>>1865913it's stupid and wasteful, its use in peacetime with no hostile states indicates that you've totally fucked up the allocation of labour. in a capitalist country this is particularly acute: "we don't want to pay nurses enough, so let's bolster health-service staff numbers by forcing unpaid or underpaid teenagers to do a bit of their job"
even there it is a bad idea: before people can conduct such service they have to actually
be trained, which means taking professionals away from actually doing those tasks so that they can speedrun the essentials into a disinterested teenager. then when the national service period ends (say a year, two years) those teenagers go away and do a job they actually want, so you're back where you started! would you like to drive your car across a bridge built by teenagers on their bridge-building apprenticeship?
if you want practical training, put it in the school curriculum. if you want people to do labour, recognize that they're workers instead of using nationalist spooks to force them to work below-value.