United Kingdom
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
Largely, but I was responding to the specific sentence I highlighted.
The UK has favored a doctrine of a small, well trained, professional army since before WW1. It's also tended to be more expeditionary. Both of these conflict with the benefits of conscription.
That doesn't mean it's an outright superior system. It has its own drawbacks and benefits compared with alternative systems. Sometimes you send that force into a meatgrinder because the fighting calls for more manpower than it can supply, regardless of technology. It depends on the war you're fighting.
Weirdly enough, fighting a defensive, existential war tends to solve the motivation problem pretty quicky.
Also, if you're calling up previously conscripted troops when shit hits the fan, they will have been trained for far, far longer than if you try to enlarge the size of your fighting force from scratch.
I feel like your knowledge of conscription comes entirely from the Red Alert 2 unit of the same name. Don't confuse peace time conscription with war time conscription. They're incredibly different things.
You're really just running down the bingo board of one-liners that betray a complete unfamiliarity with what you're trying to talk about.
No military budget is infinite. You decide the type of military you want to build, and you build it in the most effective way possible. Sometimes conscription fits in with that. Sometimes it doesn't.
Tick another one off the bingo board.
We're talking about conscription in peace time.
That's literally what a military is.
Conscripts receive the same training as career professionals.
Why wouldn't it result in a ground war? NATO isn't going to want to escalate into full apocalypse unless they absolutely have to.
There's a reason the UK didn't nuke Argentina when it took the Falklands.
The UK's two most recent trident tests both failed.