I've both seen and read Starship Troopers. I think most people are familiar with Verhoeven's heavy-handed satire, but Heinlein was serious. Leave it to a WWII vet to think the problem with Kids These Days is they weren't forced to stab enough Japs.

The United States of America, here in 2026, operates the world's largest army, the world's largest navy, the worlds largest and second largest air forces, a marine corps, a coast guard and a motherfucking space force entirely manned by volunteers, and we have to keep picking fights with towel heads on the other side of the planet to justify it. What do you think we'd have to do to the rest of you fuckers if we had to find a place in the military for every last one of our 3.8 million teenagers that graduate high school every year? We'd be clumsily JDAMing London, Perth and Tokyo within the decade.

Nah fuck that, that's the kind of thinking we get out of the regulatory capture cloaca-crotched lizard people currently plundering Washington DC. If we're going to do the "service guarantees citizenship" thing, we're not basing it on destructive power aimed without but with constructive power aimed within. And there ain't gonna be no merchant class that somehow gets exempted that wields the actual power. Your kids are gonna spend 2 years in training and 4 years replacing lead pipes in Michigan just like the poor kids.