Stephen Walt, no warmonger he, suggests the restoration of the draft in order to make America less interventionist abroad by making everyone, or at least most people, liable to be killed in such adventures. It is an interesting idea.
But even in Britain, might there not be at least as big a temptation to try and find something to do with them? Are our politicians not trigger-happy enough already? It seems an even worse idea in America, which already has huge numbers of people noisily opposed to government action while in fact living their entire adult lives as wards of the federal government.
We need universal and compulsory – non-military, but uniformed, ranked and barracked – National Service, between secondary education and tertiary education or training. As much as anything else, this would send people to university that little bit worldly-wiser, which would not only be good for academic and behavioural standards, but would also drain such swamps as Marxism, anarcho-capitalism, and the marriage of the two in neoconservatism. No one who had been around even a little bit would ever fall for such things for one moment.
Of course, that is also a very good reason for broadening the social and socio-economic base from which students, and indeed academics, are drawn. Instead of “widening participation” by abolishing everything in which one might wish to participate, and then only letting in the offspring of the upper middle classes anyway, on the smug assumption of having done one’s bit.
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A free people needs no compulsion. Parliament still has to vote every year on whether to have any standing army, historically we were extremely suspicious as of course you know. The 20th century was an aberration, the army has now returned to its traditionally small size that gives central government little opportunity to use it against our liberties. Love your idea for what to do with NEETs, however.
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