Women being eligible for the draft makes perfect sense
The draft is probably only going to happen in a ww3 type scenario, and in a desperate scenario you're gonna need everyone you can get
The argument of women not being as strong on average as men is moot, as there are still some women that are as strong as an average man; and for the rest of them, there are plenty of jobs in the military that don't require strength.
and thats probably going to skew more and more towards the former the more we get into the future. In a WW3 event scenario, drone pilots are likely already more important than your standard infantry grunt anyway, not to mention the entire naval, air force, coast guard branches etc
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
The War in Ukraine is showing us in real time that this is completely untrue. Not only that, but this argument has been made before with new technologies and has never come true (100 years ago air theorists were swearing up and down that future wars would be fought and decided entirely in the air). New technologies will change the texture of warfare, but they cannot change the underlying task in war is to take and hold territory.
still true though that for all of this high tech shit, which definitely helps. Having boots on the ground is still going to be required for combat.
something, something, War never changes. something something
This exactly. War never changes, which is the whole point. Technology changes, society evolves, but never so much that the reasons for conflict and war and their inevitable outcomes or how they're fought ever actually changes. It's in our nature.
Yeah, until robots can replace infantry, which is a long way out, humans still have a battlefield role. Even then I suspect we’ll need general intelligences operating on or near the frontlines to act as command nodes for all these animal level intelligences doing the fighting.
I mean, with the invention of the nuke, it could have been decided entirely by the air, if it weren't for the agreement not to use nukes (or modern chemical and biological weapons)
A semi-autonomous drone/mine swarm could hold a city against insurgents without ground troops, if we wanted to be dicks about it. It's pretty easy to make a little flying explosive that can detect faces and crash into people.
https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU?t=60
If even I, a self-confessed weak beta, can serve in the Marines as infantry so can the average woman. People who are against women serving in combat arms waaaay overestimate it's difficulty. It's not that physically hard, get over yourselves (the people who say this, not the op of course.).
The other thing is you still draft conscientious objectors you just put them in non-combat situations.
Just because people are drafted doesn't mean that they go into combat. Increasingly, the military has more and more support people behind the lines where the requirements don't really matter at all as long as people are relatively fit.
An average man is stronger than about 99% of women, according to studies. Men are also measured to have more endurance over both long and short periods of exertion. A woman who spends all day at the gym is probably still going to be weaker than an average slob guy, unless she's juicing.
But that's peak performance, and you don't need every soldier to be at the peak -especially in a draft scenario. Women can be trained to meet the physical bar, even if they can't soar over it as men do.
>Boy is that cartridge zippy though.
The vast majority of the 6.8 cartridges in use are going to be the XM1186 "general purpose" round with brass case, not the high-power XM1184 "special purpose" hybrid steel/brass round that 6.8mm Common has received so much attention for. IIRC the Army has orders for something like 20 million XM1186 rounds and only a few hundred thousand XM1184 rounds.
We don't know the ballistics of either round, but it's likely that in order to reduce the notorious recoil of the hybrid round the general purpose round is much weaker, likely to around the same power as 7.62. It probably isn't capable of the "body armor penetration" that the SP round was supposed to have. This makes the XM7, for most intents and purposes, just a new M14 with a 13" barrel and optional suppressor.
I promise you a ww3 mass deployment battle kit will look very different than the kit of today
if we really go full send we will have troops humping it with iron sights again
I mean then you're still having an unequal draft system. It would create a more effective force, but that means funneling the men into the combat arms even more heavily. A suppose that is a *more* equal burden of war, that service is required, but you're still going to have the vast, vast majority of casualties be men in any war where you needed a draft.
The most likely major conflicts the US would be fighting wouldn't be manpower intensive ones either. A conflict with China would be primarily fought with navies and air forces with some moderate, amphibious focused ground combat elements. We'd run out of fighters and ships before we ran out of personnel. Even if we needed to train new personnel, it would be smaller amounts, many of them in pipelines that take *years* to complete. A draft in the outbreak of war wouldn't train up anyone in time.
Personally I find a lot of the argument academic on the draft for nations like the US. It's not going to happen again barring the most intense of catastrophes. Risking a key bill to make a point isn't really worth it and just seems like grandstanding.
