The one policy conservatives across the world say will fix men: mandatory military service

In Hillbilly Elegy, the Ohio senator and Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance recounts the time he spent in the US Marine Corps. As a public affairs marine, Vance avoided the pressures of combat during the Iraq war, tasked instead with escorting the media through war zones, embedding himself with combat units to diarize their routines, and snapping photographs. He also liaised with local Iraqi residents, played soccer with school children, and handed out candy, as a show of good will on behalf of an occupying military force. On one occasion, Vance gave a tiny pencil eraser to a child, who received the bauble as if it were some great gift. “His face briefly lit up with joy,” Vance writes, “holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph.”

In Vance’s recounting, that moment constituted something close to an epiphany: a stark lesson in humility, gratefulness and the ability to find profound joy in a pencil eraser. Among more routine lessons (about hard work, grit, respect etc) it was one of Vance’s great takeaways from his military service.

Now he, and other American conservatives, are eager to share – or enforce – such a rare, character-defining privilege. Vance is among a cohort of politicians around the world engaging with the idea of a return to mandatory national service. The senator recently expressed enthusiasm for national service, claiming that it was a way for young Americans to get some “some skin in the game”. (Vance’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Elsewhere in the Capitol, the Republican senator Lindsay Graham likewise suggested that compulsory military service was a reasonable option for addressing shortfalls in military recruitment. For his part, Trump himself – who managed to dodge and defer being drafted into the Vietnam war five times – has explicitly rejected, via a post on his own Truth Social website, the idea that he will call for any sort of mandatory military service. Joe Biden also received deferments from the draft, on the basis of his asthma.

But could compulsory military service help address the ongoing loneliness “epidemic” and the crisis of alienation facing men and boys? Or is it just another desperate, cynical, nostalgic political gimmick?

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has outlined measures for renewed mandatory service in Project 2025, its dense manifesto for reshaping the nation in its own rightwing image, under the leadership of America’s next conservative present (presumably Donald Trump). The group’s 887-page manifesto, titled Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise, includes a lengthy chapter by Trump’s former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, that outlines a conservative future for the US military.

Miller proposes that conservative leadership should “increase the number of junior ROTC [reserve officers’ training corps] programs in secondary schools” and require high school students to take the armed services vocational aptitude battery (Asvab), a test to gauge their suitability for military service. He also calls for banning transgender recruits from the military, along with the expansion of America’s nuclear weapons stores and its role hawking arms and military technology to other powers, re-embracing its role as what he terms, apparently without irony or euphemism, the “Arsenal of Democracy”. Representatives from Project 2025 responded to a request for comment with a note that stated: “Project 2025 is a coalition of more than 110 conservative organizations preparing to offer recommendations to the next conservative president. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

To critics, such ideas seem like little more than a stalking horse for a renewed draft. (Indeed, Miller’s chapter laments that “the army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated”.)

Cindy Sheehan, an American anti-war activist and former vice-presidential nominee for the Peace and Freedom party, compares the Project 2025 vision of America to “Sparta without any honor”. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed by enemy action in 2004 during the Iraq war, says that “there is already too much military recruitment in secondary schools. Students should be focused on learning and preparing for a healthy future without being preyed upon by military recruiters.”

Sheehan says that recruiters, and the whole military apparatus, rely in part on the idea of an “esprit de corps”. Such values, however, rarely square with the violent reality of life in the military, and the sense of increased social alienation many Americans experience when they return from war zones and readjust to civilian life.

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However hollow their promises may seem, many of these new mandatory service proposals seem steeped in the language of alienation and loneliness, which has abounded, in the US and globally, in the years since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and resulting lockdowns and social distancing measures. In 2023, the US surgeon general released a lengthy report on the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”.

On the campaign trail in the UK, Rishi Sunak’s conservatives tried tapping into similar ideas. As outlined by the Tories’ policy manifesto, a proposed mandatory service scheme would have required every 18-year-old to chose between a year of paid military service (in either the armed forces or “cyber defence”) or 25 days a year of community service – working at charitable groups, hospitals or with police and fire departments.

It was the first such program proposed in the UK in 60 years.

The Conservatives’ “new model” of national service hinged on fairly old and unpopular promises: instilling a sense of national duty and forming bonds of fellowship through the common experience of armed conflict. Indeed, Sunak insisted that the program would go a long way to restore a “shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”.

David Adler, a political economist and co-general coordinator of the organization Progressive International, regards the policy as fundamentally hypocritical. “A Tory government that refused to invest in young people’s basic welfare, their education, their health and their employment prospects through an assault on institutions through over a decade of austerity means that this proposal is so condescending,” he says. “They’re talking down to them and saying: ‘You haven’t made enough of yourselves, so we’re gonna throw you into the military.’”

Adler also sees the idea as fundamentally “gerontocratic”: that is, a superficial appeal to young people that was actually devised to resonate with the UK’s older voters. “Ageing societies are basically telling young people what to do,” he says. “In the past, the balance of forces, demographically, meant that young people, as a bloc, would be better able to kind of manage their interests, whether through revolts, rebellions, and protests or through just voting.”

The Tories’ historic drubbing at the ballot box suggests that this model didn’t exactly resonate with voters.

But across the globe, such plans are being floated with a renewed seriousness. Last month, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, proposed a bill that would address the steady decline in the nation’s military ranks. The new law would see 18-year-old men served with a compulsory questionnaire, gauging their both their willingness and fitness for military service. (Military service was compulsory in Germany as recently as 2011.)

