Why Some Countries Ask Everyone to Serve

The story

In Singapore, when a boy grows up and reaches about eighteen, something happens that surprises children in many other countries. He puts on a uniform. For about two years he serves and trains as a soldier, a sailor, an airman, a police officer or a firefighter, because the law asks it of nearly every son of the country. Yet a boy growing up in Britain or Japan today is not called up at all. Why do countries answer this question so differently?

The idea is called national service, and a country's answer usually comes from reading its own map. Look at Singapore's. A tiny island, smaller than many cities, home to only a few million people. A country like that cannot fill a huge full-time army, because there are simply not enough people to spare. So it does something cleverer. It trains nearly all of its young men, then sends them back to ordinary life. The soldier becomes a student, a chef, a doctor. But the training stays inside him, and for years afterwards he returns now and then to practise, so that if danger ever came, the whole country could stand up together at once. Most of that army is not waiting in the barracks. It is folded, invisibly, into the crowd at the shopping centre.

Switzerland answers the same way, and has for so long that its citizen soldiers famously keep their service rifles safely at home while they serve. Finland, with its long border beside a giant neighbour, trains most of its young men too. South Korea does it because an unfriendly neighbour sits just across a narrow strip of land. In Israel, young women serve alongside the young men, and Norway and Sweden now call up both. Small countries, worrying borders, precious few people. The pattern repeats.

Now read a different map. Britain and America ended their call-ups two generations ago. They have large populations, so enough people choose soldiering as a paid job to fill a professional army. They have friendly neighbours, and wide seas for walls. And they belong to alliances, great circles of countries that promise to defend one another, which is a kind of shared shield. Japan's laws, written after the Second World War, promise that its forces are for defending the country, not for waging war. Different maps, different answers.

And the answers change when the world changes. Sweden once pressed pause on national service, then watched its corner of the world grow tense, and started it again. Countries are always rereading their maps.

Is it hard to give up two years? Ask any Singaporean son, and he will tell you honestly that it is. But many will also tell you something quieter. Strangers from every kind of family train side by side and come out speaking like brothers. A small country cannot buy safety ready-made. So it builds safety from the only material it has ever had in abundance, which is its own people, taking turns to stand guard.