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In tanknet we have many members who at some point served as conscripts in their nation’s military (eg Germany, Sweden, Finland, Yugoslavia, Estonia etc). Some served more recently, some more distantly in the past. There are similarities and differences in how those conscription systems work, and on what they expect from their conscript soldiers. My question is to see how they organized their training, and what the opinion of those who went through it is. I mean for example, how long was basic training and how good or bad do you thing it was? How was your specialty training? What followed after that? How much ammunition did you consume in training? How was the daily life in the battalion? How much time was spent on chores and guard duty compared to training? How were the conscript NCOs and Reserve Officers selected? At what point during the conscript service did they deviate from the rest of the privates? How long and how good was their training? What general impression did you get of the whole thing? Discipline, cohesion, morale etc. I am VERY interested to read your opinions and experiences.

This video shows some Greek army tankers doing a piece of training in what I understand is the tank training center at Litochoro, with a M48A3 MOLF tank. I found the video interesting, although I know nothing about crewing a tank, besides some generic knowledge. What is also interesting are the comments under the video, which are quite negative. Apparently commentators believe the crew is doing things improperly. What is also intersting is that the people in the video are professional enlisted, rather than the conscripts who manned the tanks in the Greek army until the 1990's, yet people comment that they are "wasted money". I cannot judge the video by myself, but I am very interested to see the honest opinion of tanknet's veteran tankers.