Kerfluffle over registering for the Selective Service of late — meaning that women may be required to do so in the near future:
The Senate Armed Services Committee included language in its version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act to require women, for the first time, to register for the draft. Congress has debated for several years whether to require women to sign up with the Selective Service, as men must do between the ages of 18 and 25. No American has been drafted in nearly a half century, but the Selective Service provides the government with information that could be used if a new draft were to occur in a time of national emergency.
Cute that they insist that no one has been drafted since 1973, so what’s the real harm? The head of the committee, Jackie Speier (D-CA) notes: “I actually think if we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription.” This is a fair point, and one that women are going to have to answer. Are they different in any way? If they can fight in all military venues (as they have since 2016) then what’s the harm? Men don’t want to fight either, so we’re beyond volunteering when it comes to the draft.
These authors take another tack, after showing how inefficient/redundant the registration really is:
If registration continues, and if there ever again is a draft in the U.S., we and many others believe that women clearly deserve to share equally in the responsibility to serve and the opportunity to earn the benefits of military service. So the real question is about how draft registration serves society, or doesn’t. One common belief is that maintaining draft registration bolsters the link between civilians and soldiers, which has weakened significantly since the U.S. military became an all-volunteer force. Through the last two decades of war, only 1% of Americans have served in the military. Some experts suggest that such a weak civilian-military connection contributes to a number of problems, including a lack of familiarity with the military, a military that is not representative of society and an unfair distribution of the human costs of war.
Just wow. As though a mother, wife, or daughter of a wounded or killed soldier isn’t sharing the cost of war? The mother, wife, or daughter needs to bleed as well. The editors of National Review look at the real benefits, which don’t exist:
Should we ever need one again, a draft would be instituted under conditions of grave national emergency. Let us be blunt: The purpose of conscription in modern warfare is to provide replacement manpower for soldiers killed, maimed, or captured in a war of attrition. In such a circumstance, the need to quickly process and train fresh cohorts of soldiers would be needlessly complicated by the necessity of sifting through twice as many young Americans to find those qualified to serve in the armed forces. Drafting masses of young women during such an emergency would do nothing to improve America’s combat readiness. It would weaken it.
In 2015, exhaustive Marine Corps-commissioned studies demonstrated that, under the brutal conditions of ground combat, women are generally more prone to injury, less accurate with their weapons, and less capable of evacuating the wounded. Indeed — outside of a few outliers — the most physically gifted women were on average as strong as the weakest cohort of men. Anyone watching the Olympics this week can see the obvious fact that even elite female athletes are no match for their male counterparts in size, speed, and brute strength. Why should American women compete in the cruel death match of war against men, when everyone agrees that it would be unfair to pit women against men in the 100-meter dash or Olympic Rugby?
Beyond the technical questions related to effectiveness, there is the deeper question about the relationship between men and women, and what happens when we refuse to acknowledge fundamental differences. This was addressed in 2016 as combat jobs were opened to women:
There is no valor in requiring a woman to be subjected to the brutalities of a wartime foxhole where unimaginable horrors are played out in real life. But more importantly, let me raise this possibility: If a day were to ever arrive where the U.S. military depended on female combatants in order to win a war, the United States has already lost its most important battles. A nation relying on female combatants is a nation that has been brought to its knees by political correctness. A nation relying on female combatants is a nation that has lost all trappings of male and female differentiation. It is a nation that denies creation and reality in favor of anti-creation and anti-reality. A nation requiring female combatants is a nation that has surrendered any remaining relic of chivalry. Frankly, it is cowardice of the highest order, and one that any self-respecting man ought to shun.
Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. Seeing the military as a jobs program and source of special skills training are living in a peacetime bubble, sheltered from the realities of actual strife. Seeing men and women as interchangeable (or a mere state of mind) and the military as a experimental playground are playing with the lives of others for kicks. And hiding behind the fact that selective service is outmoded and not a real barometer of military readiness is an argument calibrated just to prove their chops in the Gender Kabuki playing out all around us. Any student of history can see that those who don’t seriously prepare for actual conflict will suffer at the hands of those who do.
Women cannot man up in the place of men who refuse to do so. This trajectory doesn’t bode well for our future.
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