South Korea is running out of 20-year-olds to draft, and the proposals to fill the gap are getting more extreme by the month.

South Korea is running out of 20-year-olds to draft, and the proposals to fill the gap are getting more extreme by the month. The pool of 20-year-old men stood at 334,000 in 2020. By 2025 it was 236,000. By 2040 it falls to 138,000. To staff 500,000 troops at an 18-month term, the Army needs about 222,000 conscripts a year. So the search for bodies has expanded. Sung Il-jong, who chairs the National Assembly's defense committee, has drafted a special law to hire healthy veterans in their 50s and 60s as civilian guards at around 2 million won a month, on the reasoning that there are no young soldiers while older ones stay fit. Ahn Gyu-back, the defense minister, has floated outsourcing 150,000 noncombat jobs (gate control and kitchens and perimeter watch) to contractors and retirees. President Lee Jae-myung has set a target of raising defense spending to 3.5% of GDP and has campaigned on a selective volunteer track. But, by far, the most flammable version addresses the elephant in the room directly, and asks whether the other half of the population should be drafted. The women's-conscription debate has run with increasing seriousness since 2017. The Constitutional Court has repeatedly upheld male-only service while also urging the legislature to take mixed conscription seriously as fertility falls. Park Jin-su, a political scientist at Duksung Women's University, calls filling the gap with women without first changing what military service is, loosely translated, “hot potato.” What he means is, each proposal treats the symptom. None of them touches what the point of 250 kilometers of wire is when, year by year, it increasingly runs out of men to stand next to it all.