Will increasing the number of soldiers strengthen the TSK?

What has been reflected so far from the new concept study conducted by the General Staff on the length of military service shows that the short-term military service applied to university graduates will be ended. This is also an expression of the fact that the TSK needs more privates. This need has grown to the point that it cannot be met from those without a university education.

One of the sociologically understandable or explicable reasons for this can be tied to the progress Turkish society is experiencing in education. The increase recorded in recent years in the number of those studying at university in Turkey also leads to an increase in the number of those doing short-term military service. Naturally, since this reduces the number of those doing long-term service, it leads to a decrease in the total number of soldiers. Since Turkey's university enrollment rate increases with each passing day, we can expect that this trend will develop further against the number of soldiers with each passing day.

The TSK's turning, on this assessment, to abolish the privilege it granted university graduates in military service seems at first glance a simple necessity.

However, when the matter is related to the number of soldiers, which has been debated for years, it is truly hard to understand why the TSK stays at this level of assessment. For it has been seen sufficiently that the number of soldiers in Turkey has been of no benefit in the face of many concrete problems encountered. It is now a clear fact that numerical size does not constitute a deterrent either in the fight against terror or in national or international security, and on the contrary means nothing other than growing the institution's bureaucratic volume to the point of making it unwieldy.

In the debate we have only just been living through, the TSK stated that it had neither the equipment nor trained personnel to clear the mines that it had itself previously laid on the Syrian border. That an army holding the title of having, numerically, the largest army in NATO after America's has not developed these cadres among so many personnel should in itself be warning enough.

Again, for years there has been a growing expectation in Turkey that a more equipped and professional army concept be developed in place of a numerically so voluminous army. Because developments in the world and the sociological development of society make continuing with the old conscription concept ever more meaningless, unnecessary and non-functional.

An increase in the number of soldiers does not bring a stronger army; on the contrary, it makes the army's management more difficult, raises its cost, and, in parallel with social development, also reduces faith in the moral development provided by military service.

It must not be neglected that a decline in belief in the necessity of a military service that does not develop in parallel with the ever-increasing rationalization in society will have many other social costs.

The signs of this have been given for some time. The martyrs given in a wearisome fight against terror no longer flatter people's national or religious pride at all; on the contrary, they hurt more and create irreparable resentments toward the nation, the state, the army and the homeland.

That in the Southeast, where soldiers are today actually employed in the greatest numbers, people fall victim to terror so easily sufficiently shows that what is needed is no longer the number of soldiers but a very good counter-terrorism policy. It is clear that this fight is not only a military fight.

Everyone must have seen that the more the military, which insists on taking the counter-terrorism issue in the Southeast as a purely military subject and declares this subject an entirely "forbidden zone" for politics, goes at the problem with its own methods, the more it closes the field to politics, the more it enlarges the problem. It is obvious that there is no result to be obtained by massing armies there. The subject must now be taken wholly into the political sphere.

The loss of national wealth that the regulation on the agenda, which would also cover those who have received a university education in military service, will cause should also be dwelt on separately. The "service to the homeland" of our highly educated young people, which cost great national wealth, can be, and should be, "levied" by other means.

But the decision to send these young people, educated in a postmodern world, back to the world of the Cold War years and keep them from a life that is their right should no longer be made so easily.