I feel like teaching the peasants how to fight only greases the revolution wheels if they aren't actually doing anything to fix the other problems.

Every male adult had to serve 2 years in the military in the Eastern Bloc. Yet those regimes were pretty stable.

Not that I believe that conscription causes revolution, but if by "The Eastern Block" you mean the Warsaw Pact countries in Central and Eastern Europe, those regimes lasted about 40 years before being overthrown by revolution...

Not exactly what I would call "pretty stable"

40 years is a really long time. For a lot of us, that covers the remainder of our lives.

40 years is not a "really long time" when talking about how long a system of government should survive.

It's well under a lifetime, and is around the number of years people in the US expect to work before retirement.

Taking just the GDR for example, statistically anyone who was born around the years of its founding went on to outlive that government by another 20-25 years.

You can't really call a government stable if basically everyone born into it is expected to outlive it.

https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~....

And independently of the question of whether or not 40 years is a "long time", the fact also remains that Warsaw Pact Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had large scale uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s which were violently put down by the Soviet military.

Ergo, the East Bloc was not a stable system.

A regime with a lifespan such that people entering young adulthood when it is founded also watch it fall has not lasted a really long time.

Those regimes lasted only 45 years -- and the leader (Ceaușescu) of one was executed along with his wife.

If that is the goal, then this course of action may be counterproductive. Military service may increase the sense of entitlement among youths, who will still face unemployment after the training is over.

Keep those male 20-somethings occupied.