Injuries
Conscription puts young, often unprepared individuals into harm’s way, resulting in preventable injuries. These injuries not only affect soldiers and impede military training, but place an immense strain on healthcare and society
Conscription’s Harm: Avoidable Injuries
Universal conscription entails an additional and substantial health consequence: injury. Injuries occur, of course, in both conscript and professional armies. It is however the wide-scale recruitment of men against their will, that heightens their prevalence. Conscript army recruit is brought into its ranks irrespective of his previous propensity to partake in sports. Thus, the basic training camp is filled with a cohort of men of little stamina and fitness experience, suddenly forced into exercise beyond their strength. The conditions are therefore primed for high injury rates.
Injuries continue to be a common cause of morbidity in conscripts in the North. The incidence of hospitalisation for injuries in the Finnish conscript army appears to be much higher than in professional military or civilians. In a 2015 study of 1500 conscripts, 27% of them sustained an acute injury and 51% suffered from overuse injury during the first six months of service.
Low physical activity level before military entry is associated particularly with overuse injuries. Untrained conscripts overload their musculoskeletal structures and tissues. In Norway slightly more than every fourth Army, every fifth Air Force and every eighth Navy conscript suffered one or more injuries during basic training, so serious that it required a doctor consultation.
Beyond raw incidence rates, recent Swedish reporting suggests a systemic mechanism that can worsen injury outcomes under conscription: barriers to timely care. Pliktrådet’s latest inspections describe a culture in which some officers view help-seeking with skepticism and, in some cases, conscripts are actively discouraged or even stopped from contacting medical services.
“At seven units, conscripts state that they were questioned or stopped from seeking health care. According to the report, officers have in some cases made their own medical assessments or acted as an informal filter.”
When access to rest, assessment, and treatment is delayed, minor problems (e.g., severe chafing, stress pain, back issues) can escalate into infections, prolonged disability, or avoidable operations turning “expected hardship” into preventable morbidity.
Hallands Nyheter reports that:
“A well-trained 20-year-old had after some time in a slow down problem with severe back pain – but instead of rest, the officers in Boden demanded that he take part in an exercise. The price was high. The herniated disc has led to long sick leave.
“If the Swedish Armed Forces had not ignored my prescription that I had received from Defence Health, I would not have been in this situation and two back surgeries could probably have been avoided,” he says in Norrbottens-Kuriren.”
According to NSD he now lives with constant pain and 14 months later, he is still on sick leave with nerve pain.
In short, conscription can amplify not only the number of injuries, but also their severity by coupling mass recruitment with institutional frictions that impede early help. Those who do not sufficiently care about the painful fate of the individuals may consider the impact on public health expenditure. Military service of unwilling amateurs has a hefty price tag in that regard.
Explore the evidence
Risk factors of acute and overuse musculoskeletal injuries among young conscripts: a population-based cohort study
Hospitalisation for injuries among Finnish conscripts in 1990–1999
Epidemiology of musculoskeletal injuries among Norwegian conscripts undergoing basic military training
Councillors alarms: Conscripts punished collectively and denied care
https://www.news55.se/samhalle/pliktradet-larmar-varnpliktiga-straffas-kollektivt-och-nekas-vard/