Not to mention that if a draft happens, it's not like all women instantly become grunts. The services will need nurses, doctors, linguists, programmers, etc. Including women just doubles the pool of people they can select from.
I mean, if we’re being nit picky the draft was abolished in 1973. This change refers to the selective service system, which realistically is just government paperwork without a draft behind it.
I don’t see any situation where we reinstate the draft any time soon (in fact, most folks affected by this change are more likely to age out before we ever see a draft again, if ever) so I’ve really got to wonder why anyone in their right mind decided *this* particular brand of political kryptonite was a pressing issue to tackle in an election year..
Bingo. Really low priority issue at a time we have much larger concerns.
Take this up literally any time outside of an enormously consequential Presidential election.
> “the notion of the United States of America requiring women to register to fight our wars is simply untenable and must be opposed at all costs.”
> Forcing America’s daughters to register for the draft is UNACCEPTABLE
They can't even articulate arguments against it. At best they give some broad anti-draft arguments.
I'm reminded of Phyllis Schafly, one of the reasons she was so against the Equal Rights Amendment is that she saw that if women were equal, stuff like the Draft would require women to sign up for it. Keep in mind this is mid 70s, so the Draft was clearly fresh in everyone's memory. She saw that women were afforded extra protections in exchange for having less freedoms, in a way. I find it so interesting that the conservative cause she fought so hard for is now trying to do one of the very things she did not want women to do.
Granted, she also assumed that women and men wouldn't have Their Spaces in society, instead everyone being some kind of "blah gray" middle (I guess she envisioned everyone becoming nonbinary?).
I got one
[Servicewomen are about five times more likely than servicemen to be sexually assaulted (Jaycox, Schell, Morral, et al., 2015).](https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA746-2/handbook/resources/data-on-sexual-assault-in-the-military.html)
A counter argument would be that women in the general population are 10x more likely to be sexually assaulted, so the relative risk therefore be decreased. [source](https://supportingsurvivors.humboldt.edu/statistics#:~:text=An%20estimated%2091%25%20of%20victims,are%20female%20and%209%25%20male.)
That's an argument that the armed forces should be doing more to crack down on sexual predators in their ranks, not to ban women.
(Also, it's not like men don't get sexually assaulted in the armed forces, either. And no one's arguing the solution to that is to should ban men from serving.)
Women face the same issue outside of the service.
It's not a servicewomen issue, it's a US issue.
Not downplaying it, but they are similarly vulnerable at home or any workplace than in the service. Maybe perpretators need to be held accountable for sexual violence in an out of the service.
I'm genuinely curious, do the alt-right types support this as a way to vent their resentment and anger towards women, or oppose it as a way to show their support for a traditional dainty femininity in which women only cook and clean and pop out children?
Yes.
Most of the sentiment is boiled down to “women aren’t soldiers, having them serve is woke and woke is weak” with a mixture of “we have to protect women because in war they can’t keep up and will get raped if they get captured”. There usually isn’t any principled argument against it beyond just the typical “this is a man’s work” type of drivel.
The only semi-compelling argument I saw once was that having your entire population be draft-eligible in the event of a truly high-casualty war would hurt industry at home, but that seems like an easily solvable problem and if we get to the point where we don’t have enough people to work domestically because of casualties, we’re probably looking at a species-ending event.
>having your entire population be draft-eligible in the event of a truly high-casualty war would hurt industry at home
Beyond just "species ending" events, plenty of people of both genders are ineligible for military service for one reason or another yet could still man an assembly line. Factories were full of 4-F men during WW2.
trying to imagine drafting the majority of young americans into a high-casualty war in 2024 without the USA collapsing into civil war
we'd need to be fighting the mechanized zombie of hitler for modern americans to be willing to go along with that
Depends on why the draft / war is happening. If there was an unprovoked attack on the US, and people knew the only choices were to fight or risk being exterminated, I definitely see modern Americans being willing to go along with it.
Like, 9/11 was only the unprovoked attack half, not the existential threat half, and that was enough to lead to a flood of new people at the draft offices and give Bush broad public support to invade a completely unrelated country.
I think the other thing is people who genuinely think women shouldn't be in combat roles and don't understand just how much support is actually needed.
