All periods of national service are indefinite - until employment through training or further education.

Just like in the middle ages when you went to prison for not being tax - and were not let out until you paid it.

Good thinking mark !

Would it not provide more jobs than taking away?

And I guess it would make the contractors more competitive, they will be skilled, whilst the dolers will just be manual labour.

that depends on the job, there are a lot of unskilled jobs out there.

personally, Id give them all a wallpaper scraper, point them to a street & get them to scrape all the chewing gum off the pavements.

Actually, thinking about national service wouldnt work would it.
I mean when it was around Britian still had colonial interests, so i imagine a lot of the conscripts went overseas. Now we have this "force projection" thing where the size of the armed forces is quite small compared to historical numbers

and as other people have said, were having trouble equipping the men we have now, imagine outfitting maybe twice as many!