Austria is one of the few developed countries with mandatory national service. Their latest election was between the Green Party and a party with neo-Nazi roots. Greece has mandatory service too, and their politics are also now dominated by a far-left party with an openly neo-Nazi party in the wings. Israel has mandatory national service, and is a poster-child for divisive politics. Singapore has mandatory national service, and it’s a program that the government uses to quash dissent and enforce conformity to the party line.

Of course, most countries that require service aren't developed countries at all, but are third-word dictatorships. America is fundamentally about freedom, and taking away peoples’ freedom to work as they choose will only corrode our belief in American values further.

This next reader is more critical:

This is a horrible idea. Why is it that people who always want a smaller government are completely fine with having said government reach into people’s lives and affect them in the most personal way possible?

First of all, the Millennial generation already has one of the highest rates of volunteerism of any past generation. They are already out there getting things done. It isn’t the 20 year olds who are standing on the GOP platform calling immigrants rapists and murderers. It isn’t the 20 year olds who plunged us into two wars that wrecked havoc on our nation. It isn’t 20 year olds who are plunging that nation into massive debt.

Pay them a modest stipend? Laughable. There are currently 27 million people between that ages of 18 to 24. If we take a rough guess and say they are equal in each year, that is about 3.85 million in each year group. The number of federal workers is, currently, about 2.6 million. Do you seriously think you can more than double the federal workforce? Even if we brought on only two million each year and paid them $20,000 a year, that adds $400 billion to the U.S. budget.

What about command and control? These volunteers need to do something and have some supervision, which means more full-time government workers. I would hazard a guess and say you need one full time for every 20 volunteers, if not more. That means adding another 100,000 federal workers, as well as creating a possible new department. I’d say they would be paid an average of $55,000 a year, costing another $5.5 billion.

And what are these two million people going to do exactly? Probably displace workers that are currently paid now or get paid their “stipend” to do volunteer work that is already done for free.

This idea is less than worthless. It adds to federal power, adds to the federal debt, and costs young people their time for little reward.

Disagree with that reader? Thoughts about national service in general? Drop us a note. Update from a long-time reader, Andrew:

Hope you’ve been well! I wanted to chime in on the national service issue in response to the reader who assumed any such program would be a federal boondoggle. From my reading, the reader’s objections are essentially threefold:

1. Any such program would create a vast new federal payroll.
2. With the new federal employees would come a new supervisory bureaucracy.
3. At any rate, because Millennials volunteer at a higher rate than other generations, the amount of good a national service program would achieve is blunted by Millennials’ natural magnanimity.

Point 1 is pretty valid, but the other two points make some unwarranted assumptions. And I hope that by addressing the other two points, I can convince your reader that it’s a worthy, if expensive, investment.

Regarding point 2, the conclusion that we’d need to create a series of latter-day alphabet agencies to manage the activities of the volunteers is premature. Most federal involvement in volunteership nowadays comes in the form of public-private partnerships. In my time as a legal aid attorney in Los Angeles, I’ve come into contact with an astonishing number of excellent community nonprofits who nevertheless lack grassroots-level manpower to accomplish everything they want to. A nationwide service program could partner with such nonprofits to vastly increase the reach and effectiveness of the services they provide.

Indeed, such a public-private partnership would probably be the best way to conduct such a program, in order to avoid the duplication of services, tap into local reservoirs of knowledge, and, as I’ll explain further in the next point, to promote authentic cross-cultural understanding, empathy, and hopefully solidarity.

On point 3, if you dig into what the Case Foundation Millennial Impact Report actually says (PDF), the picture of Millennial volunteership isn't as rosy as the reader makes it sound. The relevant pages of the report are 17-19. In them, it becomes clear that the Case Report is organized predominately or even exclusively around promoting company-sponsored volunteer projects. It is not a study which is intended to describe the volunteer habits of Millennials outside of work.

Not all volunteer work is created equal. While corporate volunteership is great, its engagement with disadvantaged communities tends to be fleeting and relatively superficial. A bus full of volunteers arrives at a place, tables are set up, services are administered, and then the bus leaves. This is good work, but it’s not anywhere close to the kind of service that McChrystal, Clinton, and others are talking about. Critically, it’s also almost always local, which has a lot of benefits, but doesn’t do much to help Alabamans understand Californians.

What I and (I assume) McChrstyal and Clinton envision is something much closer to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where young people live and work in the communities they are serving every day, sometimes in towns and cities thousands of miles from where they grew up.

Living in a place confers a very different kind of experience from simple charity. You are immersed; you meet people and their families; you learn to care because those people are your people now; your neighborhood is their neighborhood; your work is intimately involved in people’s lives; and they count on you. You learn to recognize the inalienable dignity and worth of people who are completely different from you—in short, kinship and solidarity.

This kind of experience changes hearts and minds; I’ve seen it. As Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree, “It’s impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.” I don’t know what national service is like in other countries, but I’d hope American national service would look something like this.

Finally, who said that it has to be compulsory? Tie national service to tuition for higher education or trades. Create a culture of incentives where doing the service year becomes an expectation of citizenship. None of this will be easy, but it is possible—and the potential benefits could radically change the way Americans think about one another.

Thanks for putting up with this wall of text!