This. Red pillers don't point out all the ways men suffer under patriarchy because they actually want to fix those problems. They point out the ways men suffer to justify supporting the patriarchy. Look, we're sacrificing too, so those ~~uppity bitches~~ feminazis need to stop complaining!
This is also why, when you try to propose solutions to these problems, red pill types will either dismiss them as unworkable-- or if that fails, just attack you. Because they don't want those problems fixed, because if they were fixed their excuse to support the patriarchy would go away.
Because they don't view the anti male bias as bad in the way youre thinking. They view it as roles in society. The problem they have is women changing theirs while they 1.) Feel stuck to theirs and 2.) Think there is value in these roles and society is worse when we push against them.
That's so scummy, because they concern troll from a virtualized, feaux universalist standpoint so people don't ignore them completely, but then deep down they won't let things rest until their preferred non-universalist arrangement is affirmed. (Not that they're the only ones who do this, but yuck).
anti male bias enacted by ... a bunch of men in gov't. I don't understand the gymnastics to blame it on "femi-nazis" who seem to either advocate for abolishing selective service or cool with a draft that is gender neutral.
Some of the more 'read theory' types in the manosphere would say that it's feminists pulling strings from the shadows.
Personally, I think it's just a fundamental (and perhaps intentional) misunderstanding of the social role of soldiers in the West since at least the time of Classical Greece. Anti-war literature since the 19th century, intensifying during WWI and the Vietnam War, has tended to (quite ahistorically) treat soldiers as unwilling pawns sacrificed for the interests of the elites. Logically, one would assume that those pawns would be the disadvantaged in society that no one would miss. Reactionaries tend to lift a lot of their propaganda from the Left, just scratching out "capitalist" and writing "Jews" or "women" instead.
In reality, having the right to serve in the military has generally been understood as what distinguished a free citizen from a serf, a slave, or a foreigner. That's why blacks were barred from service in the US for much of its history, why Jews were forbidden from carrying swords even in less antisemitic societies in early modern Europe, and why the Caliphates barred Christians and Jews from learning to use weapons. Nobody sane would argue that barring blacks from military service was a sign that the US valued blacks over whites--yet that argument *is* often made to justify keeping women out of combat.
I mean, young men getting duped into dying by political rhetoric is more of the common theme there. I wouldn't say most anti-war material is about "unwilling pawns" (though that's true with how racially fucked up the Vietnam draft was) but more about people being fooled into wanting to fight.
> treat soldiers as unwilling pawns sacrificed for the interests of the elites.
This is generally supported by the history of rich people exploiting the system to avoid the draft, however. The marxist would say that the bourgeois state creates a nationalistic myth of service as honorable to exploit the lower classes by duping them into fighting wars for the interests of the moneyed class. Gender/racial segregation then gets projected onto that, a means to divide the working classes by making them compete for the privilege of dying for an oil company.
I'm actually a bit more materialistic than that.
In many societies, military service is a genuinely good risk/benefit analysis for the lower classes. Looting and rapine were widespread until very recently, as the most obvious 'benefit,' and it's not like life for civilians was actually that great (instead of dying of dysentery on campaign, you might die of plague at home--big whoop). Similarly, right up to the present, young men in rural areas with few prospects were funneled into the military because that's better than peasantry in a dying town. And, as the old saying goes, "Join the Navy, see the world"--there *was* some excitement in it.
Bluntly, a lot of soldiers were doing that job *because it paid off for them*. Obviously, that doesn't hold true for the wealthy who already have prospects.
I argue there's a difference between that and being an unwilling slave soldier, which has been often forgotten in our culture as social mobility and general wealth have improved.
It's been a pretty recent development that the rich do not serve, I think, especially as Officers. Non-landed people even being able to become Officers is a fairly modern development, and many have scoffed at the idea of "Mustangs" in the past.
And if someone *just* says that conscription should be abolished, fair enough.
But there *are* people who think a draft is OK but only if it discriminates on the basis of sex. Given that Trump proposed bringing the draft back, I think we can safely say a big chunk of the Republican party fits that description. That *is* contradictory.
"No way I am having feeeeeeeeemales in my manly armed forces, this is a job only men are worthy to do"
That's what I imagine they would think, specially the Tater types.
