I believe in mandatory services but SL has a lot of things wrong and they should be addressed. For example at present, SL has huge army but 70% of them are not fit, 60% are not equipped probably, there are too many elders in there, there is lack of organization and accountability.
I would suggest:
1) Organizing them into six divisions.
2) Age limit should be 19-38.
3) Females should be encouraged to join, they don't need to be in the battle field but they can sure work in offices,
4) There should be medical division and food and logistical body.
5) Wages should be increased based on number of years served. A new recruit should not be getting same pay as some one who has been with the force for 10 years.
6) When they are not in combat, they should be despatched to help poor families and doing free labor such as helping build barkaado for nomads, wells, new homes, paving roads, collecting sand, stone for Municipal Councils (for roads, pavements)...they should help with the trash.
90% of the time they are sitting there chewing khat and receiving 60% of the region's total GDP.
They need to get to work and start doing things. Army isn't just for war.
Exactly.
There should be a 2 years service.
Those who have university/college or higher education would be exempt untill graduation, they can go into the officer program.
Everyone else should rise through ranks from NCO to officer.
We have allot of successful and relative models to use.
The training period required to turn fresh recruits into basic functioning armed force is actually pretty low.
No more 3 months of intensive training is needed. The rest of the 2 years should be spent on education/literacy, and periodic training upgrades.
by building roads, wells, farming etc they should be receiving training as well and they will be able to create their own businesses, when they finish their terms.
The national service is not just defense but a tool of development, and education.
From this pool of national service you can identify talent and concentrate them in special groups and push them harder and provide a higher level of training and development.
You can teach an illiterate geeljire or ciyaal suuq kid the entire high school curriculum in a few months, you can teach then advanced skills in electronics/software/electrical other engineering and medical knowledge in 1/2 the time it takes a university or less , depending on their level of intelligence.
Isreal has such a program, so does singapore.
Isreal has national service from 18 years on for 3 years , they have special programs from under 18's of special talent,
they have 15 to 18 year olds doing university level work before national service, and during national service allot of them are doing PHD level work before they are 22 years old.
I have a cousin that i met when i was a 15 and he was older at 20, the family got him a residence visa in the emirates.
He grew up in the bush, and was a geeljire and illiterate, never stepping inside a school.
when they put him into special night classes, he excelled and was fluent in arabic and english and hindi/urdu in a year.
He had an instinctive understanding of mathematics, never studied it.
In under a year he was helping me with my GCSE' maths. He was taking apart TV' radios and repairing them and could fix any car problems.
There must be thousand of people like him out there.