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This probably deserves its own thread to explore properly, since it's a tricky question. Technically it's true that it could be seen as a form of slavery. But on the other hand, if you aspire to live in a country with any political freedoms, don't you basically have to take some level of responsibility for physically defending it from hostile aggressors who would crush that freedom? Feels pretty abstract in a country like America, but not so much in places like the above where powerful and far more numerous adversaries are only a short distance away, could invade at any moment and crush any illusion of liberty you might have had.
Political freedom is not a function of the state but the individuals ability to commit violence against the state. Knights were free and serfs were slaves not because of some deriliction or philosopgical disposition of the king, but because the knights could rebel and offer violence to the king but the serfs could not even offer violence to the knights.
Likewise the North American colonists were able to gain so much more freedom than their European counterparts because they were armed and could murder government officials... Even Canada has had more rebellions in the past 200 years than Brittain.
Making oneself subservient, even in an armed role, to the state does nothing to gain one liberty Ask all those russian concripts who died with no political freedom under communism.
One does not gain freedom by fighting the state's enemies. One gains freedom by making the state your enemy
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If the government can unilaterally send you to die in the trenches then your freedom is already crushed
Likewise if a country cannot raise enough people who care about it enough to fight for it on their own volition, then perhaps it ceasing to exist as an independent entity is not such a bad thing
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