It's both. It's a convenient argument when they argue about men being oppressed with dangerous jobs: women aren't roofers and don't get drafted. But at the same sime they oppose women being roofers or soldiers, because they belong in the kitchen. All while willfully ignoring the most dangerous profession is mostly held by women, and that one the most dangerous human tasks is giving childbirth.
A drug dealer in Chicago is more likely to die than someone on death row in Texas, or at least that was true. I’m pretty sure it’s more dangerous than prostitution.
The biggest argument I've seen from them unironically has been
"if all the women die in war, there will be nobody to have babies at home with to repopulate for the next war. Plus, having to protect the women at home would give me the motivation I need to fight!"
> "if all the women die in war, there will be nobody to have babies at home with to repopulate for the next war.
My brother in Christ, they aren't going to have those babies at home anyway.
This is already a reality in Israel, Noway, Sweden (all with active conscription), France, Portugal, the Netherlands (their own version of the selective service), will soon be in Denmark (active conscription will be extended to women from 2027). Meanwhile in America:
>Voting to require women to make themselves eligible for the draft could come back to bite Democrats in Republican-leaning or battleground states, such as Montana and Nevada.
This is an intentional poison pill to get the bill to fail while keeping up the appearance of a good faith argument and pointing out Republican hypocrisy.
It was also ruled by a Federal Judge that an all male draft is unconstitutional. Before throwing away registration all together, the judge stated the Military and Congress should research anyway going forward and make the necessary changes they want.
Few years later and surprise, surprise... Dems trying to at least keep the thing constitutional and not thrown out in the next lawsuit.
I feel like they've done the calculus and getting 50% of the population who wont be affected by a draft to care about a draft is somehow bigger than a group that wants a draft but *only* doesn't want the section where women get drafted in it and is also a marginal voter and not already a die hard Trumper who won't vote for Dems no matter what they do anyway. Who knows though
That Republican optics you were referring to is tied to the underlying assumption that the draft is a good thing, which i imagine a larger % of people oppose than support
This is an old picture.
According to Los Angeles Times, this photo is from Oct. 4, 2017. A female U.S. Army recruit practices building-clearing tactics with male recruits at Ft. Benning, Ga. The Army's introduction of women into the infantry has moved steadily but cautiously this year. (John Bazemore / Associated Press)
I'm blown away by those of you arguing in the comments that women aren't fit enough to serve and even those of you arguing women can't/shouldn't be drafted to combat roles. Other than the realpolitik argument against doing this NOW, there isn't an argument here. We wouldn't be the first military to draft women. Israel has drafted women in Combat Battalions, one of which is majority women. There are female Israeli Troops in Gaza right now.
I haven't seen any negative stories about their fitness and lack of performance. Sheesh.
EDIT: typo
Not just that, Caracal Battalion (70% women) was actually one of the first IDF units that came to the rescue of the attacked kibbutzim on 7 October. They had to come all the way from the Egyptian border and were on the scene before many other units that were closer, they were among the first to engage Hamas and saved many lives.
A study by the Marines in 2015 found that mixed units performed worse than all male units in about 70% of events tested. It also found that the top percentiles of performance amongst women consistently overlapped with the bottom percentiles of performance amongst men. It also found that women were twice as likely as men to get injured.
That said, I don’t think there should be a categorical ban on women serving in combat roles. But women should be held to the same fitness standards as men if they want to be eligible to serve in one.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2394531-marine-corps-force-integration-plan-summary.html
Even assuming that's true, there's still the fact that a unit with 100% manning with gender integration is a much much more effective fighting force than a unit with 50% manning while being male exclusive.
The issues the draft are trying to solve don't involve one to one comparisons of gender performance.
Also, that study had [serious methodological flaws](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/marines-study-casts-doubts-mixed-gender-units), and there were accusations the officers who ran it were cherry-picking data that supported their argument while ignoring data that went against it.
And, like... I'm not sure why we'd give more credence to the results of one study, than the decade-long track record of women serving in the US Armed Forces with no issues or drop in readiness levels?
That study had [serious methodological flaws](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/marines-study-casts-doubts-mixed-gender-units), and there were accusations the officers who ran it were cherry-picking data that supported their argument while ignoring data that went against it.
