Can it, for instance, maintain conscription, long thought essential to help keep the army from becoming a "state within the state"?
Defying his own conservative Christian Social Union party, which wants to maintain conscription, Mr. Guttenberg has spent the past 10 months questioning the value of calling up young men to do six months' service.
If the preliminary results showing 59.8 percent in favor of maintaining conscription are upheld, it would bode well for the center-right People's Party, which favored maintaining the 35,000-member conscription military as the best way to ensure neutral Austria's security.
BERN, Switzerland — For the third time in almost 25 years, Switzerland has overwhelmingly voted to maintain its conscription army.
They refused to be drafted into the army, maintaining that conscription would leave the homeland of the Khitans unprotected from rival tribes on the steppes.
The Pentagon estimates that the Iranian government, which has mandatory military conscription, has approximately 20 million men available for military service, four times the total number of the citizens of Israel, which also maintains a conscription service.
Denmark maintains military conscription for which all men become liable at age 18.
Both sides initially relied on voluntary enlistments, but both had eventually to resort to conscription to maintain their vast armies in the field.
Borden's Conservative administration confronted unprecedented administrative, financial, and political challenges during the years of World War I, and when, despite the voluntary recruitment of half a million Canadians for overseas service, conscription was required to maintain the Canadian forces at full strength, he initiated the formation of a coalition government.
They must maintain their exemption status from age 18, when conscription begins, until they are 35 or 41, depending on how many children they have.
First and most basic was the decision in 1973, at the end of combat operations in Vietnam, to depart from the tradition of the citizen-soldier by ending conscription and establishing a large, professional, all-volunteer force to maintain the global commitments we have assumed since World War II.
