LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Conscription: Men
built 639 days ago
For an entrance to a death-machine, the conscription centre in eastern Moscow looks remarkably inoffensive. The 1.5m-strong Russian armed forces killed 1,270 of their own young men last year according to official figures, though some observers say the number could be five times higher. For comparison, nine years [of fighting] in Afghanistan cost -- officially -- 15,000 Soviet lives. In recent years, some have even died of cold or malnutrition. Yet the new conscripts and their mothers, strolling recently through these warm, well-painted corridors at the start of the autumn call-up, provide dutiful explanations of why they want to serve their country. "It'll make a man of him," says one mother, whose younger son is among the autumn's total of 158,000 conscripts.
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Some state and local governments joined the popular opposition to conscription. The state of Delaware and the city of Troy, New York, for example, passed laws authorizing the local government to pay the commutation fee for residents, and the Governor of Massachusetts asked the Secretary of War to suspend operation of the draft in the state for six or seven weeks because a sufficient number of substitutes could no be found. The people were ... astute to find means of circumventing the draft law. Enrolling officers, who were required to canvass neighborhoods in order to find eligible males, were frequently lied to, avoided, and even physically attacked. Outright evasion was so widespread that a new word— "skedaddling"— was coined to describe it; new towns sprang up just across the northern borders in Canada, and many men took refuge in California or the or the mining towns of the western territories. In many parts of New England, so many farm laborers had deserted their employers and fled from the draft that crops were harvested only wth great difficulty.
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The new law provided for conscription at the age of eighteen but encouraged students to continue their schooling through university level by a complex system of service postponements. Once an academic degree was received or the student reached the age of twenty-eight, the two-year service commitment had to be fulfilled. Jordanians working abroad ... could postpone their military obligation. Exemptions were limited to those who could not pass the required medical examination because of permanent disability, those who were only sons, and the brothers of men who had died while in service in the armed forces. Any male of conscription age was prohibited from being employed unless he had been exempted from service or unless his call-up had been deferred because the armed forces had a temporary sufficiency. The law established an extensive system of veterans' rights, including job seniority, for men who had fulfilled their service commitment.
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When conscription was rejected by a narrow majority in 1916 and 1917 it was a triumph for a mass movement which fought its way from the ground against overwhelming odds. This movement was spearheaded by a handful of class conscious militants. It won the support of most of the labor movement, against their leaders. In the vanguard too were pacifists and liberals of great courage who proclaimed a message of humanity. Some Catholic leaders made a public stand. The brunt of the campaign was carried by young, unknown men and women who overcame every obstacle with vigor and originality.
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Unlike the Americans, the Israel Defense Forces (tsakhal in Hebrew) is recruited on the basis on conscription of young men and women that reach 18. Exemption from military service is granted only for religious reasons. Young men serve in the army for three years, while women serve for 22 months. After this, every soldier is transferred to the reserve and is attached to a definite unit. Men under 50 serve approximately 30 days a year, under emergency circumstances the term is raised to 60 days and longer. Unmarried women are usually on the reserve list to 24.
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[T]he states were reluctant to rely upon conscription as a means of satisfying their congressional quotas. In part, this hesitancy may have resulted from the feeling that the state militia systems contained safeguards for the individual which would be vitiated when state forces were put under the control of the central government. While the militia laws had a compulsory element in that all the male citizens had to enroll, train, and muster, the militiamen were usually enrolled with their friends under officers whom they had known most of their lives. As noted above, generous provisions existed for paid substitutes to take the place of those unwilling to serve, and the laws generally provided that the troops could not be sent outside their immediate borders without the consent of the legislature or the governor, The government leaders who controlled the militia were ... subject to close electoral check. But none of these safeguards was present when a distant central authority in which the state had only one of thirteen voices decided whom or where the men had to fight. Thomas Jefferson expressed the prevailing sentiment in the states in a letter to John Adams, dated May 16, 1777:
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