People involved in this debate miss the obvious: the world and our position in it has changed. We aren’t an isolated piece of the Earth with our own little moat anymore. We have cutthroats all around us and almost a billion lunatics about to get their own individual nukes to erase us.
Somewhere along this logical path, we have get our future security together and it’s got to be all of us involved or they will erase us. We have a surplus of young self-satisfied, overweight, and lazy louts who think that they should just leave the nasty and dangerous business of learning warfare to somebody else.
Wrong. Every single citizen should be ready and able to do what the country needs - just like our revolutionary forefathers knew that they had to leave the family farm to go fight the world’s strongest army all those years ago.
A short part of our lives learning which end of rifle to use while training with all the rest of the country’s kids would good for us.
I think that the decision is rather fundamental: do we accept a state that has the power to do this to young citizens in a time of non-national-emergency? My personal belief is that in principle this is wrong, that the philosophy of the relationship of government and citizen reflected in the Constitution does not permit it.
I do not, however, deny the potential benefits to the underlying society of this action, and I think the article points them out: a military that is less divorced from the general run of citizens and whose members act as a control against policies of over-employment as a means of effecting national policy. But does the first consideration allow us to do this to those members against their will? Or, put another way, do we accept the negative consequences of refusing ourselves the ability to direct the lives of young citizens, or do we accept the negative consequences of allowing it? Because either way there are negative consequences.
It isn't always the case that a too-rigid adherence to a single principle to the exclusion of others is the course of wisdom, because principles conflict and you can't build a country around only those that do not. My personal preference in this case is in favor of the liberty of the individuals involved but I fully understand people whose preference runs the other way.