At the present time in America, there is no military conscription, which is a great benefit to all of the people of America, for being conscripted in order to fight in a war, signifies for those so being conscripted, the distinct possibility that they will lose their life, become injured, or end up suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Yet, just because there is no conscription for miliary service currently does not mean that such a conscription will not come back into play at some future juncture, which is why it needs to be carefully examined as to its fairness and its ultimate Constitutionality.
For instance, our Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 and Clause 12, indicates that [“Congress shall have the power… to declare War,”] as well as [“Congress shall have the power… to raise and support armies”] The question then that comes to mind is that if Congress has not declared war, that would presuppose that it would not then have the Constitutional authority to raise and support armies through conscription. However, wars such as the Korean and Vietnam wars were not Congressional declared wars, yet they still conscripted United States citizens, which would seem to be putting the horse before the cart, and should thereby be subject to comprehensive re-examination by a serious judicial review.
Then there is the inconvenient fact, as to who is or is not eligible to be conscripted, in which, first of all, females have never been conscripted in the United States, and in addition there have historically been exceptions made for certain others in which they paid, for instance, a monetary amount for someone else to thus be their substitute in regards to their conscription – as well as other exemptions such as being married, or being in college, or not being within the age range of that conscription, and hence because of these exceptions, these people did not therefore have to serve per the rules of that particular conscription. All of the above, is absolutely discriminatory, and in an era in which physical strength is not necessary in many of the tasks so involved in today’s military service, it would seem that those that should be or could be conscripted might well be looked at more thoroughly.
Indeed, the main thing about military conscription from a historical basis in the United States, is those so subject to that service, have specifically been young adult males, and because it is circumscribed to just this subset of Americans, it thus makes it more difficult for those young male adults, to build up the overall consensus so necessary to protest the unfairness of such. So then, should conscription ever come back to America, one would expect that it won’t actually be much different than before, because if conscription was something that anybody of any sex, and of any general health, or of education, or of marital status, was subject to between the ages of 18 to 45, there would probably be a lot of pushback from the general public and that wouldn’t be what this government would want, because this government recognizes that many a person doesn’t really mind conscription being the law of the land, as long as that conscription does not directly or indirectly impact their own life. In other words, conscription is all about somebody else risking their life, their body, and their mind, to defend freedom or whatever, and those that aren’t conscripted, essentially get a free ride upon those that have been conscripted.