Penal battalions

Is forced conscription of Prisoners into designated penal units a viable and efficient use of expendable manpower in times of war these days?
I can certainly imagine the Chinese doing Prisoner zerg rushes to alleviate morale among their regular troops.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_service_in_Hungary_during_World_War_II
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_auxiliary_battalions
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Yes, why wouldn't they be? Those IED and mines aren't going to blow up by themselves. And enemies aren't going to waste their ammunition by themselves in any timely manner. Neither are the bodies going to bury themselves.

Even if the penal legions are viable, it isn't a good use of resources to put them on the front lines. Sure they might stop a few of your regulars from dying, but that's all. They have little motivation to fight so they're unlikely to secure any major victories, and for the same reason attrition is going to be high. It's a far better use of resources to put them into work camps: you won't lose your free time labor as quickly, the lack of motivation isn't as much a factor, and you don't need to worry about a bunch of potentially dangerous criminals being armed. One thing you could do is tell your prisoners that the bottom 10% of workers in the camps are sent to a penal legion at the end of each month to encourage them to work.

This. There is enough physical work going around in a war to not have to arm criminals.

Soviet/Chinks penal battalion were/are different due to the insane amount of political prisoners they had/have (threadly reminder that China still has an extensive gulag network and you've certainly bought shit from them made that was made by political prisoners). You could make fighting battalions out of them because for most them their only crime was having said bad things about communism, a party official or just having ended up in the wrong class of people subjected to this year purge.
Recently I think Iran used some in the Iran/Iraq war that were like that.

But basically if you're not living in a socialist/Islamic paradise, prisoners should get to dig trenches and make ammo and you put in fine print "wartime service doesn't count toward completion of sentence" that way you alleviate any unfairness to the fact you're sending honest people to their death while scum gets to stay safe in the back.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_service_in_Hungary_during_World_War_II

Unlike in Ace Combat world, where both prisoners and aircraft are disposable and thus there's no big roadblock to sending them into combat with minimal fighter training, in this world prisoners are disposable but everything else they need to actually fight isn't. There's no point in even loading up your prisoner battalions in surplus gear to run into the meat grinder (or the irradiated ground zero your front line is due to the tactical nukes) because it would be just a waste of training time, and you'd be throwing away ammo, food, tools, etc. that could be better used with your actual troops too. Prisoners would be best utilized to do manual labor and building things needed for the war effort, that's it.

I have to agree with the other anons, giving jailed criminals weapons and even crude training is too much of a risk to be worth it in anything but the most desperate of circumstances. furthermore, modern combat doesn't necessarily become more successful in a linear rate as formation size increases and even in the old days there are diminishing returns to total unit strength assaulting a position. However, many construction tasks do speed up linearly relative to workforce.

imagine the US pushing into an enemy country, your supply lines are choked because most roads leading to most sections of the front arent motorways, and even the motorways are choking. which is better, using your 2 million plus convict population as very inneffective soldiers which will consume somewhere between half and the full amount of supply replenishment? or using your 2 million plus convicts to expand every road into a three or four laner, supplying them with only cans of ham, bread, and basic tools. you wouldn't even need many MPs if you put a reward bounty on any that fled.

then again, when you have such a large criminal population an army should probably be "fixing" that issue at home rather than invading other countries.

...

I have a personal case about that in my family. Pls no bully.
My uncle deserted when he was told to smash Kurds up north a few years before the Iran-Iraq-war. He ended up hiding from the government for years. When the Iran-Iraq-war broke out and the government got desperate they apparently pardoned all former soldiers and asked them to return to service for their country. He did and got to be a tanker. He doesn't like to talk about it. He never said which role he had, though it's likely was the commander, since most of our family were officers back then, and he had the education for it.

Aside from considerations of combat effectiveness and resource efficiency, if you forcibly conscript prisoners the desertion rate is going to be through the roof. Even all the Commissars and collective punishment the Soviets implemented couldn't stop it for their normal conscripts; for a penal unit it would be even worse.