In a great new piece, German journalist Markus Heinrich makes a quite persuasive case that conscription is a relic that belongs in a museum. He writes:

Who seriously believes that megalomaniacs like Putin can be deterred by a group of young people who, by the end of their compulsory service, may be able to make their beds properly but are in no way capable of operating the high-tech weapons with which modern wars are fought? Dictators, by contrast, can simply send people to die at the front in almost unlimited numbers, along with prisoners, mercenaries, and shadow fighters from other countries. No democracy can come close to matching that. It must rely on high-tech instead.

He also points out that the German state wants to:

compel precisely those young people to perform a service to society from whom an immense service to society was already extracted during the coronavirus pandemic. At the moment, it is the state that owes a duty to these young people, not the other way around.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece in German.

The German push for conscription is particularly egregious. As I wrote earlier that year in my piece for SpeakFreely Magazine:

The German army is in no condition to induct thousands of unwilling conscripts, maintain discipline, or make effective use of their time. Most would simply lose a year of their lives performing menial chores and meaningless drills. They might inflate statistics for the chancellor’s press conferences, but they would do nothing to make Germany any safer.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz ought to know better, and by all indications, he does.  An expert report prepared for Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance found that when fully accounted for, conscription with all its externalities would be 45% more expensive than a professional force of even the same size. This is the most striking part: we can actually pay young people enough, and have an army of better quality and quantity, if only we adopt a sensible policy, that is, if we halt conscription.

For now, the future of conscription in Germany seems to depend on whether the current push for voluntary recruitment can deliver.