Mandatory military service is actually a good thing, people only sneer at the idea because they haven't thought it through. Correlation and causality, of course, are not the same, but it's still interesting that all the Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden) do have military service. Exactly the countries that are always louded for all sorts of success and looked at with envy by almost everyone.
Left is especially mislead on this point, because they always talk about collectives, collectivities and how to build collectives and how to maintain them and so on and so forth, while the real answer is staring them right in the face. Anti-militarism is a lousy position and professionalization of army has been a disaster in the long run.
P.S. Pointless wars are a different issue though. But there would be less of those if citizens actually had a skin in the game.