Another reader illustrates how service in Israel isn’t exactly compulsory:

The divisions in Israeli politics aren’t lessened by national service, because it’s less mandatory in reality than on paper. Haredim have enjoyed exemptions from the founding of the state until quite recently, and the struggle to draft them is one source of the division. Arabs are exempt, except for Druze. Exemplary students can get exemptions. I think the stat is something like only a bit more than half of Israelis actually serve. Get that back to where it was 30 years ago, and you might see some greater unity and understanding.

Another reader, Susanna, looks at a few more countries:

The term “national service” has very broad meaning, not necessarily military service. I’d like to see a national service that has different branches: health, education, service and military and each branch sees participants working in underserved areas of the U.S. and a compulsory period overseas. It’s an important part of education to learn about other countries and all those countries you cite in the article have easy access to other cultures. America does not.

I traveled a lot in Europe in the ’80s and ’90s and met many Greeks who talked glowingly of their national service days. Many of those I met worked in hospitals and health centers. They worked a lot with the elderly. Even my parents’ generation in England had some good things to say about their service days. It was the first time they got to travel and really experience the countries they fought with and against during the war.

This ultimately humanizing experience could do so much good.

• Like a soldier in battle, the woman who gives birth must shed her blood to do it. For nine months she donates her blood and bodily substance to the baby growing within her. Osteoporosis, anemia, and other maladies often result—injury and death, occasionally. In the act of childbirth, a woman actually spills her blood.
• Even women who do not give birth or do not plan to are subject to the physiology adapted for the purpose. Thus women shed blood monthly in a cycle of preparation for pregnancy. Menstruation, awkward as it sounds, is the female draft.
• This feminine physiology—not merely menstruation but the whole feminine mode of being human—renders military life more onerous for most women than for most men, in ways that are obvious to most people.
• In nearly all civilizations, the childbearing class is preserved as such by exemption from military duty.
• Israel’s policy is born out of an unusually necessitous situation: a small country under continuous attack. It is still not ideal.
• What women desire is the liberty for exceptional women to do things that most women don’t want to do. We do not generally wish to force the activities of the exceptional woman upon the ordinary woman. We feel that the ordinary woman is, compared to the ordinary man, exceptional enough.

If you would like to address that argument, drop me a note and I’ll update. I’ll just quickly point out—because it’s close to home for me—that having children and serving in the military are by no means mutually exclusive; my mother had two sons and a long career in the U.S. Army. When I was born, she left active duty to focus on raising my brother and me but returned after several years and eventually retired as a full colonel, outranking my father. Unlike him, she never deployed to a war zone, but her best friend—a mother of three and high-ranking Air Force officer—did.

If you’re a woman who’s been deployed, especially in a combat unit, and would like to share your perspective, please say hello@. Update from a reader, Rory, who makes an essential point:

The push to register women for the draft is based on the idea that women are now eligible for combat so they should share the load, but the simple fact is only a minuscule number of women would ever be able to contribute in a combat role. In any draft scenario, all that would happen would be that men would automatically be sent to the front lines while women would fill all the support positions.

Women registering for the selective service would only provide an illusion of equality. The politicians will decide the issue based on ideology and gender optics, but I doubt the generals in Washington are factoring women into their contingency war plans.

Just because different people would have different roles in a draft, and because men and women would on average serve in different ways, I don’t think that’s an “illusion of equality.” All Americans would be serving in some way, based on their individual capabilities—just as the draft was done back in the day but with various kinds of men.

Enemies of the draft expansion see themselves as defending an old and noble chivalric idea about the male duty to protect—one of the last remaining justifications men have for themselves in modern society. Advocates of the expansion, on the other hand, see it as a way to reify an important conviction that the differences between men and women aren’t substantive enough to mean that the genders should play different roles. Some also see it as a basic issue of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, not to mention a a matter of basic fairness.

When the sides of a debate don’t even agree on what the debate is really about, things tend to get heated. According to one Atlantic reader who supports the draft expansion:

What it’s about is the fact that Hunter really would prefer if women couldn’t serve in many posts at all. He thought the draft threat was enough to get women’s advocates and political representatives to back down on the issues. He completely misread them, as well as women in general. It turns out, women don’t object to women being drafted. Many actually support the idea quite strongly. That was pretty easy to see beforehand, except for those who are really ignorant on the subject.

But it’s not all that simple, according to recent survey summarized by Roll Call:

Women are much less likely than men to say women should be required to register for Selective Service when they turn 18, according to a poll conducted June 18-20 by The Economist/YouGov. Thirty-nine percent of women supported registration for women, compared to 61 percent of men.

It’s impossible to know why this is, but one explanation more or less suggests itself. We are, after all, talking about people being forcibly shipped off to war, and regardless of one’s stance about the principle of the thing, that’s not the most attractive proposition in the world. But as another reader points out:

There is a difference between not personally wanting to be drafted, or not believing in the draft, and not believing women should be drafted simply because they’re women.

Plenty of people twist themselves into knots decrying how horrible it is that some Americans don’t pay taxes or receive government subsidies, but then they always have a reason why industries they’re in should receive help from the government, or why people in their particular situation should receive tax breaks. It’s just as dishonest. Pretending to hide behind some sort of principle just because you benefit in the short term is not being principled.

Should principle guide policy in this case? If so, what principle? To join the debate about whether women should have to register for the draft, and why or why not, send us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.