o sung wu,

Right with you; in my day the switched on soldier had to be as smart as his Sargent and a lot smarter than a 2Lt, today's soldier has to be as smart as our Captains were and that's being more than fair to Captains of yore.

As far as putting those that don't want to be soldiers in the Army, it's a recipe for disaster, I had to put up with enough of them in the 1960s; not that I blamed them, many had been pulled out of good jobs and were now working antiquated machines that they'd only read about and for far less money.

Generally, conscripts don't work well until they are being shot at.
There have been some magnificent exceptions, however.

Thanks o sung wu and Is Mise for the informative account of the actual reality of what the modern Australian defence forces are about. The notion that the army should be loaded up with unskilled sloggers as SD thinks, is ridiculous in the extreme.

SD you are so out of touch with reality that its laughable. Do you have any other harebrained ideas for the unemployed youth of Australia?

Obviously the intense desire to view the Army as an untouchable group of specialists upon which no one must intrude so as to maintain the status quo is rather myopic however for the sake of this myopic and intransigent stance another organization can be created, specific to the purpose of providing guidance and discipline to the unemployed youth.
For this to occur, with half a chance of success ex servicemen would be needed to form the nucleus as instructors and teachers and to serve as transient role models because only they would have a uniform set of disciplinary skills, and without public servants.
So rather than bleat about what cannot be touched for reasons of the past I'd like to see the pseudo intellectuals and seat polishers come up with a workable way forward in resolving the situation rather than protest about what cannot be changed.
It is what it is...and claiming it to be otherwise is an act of foolishness but then that shouldn't be surprising to some.
Claiming you want the best for youth....at your convenience, is not going to achieve anything other than underscore ineptitude.

SD,

"So rather than bleat about what cannot be touched for reasons of the past I'd like to..."

You miss the point, today's Army, and other services, is far more complex than in days of yore.

As but one small example, thermal imaging did not exist and one could crawl around in the dark, confident that if one was quiet and stayed below the skyline one was fairly safe.
Smokers were a problem because they stank to high heavens in Chinese noses, but that could be overcome by not taking smokers on sneak patrols.
Today even daylight is fraught with danger, a satellite photo can be relayed to the enemy in real time, so today's soldier has to be a lot more aware than in the past.

He has to be more motivated, more alert and much better trained.

I talk with blokes, at the range, that have been to Afghanistan and other places and the level of tension under which they operated makes my experiences seem almost like training exercises.

Special Delivery, what colour shirts do you want this private army of yours to wear, you can't have black or brown they have been taken, how about blue, as in true blue. You can call them the Special Defence, SD for short, if you like.

Probably when posters here mention the armed forces for unemployed people, they don't intend for unskilled and untrained blokes to be sent to Afghanistan or Iraq after a couple of weeks - they mean some form of National Service ? i.e. people marching up and down, saluting, shining their boots, etc. as well as getting some compulsory trade training ? Would that be so terrible ?

But isn't it fun to distort what people might mean into something ridiculous ? Here's one such suggestion about how stupid such an idea might be - is SD demanding that, in their second week, unemployed people drafted into the army, be parachuted into war zones ? Gosh, isn't that ridiculous ? What a stupid idea. Drop it entirely. SD is obviously an idiot.

Boy, that felt good.

Joe