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Sweden's government has a message for you Swedes:
The security environment in Europe and in Sweden's vicinity has deteriorated and the all-volunteer recruitment hasn't provided the Armed Forces with enough trained personnel. The re-activating of the conscription is needed for military readiness. Trained personnel are fundamental for building military capability. In 2016 the Armed Forces lacked 1,000 active squad leaders, soldiers and sailors as well as 7,000 reservists.
Recruitment to the Armed Forces will be both voluntary and conscription. Individual motivation, interest and will should to be considered as much as possible. The Armed Forces is planning for 4,000 recruits annually in basic military training in 2018 and 2019. The modern conscription is gender neutral and will include both women and men.
What's that about the security environment? Oh, it's about Russia:
Sweden is reinstating the military draft — for men and women — because of dwindling volunteers and growing concerns over a more assertive Russia in the Baltic and Ukraine. [...] Marinette Nyh Radebo told the BBC the "security change in our neighborhood" prompted the move by Sweden, which is not a NATO member. "The Russian illegal annexation of Crimea (in 2014), the conflict in Ukraine and the increased military activity in our neighborhood are some of the reasons," she said.
[...] Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said he was inspired to make the draft gender-neutral by neighboring Norway, which in 2013 introduced a law applying military conscription to both sexes. That made Norway the first NATO member to draft both men and women, joining a tiny group of countries around the world, including Israel. Turkey and Germany are the only major NATO countries that still use a draft. Conscription also exists in Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece and Norway, according to Deutsche Welle. France ended the draft in 2001. Italy and the Netherlands put the draft on hold.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05 2017, @07:27AM
In my country, draft was only egalitarian by name. It was always possible to dodge a draft by being politically/family connected, or having enough money to burn. One could also dodge a draft with being in college for a long enough period.
The distribution of risk of dying at war to all levels of society evenly by draft works only if You have never had a war on Your own soil. Then risk of death is usually evenly enough distributed (discounting spatial organization, as whole countries are rarely one huge front line), as bombs usually hit people irrespective of their education. Still doesn't work quite the same with wealth and connections -- but these people are usually more protected anyhow, in both times of war and peace.
On the other hand, with a war on foreign soil, distributing the risk of death to all levels of society just doesn't make sense from a purely economic point of view You give the same probability to die to a prominent PhD in theoretical physics as a high-school dropout who only plays video games all day. Given the choice of sending one of them to die, the self interest of the society is to pick the less useful -- or, rather, societies which pick the less useful to die off first in dire times are more likely to thrive.