Europe must learn from South Korea’s mistakes on military conscription

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BrusselsReport.eu
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By Ian Golan

As South Korea reacts to President Yoon Suk Yeo’s unexpected attempt to impose martial law, Europe should learn lessons from recent Korean missteps in defence policy—not least South Korean military conscription.

A young man in South Korea was just sentenced to two years in jail. His crime? A poor diet. South Korea’s conscription policy requires able-bodied young men to serve for at least 18 months in the military. Korean draft authorities grew suspicious of this man’s sudden weight gain just before his assessment, suspecting him of deliberately eating unhealthily in order to avoid signing up on grounds of obesity. The draft dodger, wracked with guilt, confessed to deliberately packing on the pounds to avoid conscription, implicating his friend who coached him on the binge-eating and masterminded the entire scheme. The accomplice was sentenced to six months in jail, while the future soldier was allowed to escape his prison sentence if he did his time in the army after all. 

Conscription is back in fashion, at least in Europe. Sweden has reinstated mandatory military service, and Serbia is now eyeing a similar move as tensions on the continent rise. The shift has sparked serious debates on conscription in countries like Luxembourg, Germany, and even the UK. But the South Korean story perfectly illustrates just how absurd the process of conscription can be, and the myriad of unintended consequences it can bring along. Europe should take note. In public debate, conscription is lauded as a seamless solution to national defence, as if a few orders could magically craft a superior military. Europe, in its naive optimism fuelled by decades of demilitarisation, has forgotten the grim reality—the misery, the blunders, and the sheer toil that come with forcing men into uniform.

A key problem with conscription lies in the lack of self-selection. Whereas voluntary enlistment brings in only those truly fit and willing, under conscription, brute force is employed to drag men, no matter how unwilling or unfit into service. Suddenly, legitimate reasons for exemption such as illness,  disability, or mental health issues are often dismissed as mere excuses or, in some cases, outright treason. Draft boards are littered with cases of men seeking exemption based on imaginary or overblown ailments. The true cases are lost in the forest of rampant fraudulence.

Conscription creates abhorrent incentives for the youth. Mild obesity runs rampant in conscript armies as the byproduct of forcing unwilling, unsuitable recruits into service. If a man is even somewhat overweight at eighteen, in all likelihood he will soon be unfit for duty, with bad habits only deepening over time.

Nonetheless, many armies waste precious resources on those unlikely to stay in reserve for long. The alternative is worse. Excluding recruits based on BMI would create a perverse incentive, as illustrated perfectly by the South Korean example. A humble box of doughnuts becomes a free ticket out of army service. Conscription creates the complex art of draft-dodging. Men take up needless university degrees and even try to marry or have children all in the effort to soften the hearts of the draft board.

The most sombre part of all of this is that the South Korean draft dodger is not likely to come out of the army any healthier. A central lie of conscription advocates rests on the propagandistic image of the youth being forged into true men in the fire of military service. This is often fuelled by vile intergenerational stereotyping. “Today’s youth are so fragile they need the army to teach them toughness,” one will often hear from conscription’s defenders.

The marketing of conscription spins a tale of muscular youth leaving the army at the pinnacle of physical prowess, poised to win the hearts of every girl in sight and die nobly for their country.  Yet the fitness results of mandatory service are far bleaker than the advertised fantasy. Men often see no change at all in their physical capabilities. A study on South Korean conscripts, aptly titled Conscription Hurts, showed soldiers suffered from poorer health as much as eight years after they were discharged from military service. Most importantly, this negative effect of military service on physical health lasted for a whole decade afterwards.

Army diet is also a cause for concern, best showcased by the often-glorified example of conscription in Finland.  Finnish conscripts show a significant increase in the consumption of sweet foods during their period of mandatory army service. While in the civilian world, well-informed men would avoid fat-heavy products, under the unimaginable stress of conscription, they completely let go.

In the grim world of military service, poor food choices are less about hunger and more about escapism—a brief, necessary relief from the stress and monotony of army life. In Finland, conscripts indulge in binge eating whenever they are granted leave, abandoning any concern for their health. For those already prone to overeating, military service offers the perfect storm of time and stress to cement bad habits, lasting long after they leave the army.

Conscription does not deliver the advertised effects. It results in the creation of perverse incentives, disrupting young people’s natural growth and development at the crucial point when they should be kick starting their adult life. The South Korean draft dodger frightened into army service will not leave it any fitter or particularly battle-ready, but will certainly carry the scars of his attempted evasion. The institution in question creates a fictitious sense of security. That’s a delusion Europe cannot afford to indulge.

 

Ian Golan is a writer based in Helsinki. Ian is a writing fellow with Young Voices Europe and author of the novel “Flugjagd,” which explores the war in Ukraine. He serves as the national coordinator for Students for Liberty in Finland and is the executive publisher of SpeakFreely Magazine.

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