Also, I'm not sure why we'd give more credence to the results of one study, than the decade-long track record of women serving in the US Armed Forces with no issues or drop in readiness levels.
They make this sound like they would be sending all the drafted women to the trenches. Most military is behind the line these days so I don’t see it as anything but increasing your personnel
You would think people might change their perspective on this, seeing as how Russia clearly screwed up on the logistics front in the early part of their invasion in 2022. Doesn't matter if you get everyone to the battlefield if there's no steady stream of backup to supply them.
Gender equality in the draft is especially important when it comes to conscientious objectors. Why should a man be drafted to serve into a non-combat role while women aren't drafted at all?
Because those are two different types of people, who happen to agree that "feminism is going too far".
One is against this measure because it's feminism going too far, the other supports it because it's feminism finally giving women the "bad side of being a man" too.
One pretty common rhetorical technique I see online that often goes underdiscussed (probably because it doesn't have a cool name) is the act of taking two different ideological groups that both disagree with you, lumping them together, and then calling them out for hypocrisy, going "isn't it weird how the same people that support \[X\] also support \[thing that is contradictory with X\]?"
This is a really common tactic with conservative commentators, and once you notice it, it's pretty hard to miss. Back during January 6th, you had a lot of people going "Isn't it weird how the same people that say they want to abolish the police are out here showing their support for the police at the capitol building?" It's like, I'm sure there's some overlap between the two groups (police abolitionists and normie dems) but it's probably not as big as you think it might be.
In this case, it looks like the MRA types on the mensrights subreddit are celebrating the idea of adding women to the draft and accusing the republicans against it, as well as society in general, of "gynocentrism".
> taking two different ideological groups that both disagree with you, lumping them together, and then calling them out for hypocrisy
I see this a LOT. Someone needs to come up with a catchy term for it.
We have not had a draft in a very long time. I genuinely hope we never have to draft our citizens ever again, but I do understand under certain scenarios it may be a necessity.
Ukraine is a living example of why having good infrastructure for a draft in an emergency is vital. We're never going to use it, but if we ever did it would sure be a good idea to have maintained the basic administrative structure.
And as a woman, I wouldn't vote for the political party that treats me as so incompetent / incapable that I'm not even worth drafting in an existential crisis for the country.
You don't want a soldier on the frontline who is physically incapable of e.g. dragging an injured comrade to cover. It's just statistically less likely a woman will be able to do that.
But there are also plenty of men who couldn't, and plenty of useful roles in the military that don't require that degree of physical strength.
By Chris Good January 24, 2013
Today's announcement that women will be allowed to serve in combat was hardly the first time the subject has come up.
When it cropped up during the Clinton administration, it drew opposition from the likes of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who offered a now-infamous medical assessment of why it was a bad idea to let them fight.
"Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," The New York Times quoted Gingrich as saying in early 1995. Men, on the other hand, "are basically little piglets; you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it."
More recently, Rick Santorum caused a minor controversy by bringing "emotions" into it.
"I do have concerns about women in front line combat. I think that could be a very compromising situation where, where people naturally, you know, may do things that may not be in the interests of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved," he told CNN in February 2012, in the heat of the GOP presidential primary.
--
Parts of the GOP were always nuts.
>Females
Women. Stop being weird.
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Why is "registering for the draft" even a thing? What purpose does it serve? What, the government doesn't know you exist if you don't register for the draft?
In a hypothetical future where we need a draft, I'm struggling to understand why the government wouldn't just use social security numbers or something. Let that future government that's implementing the draft decide who to include, there's literally no point in having this discussion now.
It's just a holdover from times before widespread use of databases. The new bill that was passed included modernizing the process so that people no longer have to manually register.
No. In fact the National Coalition For Men has repeatedly sued the Selective Service on the basis of sex discrimination. It got all the way up to the Supreme Court who then refused to hear the case because "that's for Congress to decide".
Not really a firestorm, just culture war weirdos hyper reacting that maybe if we're in a situation where we need to mobilize our civilian population to defend our country from total destruction... don't let sexist attitudes prevent us from going all in on that dark possibility.
Can't have it both ways here, either have everyone answer that call or don't bother having it.
