Does military service affect draftees' political attitudes after service? Millions of men have been drafted into compulsory military services in Western democracies. Yet while a rich body of research investigates the effects of combat participation on soldiers' attitudes, we know little about the effects of military service in the absence of combat. However, a widely shared concern is that the military socializes its draftees into authoritarian values running orthogonal to the values of civilians' lives in democracies. I identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on recruits' political attitudes by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of the re-introduced draft in Germany in 1956. Using several data sources and a fuzzy regression design I find that if anything military service makes draftees more interested in politics and democratic participation. These findings have huge implications for an ongoing debate about the military and the political radicalization of draftees.