British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a plan to bring back mandatory national service for 18-year-olds last week. The plan would require British teens to partake in a 12-month full-time military placement or spend one weekend a month carrying out community service. The program, which the Tories insisted shouldn’t be described as “conscription,” could be dismissed as an outlandish idea from a government likely on its way out – if, that is, you hadn’t been tuned in to the changing mood about mandatory military service in the West in recent months.