While the plan would not make service mandatory, it would equip military recruiters with a wealth of data and analytics, which could be used to better target potential servicemen. Pistorious, a center-left Social Democrat and one of Germany’s most popular politicians, has been vocal in sounding the alarm about the perceived military ambitions of Vladimir Putin, comparing the Russian leader to Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron has been mulling similar measures. The president has spoken of bringing back mandatory national service for teenagers and “restor[ing] authority” to France.

Amid shifting political landscapes and increased military activity on Europe’s eastern front, it can be tricky to gauge whether such appeals are sincere, or a more cynical attempt to sap support from increasingly popular far-right political parties. Indeed, the French Green party member Jean-Claude Renaux has claimed that Macron’s calls for a return to tradition and authority constitute little more than another gerontocratic appeal, pitched to “to nostalgic voters who idealize the past”.

Globally, scores of nations – from Brazil to Egypt, Greece to South Korea, Israel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – that require some form of compulsory military service. What’s unique about the new proposals is not their existence, or even their core demands of an able-bodied citizenry, but the context of their emergence. It is one that Adler defines as a generalized “militarist” revival in European politics.

“There is a shift in policymaking power,” he explains, “away from one set of elites, who are focused on social and economic issues … to a different set of elites, who are focused on security, defense, war and peace. In all of these countries, we’re seeing a shift from one set of elites, who were trained in one set of questions, to a different set of elites who went to naval colleges and did war games.” The arrival of this new breed of elite is signalled by the ascendancy of Vance, whose railing against “dominant elite society” is betrayed by his Ivy League bona fides, military background, and deep ties to deeper-pocketed Silicon Valley tech billionaires.

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Proposals by Sunak and others seem to echo an ostensibly more progressive, less explicitly militaristic, idea of national service. It is one for which Kevin Frazier, an American lawyer and writer, has been advocating for a long while. In a 2021 op-ed for the American Conservative, Frazier outlined a plan for a “Citizens Corps” that “can help all American youth build … economic, social, and human capital”. The idea of a “Citizens Corps” was originally proposed decades ago by two Democrats, the senator Sam Nunn and the representative Dave McCurdy. They introduced the Citizenship and National Service Act of 1989, ultimately unsuccessful legislation that outlined the institution of a national – and voluntary – civil service program, conceived as an alternative to higher education.

In such conceptions, high school graduates would be paid to take jobs working in their communities: in hospitals, in volunteer charity organizations, even in large-scale public works projects (as in the days of FDR and the Civil Works Administration). Such work could address labor shortfalls in these fields, while also fostering a different type of esprit de corps, in the age of the loneliness epidemic. “I really think that there are few more meaningful experiences than giving back to your community,” Frazier said. “If you’re doing that with friends and colleagues, I think it’s going to solidify some really meaningful bonds.”

Cindy Sheehan said opportunities in the US were “enormous”: “Perhaps a national service program that focuses on improving society, instead of destroying societies, would help the US come together in ways we haven’t in decades.”

Of course, in the US and elsewhere, versions of such programs already exist. AmeriCorps offers stipends to millions of volunteers, while the Peace Corps has long provided positions to young people (albeit typically after college) eager to help meet US humanitarian obligations abroad, especially in developing countries. At the state level, organizations like the California Volunteers recruit citizens (both volunteers and paid staffers) to assist in disaster recovery and other community efforts. “Service members get off their screens and out in the streets,” writes the California Volunteers’ chief service officer, Josh Fryday, in an email, “working together to solve community challenges. These programs foster belonging, purpose, lasting friendships and combat loneliness through shared experiences and collective action.”

Fryday, himself a navy veteran and former member of the judge advocate general’s corps (Jag), offers an alternative to military service, while nurturing many of the same values – duty, service, civic virtue – that have long been part of recruiters’ pitch materials. “We are giving thousands of Californians the same opportunity I had in the military,” Fryday writes, “to be a part of something bigger than yourself, to work towards a common purpose and to accomplish great things together.”

The key distinction between straight-up conscription and groups like the Volunteers, the Peace Corps, or even Nunn and McCurdy’s scuttled Citizen Corps, is that these groups are non-mandatory, and non-coercive. Press-ganging and conscripting teenagers into service during a period of increased military hawkishness is a different thing altogether.

Some have gamely argued that instituting some version of compulsory service may actually be a progressive solution to inequality in the military. In 2013, the New York City congressman Charles B Rangel penned an editorial advancing this idea. When wars broke out following the 9/11 attacks, Rangel claimed that a draft would “ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars”.

Certain critics have claimed that the military regards poorer, underprivileged would-be recruits as “fodder”, while other data suggests that the top predictor for military recruitment is “familiarity with the military” – for instance, a history of family service. In any event, the case goes that a draft would go a long way to bringing the American military more in line with the demographics of the nation as a whole.

But expanding a draft is arguably a case of “negative privilege”: where a burden is redistributed in the name of fairness when freedom from that same burden could instead be equally applied. Civic proposals offer an alternative, in which demands for service are applied uniformly, but with less potentially fatal outcomes. “There have always been proposals for young people to become teachers, or to plant trees,” says Adler, the political economist. “Enlisting young people is not a left- or rightwing idea. It’s not a new idea.

“What is novel about the present circumstances,” he adds, “is who is issuing them. These are politicians who are destroying the economy, destroying the institutions that empowered young people, and that gave them the power to participate in the economy … Is there a progressive version of this? In its current form? No.”

Source: US Politics - theguardian.com