More precisely, the question from the title should read: what will military service do for us, an army that will be served by the unwilling. Reluctant? Yes, that's right: despite the psychological-propaganda kit (as Antonije Pušić would say) called videos and television series, it seems that people are not too happy to join the professional army. So they will have to by force of law.
Reluctants, therefore, will go to infantry training. Because, I guess that's the meaning of that two-and-a-half-month stay in the barracks. After all, that's what we, the JNA sufferers, did too, kicked out of the most beautiful and potentially longest vacations of our high school lives: many excellent bands broke up due to military service, many football players remained only at the level of provincial dribblers. Only my friend Miljenko Jergović profited from serving in the hell of the Lastovo and Knin barracks: he became the best Croatian writer after Krleža. And wider. Because what else can you do there, except to fight with erotic stimuli in the form of ripped old issues of pornographic magazines or to become a writer.
Bitter joke aside, the re-introduction of compulsory military service in such an abbreviated form that, apart from an "assault division" and one tactical shooting, these male youth will learn nothing, especially not how to survive, seems more like a political exhibition than a the order of time in which it is necessary to defend the homeland by all means, including trained recruits.
After all, we have two current and horrifying conflicting examples: the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the number of dead recruits show all the senselessness of that type of army, just like the Israeli counterstrike against Palestinian terrorists, as, at the very least, exceeding the necessary defense, and indeed a form of bloody sanitation terrain that mostly affects innocents (20.000 dead children), show all the "advantages" of an absolutely militarized society in which state ideology is more important than humanity. The first one is close to us and our understanding of the army, if we are to believe our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers throughout the twentieth century. The other is not close to us. And, did I say, thank God it wasn't.
Why, then, infantry training without specialist training? What will these children learn about the arts of war? Atomic right! - so you throw yourself to the left, because - what? - an atomic bomb passes over you and everything will be harašo (Serbian: okay). And what if, as in NATO aggression, you never see the enemy while he is showering you with cluster bombs? What exactly is our doctrine? Back then, it was a theory about an armed people, which is why we used ONO and DSZ in high schools and colleges, which mainly served to improve or spoil the overall average of school success. A standing army is the most expensive army, and if it is not professional, then it is - cannon fodder. The idea is, therefore, that professionals command and manage the units, and that children die as third parties at Duško Kovačević in Aždaha.
The children will learn what they already know, as we learned it in the eighties of the last century in the JNA: everything that is wrong in the big social lie of the authoritarian order - hypocrisy, corruption, murder of spirit and intellect. That is why that army passed as it passed: dishonored and scattered. What is born hump... etc.
That monument to an unknown deserter from the wars of the nineties could have been a certain sign of spiritual health. It just never got picked up.
Bonus video:
