conscription

If you're a young man in the US, remember that conscription is about to hit you, big time.

There is no conscription - soldiers in today's wars are volunteers.

I'll assume the parent poster is from the US, where conscription didn't end until 1975.

Ten years of war in the middle east killed only a tenth of the US soldiers killed in Vietnam, and there was no conscription.

The topic that's sort of ignored is how incredibly wrong it was to impose conscription on the British public.

A related point is that we used to have conscription and it was much harder to get elected if you didn't have a good record of service.

With a draft and mandatory conscription, everybody had the common experience of serving and perhaps doing really bad things in the line of duty.

The irony of conscription wasn't lost on Americans at the time either, and the military drafts were extremely unpopular on both sides.

I would like to further suggest we end the use of the word "war" in contexts that do not involve mandatory conscription and the deaths of large numbers of combatants until one side totally surrenders.

Forced conscription was part of the reason for public opposition to Vietnam; the opposition to Iraq would have come quicker and stronger if the costs and realities were more uniformly distributed.

I'd like to upvote condemnation of misuse of the word war too, however note real war frequently does not involve mandatory conscription, deaths of large numbers of combatants, or one side totally surrendering.

In my case, it was because I was refusing conscription in Norway, and it is a formality to be interviewed by a police officer as to the reason why; said officer was friendly and trying to accurately represent what I was saying, but despite that it took several hours of hard work to correct the statement before it represented what I had said in a remotely accurate manner.