Finland has a history of needing to fight off a much larger expansionist neighbor. One who has recently (a few years ago) annexed more territory while the rest of the world sat around and did nothing.

Or are you asking why they don't extend the mandatory service to women? The reasons for that are somewhat historic and very _biotruth_. A country that fights a devastating war that wipes out 90% of the men but keeps the women can recover. A country that has 90% of the women wiped out but leaves the men is completely screwed.

If there was ever a situation where there was a genuine risk of a significant portion of the military being killed, it would not be difficult to withdraw all women from the military at that point. And I do not think there has been a single country in modern history that was at a genuine risk of being wiped out due to combat deaths, even if all of those combat deaths had been men instead of women.

To me this incredibly small risk does not seem to be worth holding one gender back over another, increasing the gender gap for no reason. Forcing someone to work just because of their gender seems very wrong to me.

But those aren't the two options. If loss of life were equal due to equal participation, you'd get 45% loss of each sex (using your 90% of men figure as the potential loss), which (while still devastating) isn't the same argument for losing the breeding capacity of the country.

The reality is that those sorts of rules are very much based on culture tradition ('historic'). It takes a long time for parts of our culture to change. Only a few countries have mandatory service for women (Finland's neighbors Norway and Sweden among them). Israel does as well, but has a large exception on religious grounds.

Also, mandatory service doesn't necessarily mean mandatory combat service, although I don't know how those countries just mentioned manage that.

Scenario A: 100 women, 100 men. 100 men go off to war, 10 men return. But with polygamy, 100 women have 100 children for the next generation.

Scenario B: 100 women, 100 men. 50 women and 50 men go off to war, 5 men and 5 women return. You have 55 women left in the population and 55 children for the next generation.

The limiting factor in human population growth is the number of women that can have children. The cold calculus might be distasteful, but it is there.

by adding polygamy into the mix, you're moving the goalposts of what is really just an intellectual exercise here. The reality is that these sorts of laws are put in place based on what the lawmakers feel is culturally acceptable (tradition). Pretty confident the people arguing for male-only conscription aren't putting much weight on polygamy in their thinking. What they're really thinking is that they need male soldiers to win their war or defend their country...

It's not even official polygamy, it's just people being people and life finding a way. Lots of single mother households raising a bunch of kids. The balance is mostly restored in the next generation.

The cold calculus is also hopelessly outdated in so many ways given the timescales of modern wars and modern transportation speed and connection. Even in an extended war the reproductive capacity is frankly irrelevant as even 1 million moms can't pop out a fully trained soldier. And it isn't a matter of cannonfodder anyway. Gender ratios and population growth may be resolved better by immigration than enforced by isolation polygamy.

You do have another 45 men who aren't dead. They appreciate that a lot. You left that out...like it's always left out.

It's a good thing then we don't have any country with just 200 people in them.

It's same excuse used when someone asks why safety of women comes before men, conveniently ignoring that the scenario itself is so far out, it's not going to happen.

Do you not understand what an example is?

multiple 200 by whatever number you feel will represent a true population.

Israel has mandatory service for women and men, and has presently one of the most advanced armed forces.

AFAIK, in Israel women serve less time and in less dangerous roles. The only culture that I know of, which seems to have somewhat equal burden of war fighting are the Peshmerga/Kurds.

They can thank the US for footing the bill for all those war toys.

What kind of situation wipes out the army, then leaves the country alone to recover?

The kind where you are conquered but the population survives as a vassal state.

So, the strategic planning was done by Dr. Strangelove?

Switzerland is in the same position. You cannot get a majority for abolishing the draft, so it is here to stay (for now). You also cannot get a majority for extending it to women, for those who support the military tend to also be those who hold more conservative values, and those who seek egalitarianism tend to be those who would want to abolish the draft.

Because there is a law for mandatory service, and nobody wants to extend it to women.

Women can volunteer and some of them do.

This is the norm almost everywhere that has conscription. There's a map of countries with conscription on Wikipedia (blue, red, and yellow): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription

Jehovas witnesses in Finland were exempt from the military service until last year. Someone took it to court and the ruling was that you can't discrimate certain groups based on their religion. I think it's only a question of time before it is brought up as gender discrimination and the exemption will be removed.

There are some political interest in changing in mostly from the youth branches of the political parties but the "real" politicians mostly stick their fingers in their ears. I suppose it is more or less political suicide to try to change the statsu quo as would affect a huge amount of voters negatively.

Turns out feminists don't want the 'right' to be considered as expendable resources, so they conveniently pretend it doesn't exist.