South Korea does rethink on military conscription

SEOUL • South Korea, a country still technically at war with the North, is rethinking the draft. A rite of passage for millions of young men since the Korean War, the country's military conscription policies are gradually getting chipped away.

Lawmakers are carving out more exemptions. Some conscientious objectors can avoid criminal records. Some leaders want to include women to make up for a shortfall in the ranks, while others want to do away with the draft altogether.

"There's a growing sense of the price we pay for running the conscription system," said research professor of history Kang Inhwa at Seoul National University.

Conscription has long been seen as a bulwark against threats from North Korea which, in numbers at least, has a robust military.

In addition to its nuclear weapons, the North has 1.88 million troops, with 1.28 million active and 600,000 in the reserves, and it likes to show off their toughness.

A military build-up in China has added to pressure on Seoul to strengthen its military.

South Korea is one of the few industrialised countries that still drafts its young people. Less than a third of the world's economies actively draft their people into the military, according to a Pew Research analysis from 2019.

Taiwan phased out mandatory conscription in 2018. In the United States, the military draft is authorised but not implemented now.

South Korea has stepped up its pace as other places step back because its rapidly declining birthrate has led to a deficit of conscripts. Its military is one of the largest in the world, with about 3.3 million troops - 555,000 active and 2.75 million in the reserves.

It has expanded the proportion of young men it conscripts, from about 50 per cent in the 1980s to more than 90 per cent today, by loosening eligibility requirements.

As conscription has risen, however, public attitudes have cooled. In a survey conducted in May by Gallup Korea, 42 per cent of South Korean adults said they supported maintaining the current conscription system - a 6 percentage point decrease from 2016.

In 2014, a majority - nearly 56 per cent - of those polled by Monoresearch said the conscription system should be maintained.

Critics of South Korea's conscription system have said that it has helped cultivate an institution riddled with abuse and discrimination and that it has kept men in their prime from the labour force.

Earlier this year, a Netflix show critical of conscription became an unexpected hit in South Korea. Called DP, for deserter pursuit, it followed a fictional private assigned to capture deserters, whose stories portrayed the emotional toll of conscription.

Although the military has said it would stop dispatching its personnel to capture deserters starting next year, the show resonated with many viewers and even prompted some politicians to weigh in.

Mr Hong Jun-pyo, a candidate in next year's presidential election and a lawmaker in the opposition People Power Party, said on Facebook he had watched the show and was in favour of shifting the military to an all-volunteer force.

Hundreds of fans on social media said the abuse it portrayed resonated with their own painful experiences in the military.

Even defenders of conscription say the military must take steps to make service more appealing. The number of men in their 20s is expected to halve by 2040, said Mr Ahn Seok Ki, a researcher in the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses.

That means the military may not be able to field the number of people it needs unless it incentivises recruits to stay for longer stints and gets more volunteers to join.

"The conscription system should be maintained," he said.

"It is impractical to switch to an all-volunteer system. But it is possible to reduce the number of conscripts and increase the number of volunteers... To do so, a lot of changes have to be made to make the military more suitable for the younger generation," he added.

Meanwhile, the government has cut the length of service, which varies by branch, by several months, paved a path for conscientious objectors to perform alternative service in a civilian setting; and postponed service for K-pop stars until they turn 30.

NYTIMES