In the conventional view, the earliest preparations for war involve building a strong industrial base, reducing corruption, and securing alliances through cooperative foreign policy. The near-term preparations for war include diverting a fraction of total resources away from compounding growth and towards non-compounding defense manufacturing. A draft is something you do after the war starts.
The strategic idea is to remain in a pose of compounding growth as long as possible by avoiding war and war preparations until they're known to be absolutely necessary. Peacetime investments like scientific research build on themselves, while military spending sits in a depot until it's obsolete and then costs even more to safely dispose. The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
> The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
This may be true in an American context (though I don't actually know) in the sense that the US military is highly specialized and matrixed. In smaller militaries soldiers tend to be more generalist, while still having specializations.
e.g., they say in the British forces, if you ask an artillery soldier what they do, it's a little bit of everything. In the US military, a soldier might say "I pull the rope!" Not a good use of talent.
There are other bases besides war for national service, eg disaster prep, taking care of the poor and so on. In any case, being somewhat prepared for war at the human level and understanding what that entails is more productive that not being prepared and having to educate people in an unwelcome emergency.
The same goes for replacing the first two years of professional school with standing around in a big shed.
Exaggerated tropes like this don't make for useful discussion.
One of the paradoxes of military service is that the real experiences of servicemembers sound exaggerated, while what sounds like reality is expressed through Hollywood tropes.
From some quick googling, I think the average firefighter fights about two fires per month, which is pretty good! And the average specialized wildlands kind of firefighter fights fires much more often.
But firefighters don't just fight fires, they mostly do medical emergencies, which keep them very busy. And that's the problem with standing armies: we generally don't want soldiers doing a bunch of other kinds of work besides wars because they're around.
You can only prepare for a fire before it starts.