General Election 2024

National service makes sense if you need to build a big pool of people who could be rapidly mobilised for a future war. People who did NS one or ten years before can be called up, have refresher training and be ready to fight within weeks. Their skills and mental and physical characteristics are a known quantity, so the generals can build them into war scenarios. But this requires long term planning and investment, which the Tories wouldn't do. And it's become irrelevant for the UK because our possible future wars will need specialists with years of technical training, not dogsbodies who have only served long enough to learn marching, rifle shooting and living in a hole in the ground. We're not going to be invaded so we'll never need 50,000 people to live in trenches.