Michael Caine wants to bring back draft

Sir Michael Caine thinks young men should be forced to join the army.

The veteran actor served in Korea when he was a teenager and insists the experience “defined him as a man”. Now 76 years old, he thinks young people would stop behaving like “animals” if they had to do compulsory military service.

“In my new movie Harry Brown, my character says to one villain, ‘You should have done some service and you wouldn’t have become an animal,’ ” Caine said. “I don’t want to sound like a moral crusader, but I do think there should be some sort of national service for young men.

“It doesn’t have to be for two years and they don’t have to fight, but they have to be trained to defend their country. As we know, there are quite a lot of people who are quite willing to fight against our country.”

If Caine could live his life over, he insists he would sign up for the army again, even though he hated serving at the time.

“I was 19 and it defined me as a man for the rest of my life,” he added to Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. “It was the young African warrior going out with a spear and killing a lion. I did that. I know I could do it. I wouldn’t change a thing.”