I thought that was Churchill. Or maybe more than one of them said it. The way I heard it, when Churchill was Secretary of the Navy in his young years he made some change to regulations. "But that's a tradition of the Royal Navy," he was told. "The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash," he said.

>Yeah, to make conscription work you kind of have to adopt a training and discipline model that has gone out of fashion. Wellington used to refer to his troops as "the scum of the earth" - even after they defeated Napoleon. And Nelson, of course, said the British Navy was sustained by "rum, buggery, and the lash". (though come to think of it, if you dropped any ban on gays in the navy you might be able to put that on a recruiting poster on Fire Island <bg>)
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>>That's a good point about some of our citizens not being the type we would acting on our behalf.
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>>>I agree in principle that public service is a good thing, but i would object to the universal conscription ( to whatever service ) on very pragmatic grounds -
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>>>The bureaucracy it would create would be stunningly bloated, inefficient, make-workish and generally everything I abhor about big government.
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>>>And, a good number of the our fellow citizens would be more trouble than they would be worth in terms of getting any kind of useful service out of them.
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>>>Rewards, education etc in return for public service is workable, but it would be a voluntary and hopefully very selective process. Increase military pay and benefits to where it is a very desirable career for the high qualified and highly motivated. Subsidize education for those who will commit to public service when the education is completed ( medical school of course comes to mind, but lots of science, IT etc technologies could benefit.)
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>>>But draft the dregs and try to get something useful out of them in 2 years?
>>> - laudatory in terms of egalitarianism but doesn't accurately reflect the state of the raw material.
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>>>>I agree that service to volunteer organizations should count as well. I did not mean to limit the type of service, only that it should benefit the public.