Conscription in the Ottoman Empire 1389 forward . In 1389 a system of conscription was introduced in the Ottoman military . In times of need every town , quarter , and village should present a fully equipped conscript at the recruiting office . The new force of irregular infantrymen was called " Azab s " and it was used in a number of different ways . They supported the supplies to the front - line , they dug roads and built bridges . On rare occasions they were used as cannon fodder to slow down enemy advance . A branch of the Azabs were the bashi - bazouk ( başıbozuk ) . These were specialized in close combat and were sometimes mounted . They became notorious for being brutal and undisciplined and were recruited from homeless , vagrants and criminals . 1908 forward . With the Young Turk Revolution a new military conscription law was prepared by the Ministry of War in October 1908 . According to the draft , all subjects between ages of twenty and forty five were to fulfill a mandatory military service . In July 1909 military service law passed that made it compulsory for all Ottoman subjects . The law was opposed by Muslim as the Muslim students in religious colleges who had failed their exams , Muslims of the capital city lost their exempt status . The opposition also come from non - Muslim ottoman citizens . The spokesmen of the Greek , Syrian , Armenian and Bulgarian communities agreed for the military service on the paper . The practice was totally different . In practice each member wanted to serve in separate . They wanted to keep their own military structure , rather than uniting under single flag . They demanded to have ethnically designed uniforms so that they would be separated from each other . These units , if achieved to be established , officered by Christian commanders . The Bulgarian non - Muslims did not want to serve non - European provinces . Armenians separated by their partisan attachments . These practices was simply opposite of Ottomanism . The government who thought that keeping the Ottoman Empire as a single entity could not accept an army who could decline to go war because of their ethnic assignments . They claimed an army on a national , or religious base only serve the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire . In October 1909 , the recruitment of conscripts irrespective of religion was ordered for the first time . Beginning with the 1910 , Balkan Wars , and extending to World War One , at grassroots level , many young ottoman Christian men , especially Greeks , who could afford it and who had the overseas connections , opted to leave the country or hide as a draft dodger . World War One . On 12 May 1914 , The Ottoman Empire established a new recruitment law . This new law lowered the conscription age from 20 to 18 and abolished the “ redif ” or reserve system . Active duty lengths were set at 2 years for the infantry , 3 years for other branches of the Army and 5 years for the Navy . These measures remained largely theoretical during the World War One . The ottoman Empire in 1914 could only drafted 70 . 000 or about . 35 per cent of the population . In Bulgaria the ratio at the same time was . 75 per cent . Fully mobilized , as in early 1915 , only 4 per cent of the population was under arms and on active duty , compared with , for instance , 10 per cent in France . Bedel - i nakdī . The system of exemptions through the bedel - i nakdī and the bedel - i askerī meant that the burden never fell equally on all Ottoman subjects . The riches evaded the military burdens . The socio - economic distribution of the Ottoman Empire was not even , the non - Muslim members of the Ottoman Society had the highest income level . Even at the end , the Ottoman army remained an army of Anatolian Muslim peasants .