Summary
Both Blythe and De Souza discuss conscription, but they have very different opinion about whether Australia should bring back conscription. According to Blythe, Australia has faced serious threats while there is a shortfall in numbers of military, and join to army can benefit young people in many ways such as learning teamwork leadership and responsibility and improving job-related skills. He also points out that conscription is fair because it does not regard any personal background. As De Souza, he is strongly against conscription. He argues that military culture is dangerous because it is violent and joining army may include killing or being killed. In term of threat, De Souza asserts that Australia has no direct threats from surrounding countries and if the government reinforces the armed forces, it would lead other countries nervous and real threat. In the end, he points out that there are other ways to solve the short fall like better pay and condition and for young people to serve the nation such as working for hospital or school.

Discussion
Consider the so called threat aimed at Australia, De Souza gives more reasonable argument. In fact, there are only 13 countries in Oceania around Australia, except New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the rest of 11countries all have small land size and small population, they all have well relationship with Australia including the two former countries, so actually there are no obvious threat to Australia. While as soon as Australia strengthens the military forces just like increasing the number of army, it would make some countries consider Australia is being a threat. For example, think about the situation of the North Korea, because they restart the nuclear experiment even they claimed that it just for civil use, many countries like the USA China and Russia began to be very nervous and asked them to stop it.
In the end of Blythe’s article, he assumes that many successful countries have compulsory national service but this may not be the case because they have their particular conditions. Firstly, those countries he gives as examples are mostly having relative small population such as Singapore Greece and Denmark or sharing very different culture with surrounding countries like Brazil.