There are strong arguments for national service in terms of national solidarity, training and self-discipline. In the end, however, the real question for any army worth the name is: would the soldiers fight? And would their families at home tolerate them being killed? It is indeed grotesque that Britain now has only one brigade immediately available in an emergency; but it wouldn’t help to have 30 brigades if they could not in fact be deployed for war.
From this point of view, it is important to realise that national service has always involved an explicit or implicit understanding between citizens and states. It is that conscripts are there to defend the homeland, or the immediate neighbours and allies of the homeland (even if defending the homeland sometimes seems to require invading someone else’s homeland). Even if the young Britons doing national service have applied to join the army as an alternative to doing community service, they will not be professional soldiers in any normal sense.
Overseas wars (in the 19th century, colonial; today, ‘humanitarian’) are to be conducted by professional troops, or locally recruited mercenaries. The British Empire was conquered by such troops. The French Foreign Legion was raised for this purpose. Even the German Empire before the first world war raised special volunteers to fight in its colonies. Contemporary Germany had conscription until 2011, but also had to create volunteer units to fight with Nato in Afghanistan.
Public opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been immeasurably higher if British conscripts had been involved
Nineteenth century empires were able to get away with this in their colonial wars because their weaponry was so overwhelmingly superior to that of their enemies. When, however, states used drafted soldiers in such wars, they always faced huge problems of morale and discipline – as the Americans experienced in Vietnam – and generally lost as a result.
In France’s late-colonial war in Vietnam from 1946-54, they used volunteer units, the Foreign Legion, and colonial troops. They were defeated in part for lack of troops. In Algeria, they were able to use conscripts, because Algeria was technically part of metropolitan France; but they did not compare in effectiveness with the professional units, and unhappiness at their use in the French population eventually helped ensure French withdrawal.
The British (like the American) tradition was strongly hostile to standing drafted armies, even for homeland defence. The regular military much preferred well-trained, disciplined professionals to bolshie civilians. Conscription was also regarded as unnecessary, because Britain is an island. To defend the homeland, what was necessary was a strong navy; and until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy did have conscription, in the form of the press gang.
The anomaly of British national service from 1916-20 and 1939-60 stemmed from the two world wars, when Britain appeared to be fighting for its very existence. It was continued after 1945 in part because of lack of money to pay regulars, and also because of bitter memories of the interwar years, when the abandonment of conscription made it impossible to field an army to resist Hitler.
British casualties in the late colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s were low (4,437 deaths including Korea), and incomparably smaller than those just suffered in the two world wars. Moreover, Britain, unlike France, was clearly withdrawing from the territories concerned, which meant that the conflicts appeared to have a time limit. When a few years later, Britain was plunged into a guerrilla war without a time limit, in Northern Ireland, national service had been abolished. If it had still been in force, it seems probable that there would have been vastly stronger popular demands for British withdrawal (with disastrous results).
Moreover, of the drafted British soldiers deployed overseas, a large majority served with the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany (BAOR), 80,000 strong in the mid-1950s. The BAOR was the direct descendant of the British Expeditionary Forces of the world wars: an extended defence of the British Isles themselves, on the territory of Britain’s neighbours. The world wars, and the Cold War, were also not seen by the great majority of the British public as ‘wars of choice’ like Iraq, but as inescapable necessities.
The BAOR also – thank God! – never had to fight; and indeed, old national servicemen from the BAOR have often told me that they expected that any war with the USSR would soon become a nuclear one, ‘and we’d all be dead anyway, so why worry?’
Today, there is a strong argument for a new version of the BAOR, staffed by Britons on national service, to defend Nato in Europe, especially since long-term US support is becoming questionable. The BAOR was however strictly for collective defence under the Nato Treaty. Nobody contemplated using it to intervene by force in the Soviet bloc. In future, in the extremely unlikely event that Russia were to launch a direct attack on Nato, it seems likely that British conscripts would fight, and the domestic population would endorse this.
It could be a wholly different matter however if Nato were seen to be intervening beyond Nato’s borders. British public opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and still more the invasion of Iraq, would have been immeasurably higher if British conscripts had been involved. According to polls, British public opinion is strongly supportive of Ukraine, but strongly opposed to sending British troops to fight there. In France, President Macron has suggested the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine, but the French public is against this by almost three to one. It seems likely that these figures would be even higher if the troops concerned were conscripts.
According to the famous Roman maxim, ‘si vis pacem, para bellum’; ‘if you wish for peace, prepare for war’, largely because by preparing for war you can deter a potential enemy from attacking you. In the case of a re-introduction of national service, however, one of the nations that we would be deterring from going to war would be ourselves.
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