Freedom!

In plain English; you'll spend most of your time sleeping, playing Wii and eating candy.

That's the essentials of guard duty, I hear.

 

Actually that goes for everyone. Though the odds of Sweden being invaded are rather low.

 

And I won't dispute that. I'm just stating that your absolute is false.

 

Apart from errors in your grammar, that does appear to be more correct yes. Though a situation where a group of civilians open fire against a military base is not impossible either, however improbable.

 

It's compulsory. In Norway the compulsory time is one year, I'd guess the same is the case in Sweden.

 

I believe that it depends a bit on what you do. Rangers have a longer period of training than mere cannon fodder, for example.

In any case, it's compulsory general conscription in theory but you could say that it's voluntary in practice. The Swedish army has been dismantled to the point of being a joke, as very few young men are actually admitted to military training. An extremely slight hearing problem was all it took for me to get out of it, for example. While it was sure nice not having to give one year of my life to the state, there are times when I kinda feel cheated on something that could have been an interesting experience. If nothing else, I like yelling at people, and if I'd been promoted to furir (lance corporal) I would have had plenty of opportunity to do that.

Nowadays is a wholly different world really. People in my dad's generation had to be declared clinically dead by three independent doctors before anyone would even dream of letting them skip basic combat training, and Sweden could quickly mobilize two million men to defend the country when the army was at its peak. Now the armed forces is more like the most expensive daycare in the world and couldn't defend us from an invasion consisting solely of Xz's dear old grandmother. Finland spend half the money we do on their army, yet have twice the combat potential we have and they're laughing at us all the way to the sauna. And they used to be our imperial subjects, our bitches. It's bloody disgraceful, that's what it is.

Russia needs to go Soviet again so this nation can grow itself a pair of balls.

 

If it's anything like in Norway, they'll force anyone who doesn't want to join, while refusing a lot of the people who do want to join.

 

That's true as well. It's a fucking failure all the way through.