[CaptainCrunch]

I'm torn on the concept of conscription but there are situations where its necessary.

For the most part Conscription hasn't been positive in times of war if you take everyone. The US military during the vietnam era was hardly a professional military and you had a war within the military between the officer and senior NCO core and the conscripts who didn't want to be there.

In Russia the average quality of a conscript was pretty poor, but that was a combination of poor training, poor pay, poor kit and not wanting to be there. Add in the whole glug glug stumble stumble issues in the Russian military and you have problems.

The benefit of recruiting properly is you get soldiers that you want and want to be there. if done properly, where you pay them decently and train them lavishly and equip them properly you can run with a smaller more professional military.

However with smaller countries like Sweden or for example Norway I do think that conscription is almost a necessary thing.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with conscription in exchange for. helping to pay for a college education for example when they leave the military would be a positive thing. Or upping the trades training would be a positive thing so that the kids who leave after lets say three or four years have a step up and some job experience and educational opportunities that won't force them into debt when they're 50.

The biggest failure of conscription though is retention. If you can't find a way to get at least some of the conscripts to stay and take up soldiering as a career then you tend to have an military with ineffective leadership as you don't get that core of strong NCO's or officers.

The Russians or Soviets were the worst for that, they had the whole instant sergeant thing where promising conscripts were sent off to a Sergeant's school so their core of NCO's wasn't more experienced then the average conscript. They were more politically reliable and had better training in terms of leadership and tactics but it wasn't the massive leap that you see in Western armies where your Sergent or Warrant Officer had 15 or 20 years of soldiering experience.

I personally think a conscription in Canada wouldn't be welcome even in a time of war.