Britain and national service
The British military has traditionally favoured quality over quantity. It introduced conscription from 1916 to 1920, and from 1939 to 1960.
The 1916 introduction of conscription was a result of massive troop losses that weren’t made good with volunteers alone. World War 1 was the first industrial scale, modern war that Britain had been involved in, and the first time it needed more than volunteers to fill the gaps caused by dead and injured soldiers (as well as sailors and airmen).
In 1939, it was the same thing, although the writing was on the wall and the call ups started before the shooting did. In World War 2, all of the belligerent nations relied on huge, massive, ginormous militaries, all of them fuelled with conscript forces. There was no way that warfare on that scale could have been waged any other way.
Britain continued with conscription after World War 2 because it also had to police its colonies, many of which were agitating for freedom.
Trouble was, conscription was also jolly expansive, and after 1945, Britain was broke. This wasn’t helped by Britain being obsessed with wanting a top table at the UN, which required really expensive nuclear weapons.
But by 1960, most of Britain’s colonies were ‘free,’ and the accepted military wisdom was that a smaller, professional military would be much more effective than a larger, conscript based one. Traditionally, it had always been the British way, and let’s face it, a smaller volunteer army had given old Boney’s conscript army what for back in the 1800’s, what? So there was definitely the historical precedent.
Also, Brits never really saw national service as a duty, a way to be prepared for war. A lot of Brits saw national service as a kind of rite of passage into adulthood, a finishing school that turned boys into men, and also as a bit of a laugh.
None of which, actually, is what the military is there for.
When all is said and done, Britain was, and is in NATO, and it doesn’t need its own reserve of troops, and nor do any of the other members, because if the shit comes down, every NATO nation has every other NATO nation’s back. Britain, basically, will resort to conscription for its own existential survival, but will probably only ever introduce it when that existential threat is physically present and marching towards Dover.
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