Burk dear, you're so tackling the wrong things. And you're totally out of your league.
Let's take this into parts:
1. Consists mainly of combat training.
2. That training is to make them killers.
3. Serving one's country
Points one and two are connected so I'm explaining them here.
Army consists of so much more than combat training. It's only a little part of people who are trained to true frontline infantry, logistics, indirect fire, armoured, navy, air force, recon, leading, information, etc. We can pretty much throw aside the others except true frontline infantry because they're the only ones trained for killing. That already counts out most of the conscripts. Then, how much of their daily schedule consists of combat training? 8 hours of sleep, 2 hours of eating, 3 hours of free time, 2 hours of daily routine, 9 hours of training.
Okay, so we got 9 hours a day for training. So let's divide that to Technical training, Tactical training, Strategic training and Fitness. Strategic training is only for officers so we can skip that, it just lowers our numbers by 1/40th or so, not relevant. Tactical training is given in very small part to the regular person and to officers and non-commissioned officers quite a lot, that's around 1/5th of the numbers already, that's significant, let's keep that. Then were left with technical and fitness, which are for everyone. Fitness is probably something like 1/10th and technical something like 8/10th and the rest 1/10th would be the wieghted average of tactical. So around 7 hours a day for technical. At least 2 hours of which are probably spent moving from one place to another. That leaves 5 hours for technical, shooting, gun control, grenades, all kind of tech you have to use, formations, battlefield movement, etc. etc. Not really sounding much for trained killing, you could say shooting gun control and such are tools for killing and you'd be right but we all know people throwing darts and that doesn't make them trained killers so we have to look further.
We come to the core of this, the battle course training, which consists of around half of shooting training so maybe 15 minutes a day on average. Around 4/5ths of this training is spent in building, taking down and planning the course. So that leaves around 3 minutes a day for actual battle course run. So what is this 3 minutes of a day training that's planned to make a man overcome his natural distress over killing other men? It consists of making aiming and shooting your gun an automatic reaction to seeing a hostile while moving, evading, communicating, being aware of your surroundings and supporting your team mates.
So how much do we have left? Some ten seconds or so per day for making it an automatic reaction against hostiles. When you're holding a gun(assault rifle usually), on battlefield filled with grenade explosions and gunshots where you've been prepared to go for days, weeks or months. Tell me, how often in normal life are you in such a situation? Unless you're part of an army corps currently in engagement with the enemy I could make a pretty valid quess of not once in your life.
So, one hour in a year's training to make them trained killers in highly specific situation that is nigh impossible to happen in regular life.
Compared to what trained atheletes train in a year, I'd see that as ridiculously small, hardly worth to call them trained killers. Or compared to the amount of FPS shooters you play I'd say you're closer to a trained killer psychologically than a conscripted soldier is.
Serving one's country was used just as an expression of doing the army but I can evaluate on that. You live in canada so you're probably "fuck it" but I bet most south koreans are pretty glad they aren't living in the north. Most finn's are also pretty damn grateful that they don't have to learn russian in school. Do I have to continue?
I've seen a lot of kids grow up in the army.
Define "grow up".
Learning to work as a part of a society, learning to work under pressure, learning to be more accepting of others, learning to take responsibility for themselves and others, learning to take care of simple everyday tasks.
Simply growing up, becoming more mature. Nothing that strange and mysterious.
