It’s crazy to think a 39 year old got drafted.
Why?
As the other commenter said. There is a reason drafting is normally done at a young age. Once you get to late 30s. It takes effort to stay fit. Most folks having done a desk job in that time. Are not suitable for the sort of roles conscription is generally used for.
Conscripts tend to need to be trained in ways older minds are less willing to accept. Amd tend to still be used for tasks that are more physically demanding then professional soldiers.
Now back in ww2 the UK did draft older people. So it is lass rare in Ukraine like situations. But it dose show how rare such situations have been in the last 40 years or so. That many of us have grown up never seeing a draft get so desperate for people.
Unlike some posters on lemmy claim. It is not really a sign that NATO nations will look to conscription yet. Or at least those that do not do so in genral will not need to move to doing so. The simple,e fact that nato nations are drawing from well over 900m people to russias 145m. Means it will take a major change before Russia is able to form a ground war within nato territory. Even the new ones of sweeden and Finland. Russia would need some seriose funding and rebalencing to be able to threaten the professional forces in a way that would look for conscription.
But this dose paint a clear picture of how bad things actually are in the Ukraine.
The 77th Infrantry Division would be the counterpoint to “older conscripts are harder to train and can’t keep up”.
Success is no proof of comparative ease.
Just that the division is actual evidence that a different approach is needed. And let’s face it. In most daily situations the military has a do it the way we always have attitude.
Thanks for sharing though. Its a good story to share.
As I said we did it in the UK. Not just with regular troops in ww2. But spy units were trained in secret (along with the home gaurd). To act as a resistance if Germany ever took the UK.
This was made up of retired and protected industry non conscripts.
Much of it only released under the official secrets act in the last 20 years. They were literally trained to sabertarge the German lines and keep the resistance active if our government was removed.
But as I say. Its a different thing to train older people. Unless they have had reason to remain fit. Many take more time. And care to train to military standards. The higher level their carreer the more likely much of it was spent at a desk.
And teens leaving school are more used to being directed in the way they are expected to think. Old folks have good reason to think they may know better.
As I said harder to train not impossible. Often best with a more flexible approach then the break down and rebuild most basic training attempts.
And my grandfather died a few years back. But could not keep up was not a phrase I’d dare use untill the last few years. But generalisations have value when folks are making decisions based on a whole nation.
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Because we’re old now man, we always perceived being drafted as a thing that happened in your 20s like it worked for our parents during Vietnam.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A man who spent two years moderating one of the internet’s most influential sources of information on Ukraine is being called up to fight against Russia.
Then, a few months before Russia invaded in February 2022, he joined r/Ukraine as a moderator, one of the users empowered to help shape the subreddit’s conversation.
It became a key source of information on the war, often breaking news of major events and featuring gritty combat videos that mainstream journalists scrambled to confirm.
Sokalskii — who uses the username “JesterBoyd” — said he uses Reddit to convey what he sees as “objective truth” about the war to its members, predominantly in the US, UK, and Germany.
In August, Zelenskyy fired all of Ukraine’s military recruitment chiefs after an investigation revealed they were accepting up to $10,000 in bribes to help people avoid being drafted.
And stay dry — this is a survival thing: being miserable grinds people down mentally so they make stupid decisions," one person wrote in the thread he started.
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