Rishi Sunak's crap-headed conscription plan

There's so much wrong with Rishi Sunak's plan to bring back mandatory conscription, it's hard to fit it all in one article.

Rishi Sunak has announced that he would bring back mandatory conscription for 18 to 21 year olds if he were to win the next election.

There are more than few things wrong with this plan, in fact there are far too many to fit into a single article, but I’ll try to go through some of the many objections here.

Two days prior to Sunak’s headline grabbing announcement that he was going to bring back mandatory service the Tory Defence Secretary said the government had no plans to bring back conscription in any form, making it look like there’s absolutely zero communication whatever between the Prime Minister, and the Ministry of Defence, which can’t be a good thing, can it?.

Former chief of the naval staff Adam West described the plan as "bonkers", and complained that it would deplete the defence budget.

The cited funding source of clamping down on tax-dodging is fantasy land stuff that makes the Tories look desperately incompetent. If there are apparently £billions per year available to fund government projects simply by squeezing tax-dodgers, why haven’t the Tories done this over the last 14 years in power? And why would they waste the money raised on absolute nonsense like this?

Former chief of the general staff Richard Dannatt described the plan as "electoral opportunism" that would impose considerable costs on training and infrastructure, adding that Sunak’s plan "cannot just be imposed on the armed forces as an extra thing to do".

Where would all of these recruits be housed, given the desperately depleted state of existing barracks?

If the Tories believe that the size of the UK armed forces needs to be dramatically increased, how come they’ve spent the last 14 years reducing the number of personnel from 191,700 in 2010 to 142,600 in 2023?

Who honestly believes it’s good management to fire almost fifty thousand trained and experienced military personnel, and then hastily replace them with hundreds of thousands of raw and potentially unwilling conscripts?

Former Tory Defence Secretary Michael Portillo said the plan hadn’t been thought through, and doubted that the armed services and all of the charities that would need to be involved have even been consulted.

Anybody who has been paying attention to the conflict in Ukraine should be well aware that what the British armed forces need to catch up on rapidly is drone technology, not hundreds of thousands of untrained, and likely unwilling, kids to use as cannon fodder.

Watching the Ukraine situation and deciding the priority is conscription rather than advancements in drone tech is akin to a WWI general watching years of trench warfare and concluding that what the British army really needs instead of tanks, machine guns, and more powerful artillery is several new battalions of horseback cavalry!

So, if defence experts think it’s a stupid idea, the armed forced don’t want to babysit hundreds of thousands of raw recruits, the plan to pay for it is unbelievable nonsense, and Sunak’s own Defence Secretary reckons the plan would "damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources", who is this absurd idea even aimed at?

Given the roaring approval from right-wing capitalist media, it’s obviously aimed at comfortably wealthy London-based hacks who are in absolutely no danger of being forced to serve, and at the kind of dolts who lazily rely on these right-wing propaganda-peddlers to shape their worldviews for them.

Conscription ended in 1960, meaning that anyone who has actually experienced mandatory military service would be well into their 80s by now, so the vast majority of right-wing blowhards who reckon that what the youth of today needs is a good old dose of mandatory military service are a bunch of frothing hypocrites who benefited handsomely from the youth of their day not facing compulsory conscription.

So instead of working out why it’s costing us £billions for every baby step we’re making in drone tech while countries like Russia and Iran are mass producing fleets of drones at a tiny fraction of the cost, or developing new anti-drone protections for our existing armed forces, Sunak’s idea is to flood any potential battlefield with thousands of untrained British kids, and tie up money, resources, and experienced personnel with the enormous task of babysitting all of these raw (and likely unwilling) recruits!

And instead of questioning any aspect of this rushed and ridiculous announcement, right-wing propaganda hacks and Britain’s armchair army of bloviating blowhards are applauding this absurd nonsense as if it’s exactly what’s needed!

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