might I suggest that relying on an army of "four weekers" with little training is probably not the best solution to whatever problem it is you think they're going to solve.

Perhaps instead you could start by defining the problem you wish to solve more clearly. Undoubtedly at this stage you'll realise that a gaggle of 18-25 year olds in military uniforms with first aid badges is probably not the answer, and then you can start planning how to better resolve the issue with proper funding and a proper plan.

Unless of course your motives are very different and you don't actually care about opportunities for young people, or treating them as individuals with different ambitions and personalities and skill sets, which in itself requires hard work and effort to create more tailored packages, because you're too fucking busy patting yourself on the back about what a great idea you've had promoting your ideological, catch all safe space of "National Service!"

And if you work for the MoD and per chance you happen to be reading this thinking "bUt wHAt AbOut pUbLiC UNdErsTaNdinG of DeFeNCe?", might I suggest that you first remove your head from your arse and then take a long, hard look at your miserable organisation.

If the public doesn't understand defence, that's not their fault. There are something on the order of more than 66 million people living in this country. Are you really expecting me to believe that the problem is that they just don't understand your genius?  Or, or, alternative take, maybe you're just absolutely piss poor at communicating with them and need to find a better way to talk to and engage with the non-military population?

Finally, for those who want to instill a proper sense of national pride in our young people, allow me to disabuse you of your fucking nonsensical notion that making kids get up every morning and recite the national anthem is going to make that happen. It is likely to do the opposite.

You can't just make people be proud of something because you say so. Respect is earned. If you want young people to be proud of Britain, then help make a Britain they can be proud of. You have to show them why, teach them about the positives. How about instead of calling for young people to volunteer in the community, you yourself volunteer to go into a school or a youth club to give a talk about what makes you proud of Britain?

Instead of sending kids to a barracks to make them clean loos and cut grass for a month, as if this will spontaneously cause them to well up in tears with national pride, why not arrange for service people - current and former - to go and visit schools to talk to an assembly about what they do and why they're proud to do it?

Forgive me for my rant, but I've had just about as much as I can take of listening to dickheads endlessly trot this putrid national service shit out every few years. Everyone seems to think the problem between society, nation and "da yoof" is all the fault of the latter, yet nobody is prepared to take any ownership or responsbility on behalf of the nation to the younger generations in turn.

Instead of trying to force young people to match your world view, how about you try explaining some of the benefits of it, if it is indeed so great? If we want kids to be proud of Great Britain then it is encumbent upon us to make the effort to show them what makes Britain great, not the other way around.

Just a thought.

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