This question was inspired by a post on lemmy.zip about lowering the minimum age to purchase firearms in the US, and a lot of commeters brought up military service and training as a benchmark to normal civilians, and how if guns would be prevalent, then firearm training should be more common.
For reference, I live in the USA, where the minimum age to join the military is 18, but joining is, for the most part, optional. I also know some friends that have gone through the military, mostly for college benefits, and it has really messed them up. However, I have also met some friends from south korea, where I understand military service is mandatory before starting a more normal career. From what I’ve heard, military service was treated more as a trade school, because they were never deployed, in comparison to American troops.
I just wanted to know what the broader Lemmy community thought about mandatory military service is, especially from viewpoints outside the US.
I am for it only because it helps avoid politicization of the armed forces. When the military self-selects recruits, you risk the organization biasing towards people with a particular worldview. It intrinsicially also leads to a military comprised of people who love the idea of being a “military person”.
It’s much more reassuring knowing your armed forces, the people with the big guns, are your neighbors, rather than strangers with a particular ideology or biased loyalties.
How about compulsory national guard service?
Do you think the national guard isn’t a component of the military?
That is correct. The National Guard is (part of) the militia, not the military. 10 USC 246.
The Military consists of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and now the Space Force. The “Armed Services” includes the above, plus the Coast Guard and the National Guard.
The National Guard consists of state-level units operating under the authority of the state’s governor. They can be called forth to federal service. They could, arguably, be considered part of the military when called forth. But generally speaking, no, the National Guard is not a component of the military.
The problem with your reasoning is that you can (and many people have) been given duty outside the United States of America when directed by the Federal Government (POTUS). So while I can appreciate you making the distinction, for the purposes of this discussion I’m not sure just how relevant that distinction is.
Joining the military, you would expect to be living separate and apart from the local communities. You’ll spend a year or two at one posting, before being transferred to another, and another, and another. You won’t expect to set down roots in the local community. The people you are serving with will be constantly rotating in and out of your current unit on similar schedules; you can expect any friendships you form to last a few months, before you or they are transferred again.
Joining the National Guard, you will be serving primarily in your home state, at the call of your own governor. You’ll spend your entire career in your own community, serving with other people in that same community. Even when you deploy, you are deploying with people you’ve known your whole career, if not your whole life: your friends and neighbors.
The militia is not the military.
As someone who joined the military, that’s not really how that works and if you’re getting your information from memes and content creators, perhaps it might be a better idea not to continue this conversation because I really don’t want to have to go into detail about how flawed that first sentence is, let alone the rest of it.
I served in the military from '99 through '05.
In California, the only military members I knew of who had California drivers licenses were people who had grown up in California. Nobody else in considered themselves a “resident” of California.
We were briefed on how to obtain absentee ballots from our home states, because most of us didn’t qualify as residents at our post.
We were advised to file taxes in our home states, not the states where we were living and working.
The parking lots on base had more out-of-state license plates than in-state.
Military members and their dependents are guests of the local community. Visitors. Tourists. Not locals. We aren’t in their communities long enough to become locals.
I was in the military from 2010 to 2022. If all you’ve known is living on post then you weren’t trying to be a member of the community and that’s at least part of the problem here. When you live “on post” you’re isolated and that’s at least partially about control (and damage control).
I’ve served both active duty and as a reservist and I gotta tell ya, the shortest I ever lived in one place was about 6 months during C-school. You don’t make a whole lot of connections in 6 months, but you absolutely can in 4 years and my first duty station was literally a 4 year stint. It is what you make of it, but it’s also down to what kind of person you are, where you’re from, hundreds of other things besides.
The people I have known (deployed and from my home town) who were Guard rather than military seem to have had similar experiences to me. Not all of them are even stationed in their home towns. Plenty of the ones I’ve known have been deployed.
I was also stationed in CA. I hate the state, but the community where I lived and worked wasn’t the worst. I had neighbors and friends, people who gave a damn. That’s perhaps rare in the military, but for the purposes of the conversation about the differences between the Guard and the Military branches, I can’t say that I would consider the National Guard to be a Civil Service, even if on paper it might technically qualify. The National Guard has more in common with military than it does with just about any other civil service and bonds to the community don’t do much to protect you from living in a hut in Djibouti or a tent in the sandbox.
I wouldn’t be so quiet to discredit sacrifices those people have made just to make a random claim online.