Elan Journo has a informative interview with Boaz Arad, from the Ayn Rand Center Israel, about his activism to end military conscription in Israel.
Boaz’s solution is a volunteer army which is justified in a two part argument “one part moral, one practical.” According to Boaz:
The moral case, echoing Ayn Rand’s view, is that it’s a violation of individual rights to conscript people into the military. In a free society, it’s wrong for the government to coerce your time, which is irreplaceable, and put you, against your will, in life-threatening situations.
The second component is a practical point: A volunteer army works much better. You need professional soldiers who are highly trained and skilled. Today’s military is so high tech and sophisticated that you need specialized people in key roles, those who have, say, 10–15 years’ experience. It’s not cost-effective to train conscripts to do such a job and to have them do it for one or two years, at which point they move on.
That wastefulness is bound to get worse. Given current birth rates and the typical annual intake of conscripts, in a few years, Israel will have a glut of military personnel. The army could grow to something like half a million to a million soldiers. There would be way more people than really needed to serve national security, and some will end up, as they do today, in non-essential positions like entertainment. Young men and women are conscripted into the military and, literally, end up doing magic tricks or singing as part of their military duty.
Read the rest of One Activist’s Impact: End Military Conscription in Israel.