This should have been done years ago.. Some of my fellow comrades were beyond worthless as soldiers. While I agree in universal mandatory service for all, many should be sent home after basic training after learning their right foot from their left. Just watching them loafing & being near useless on an army base lowers the morale of the combat & other necesarry productive units...............

There are plenty of low skill jobs that these non-combat draftees can do. collect garbage, basic clerical work in gov offices, fix roads, plant trees.

Give those soldiers more money. It is disgusting how they pay those soldiers third world wages or a little less than an American draftee earned in World War Two and less than half of what he earned 30 years ago in Vietnam. That excuse that he is serving his country is BS. An 18 years old he is a man and you shouldn't pay a man or women 200 dollars a month in one of the worlds most expensive countries to live in.

if I may just add a "devil's advocate" point of view: Many "city people" appear to imagine that "low tech" tasks are "low skill". Believe me, if you owned a moshav meshek, you'd ALSO be saying that you prefer to hold onto your veteran crew of Thai farmhands, rather than a use un-motivated, unskilled, & resentful conscript teens from Tel Aviv.

its long overdue . most of these useless soldiers should be sent home . the savings should be distributed among combat troops . i have seen soldiers serving 3 years taking papers between offices that were 50 feet from one another. of course the girls were a different issue . no one ever complained about them

Although I'm a (non-combat) veteran and a galutnik, I can't imagine letting those with the least (or non) dangerous work serve a shorter term than combat solders w/o creating a huge inequality and morale problem. For one thing, a person serving two years when others must serve three has a one-year head start on post-service education or employment. This is very unfair to the combat soldier -- he (or in some cases she) would be risking life and limb only to fall economically behind those who don't. I can't argue with the observations of IDF veterans about the low value of many members' service, or with experts who say the IDF doesn't need so many soldiers. But unless laws say otherwise (or it would put private contractors out of business), there surely must be some national projects to which these "surplus" soldiers could be put to work. If nothing else, assign them to charity work; even the unmotivated soldier can help someone who looks like his elderly grandparents..