And while we're on this topic, my hot take on the draft is that 25 is too low a cap. Raise that to 35, maybe even 40.
So fucking stupid. The scotus literally requires next time we draft it applies to women. Like ????
Edit: never mind I completely misremembered I’m smoking crack or something
From wiki article:
The Supreme Court declined to review the case in June 2021.[2] In an opinion on supporting the denial, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh, stated that while there was a constitutional argument about discrimination on sex on the current draft, they agreed to decline because Congress was actively evaluating removing the male-only requirement of the draft through the 2016 Commission, and that "the Court's longstanding deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs cautions against granting review while Congress actively weighs the issue".[3]
So they probably would change it but I was wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_v._Selective_Service_System
I volunteered, served, got in a few TICs, yada-yada-yada. With my bonafides out of the way:
This is some horseshit. Sign them up post-haste. These arguments always have one side acting like we’re sending 100lb girls into combat. You can be the most sexist person alive and agree that a woman can be a dental hygienist on a boat, right? Barely any MOS are combat arms in terms of raw numbers. The leviathan is almost all tail and maybe 10% tooth.
I’m amenable to conscription, but only if it’s not discriminatory. I think the good arguments for conscription are actually about the social effects more than the military readiness of adding people to my squad who don’t want to be there, but that’s another argument for a different day.
If women are considered physically capable of serving in the infantry, they need to be signed up for the draft. The double standard of rights versus responsibilities here is plain to see.
Flashback to 2016, when Reddit MRA types loved to say that if feminists were committed to their principles then women would have to sign up for the draft, too. And yet, somehow they didn’t cheer when Hillary proposed exactly that
So, like, yay equality. But, like, BRO. Now? You're doing this *now*? Can you go kick a hornet's nest in a non pivotal election year please?
This will piss off so many suburban women.
Suburban woman here weighing in. No, not really. I fucking hate the idea of drafting my son. Drafting my son and not annoying Suzy next door? Suzy who plays rugby and never wants kids? Why? Because vagina/penis? WTF?
We'll probably never need a draft again. With that being said in the incredibly small chance we do, the situation is so dire that there is no way to build that infrastructure at that point in time. It's far better to have this infrastructure in place and never use it than need to somehow scramble to build it in a total war environment.
What infrastructure does "registering for the draft" provide that is actually of any use? What information does it give the government that the social security administration doesn't already have?
Prior to modern databases, the government didn't have an index of males between 18 and 26. The data may have been there, but it would have required tens of thousands of people combing through files.
The draft registry is basically an index that allowed the government to go directly to the list of people who can be drafted without having to comb through everyone who could not be drafted.
This bill modernizes the process, there's not going to be a need to register for the draft anymore.
You need background infrastructure on how to select and call people up assuming the worst. You need to know when and how the government has the authority to do so. You need some information on who is able to serve and who would be exempted in specific situations. The government at this point could probably do most of this with other information they collect and not actually have it be in people's face.
There shouldn't be a world war 3. And if there is the US should be prepared to win without a draft.
Not joking. This is not /r/neoconservative, draft is bad policy. Volunteer armed forces are better than unwilling armed forces. The US is a civilian controlled government, not a military controlled government.
Last time the US used the draft was horrible.
And before that last time the entire success of America in war was with a draft?
The issue isn't a draft, which should be preserved for true emergencies. It was using the draft for a low intensity miserable war with low political support.
> And before that last time the entire success of America in war was with a draft?
War has evolved to require much less men (and women) than WW2 times.
Broadly I agree this is extremely sensible. Although to cover all bases, there is at least one historical example of the draft actually being deemed *more* efficient and manageable than a glut of voluntary enlistments - in WW2, the US actually *stopped* taking voluntary enlistments outside of the Selective Service system and basically switched to *draft-only* in 1942 in order to prevent domestic manpower bottlenecks and disruptions due to *too many volunteers* from some areas.
Even if this was passed, I feel like the rules would suddenly change if we actually wound up in a war. The military would just add “being a woman” as one of the draft disqualifications, even if it disqualified 50% of the pool. Realistically, there’s no way American women are ever going to be forced into the military, even though it would be fair.
Why? Other countries already do this. It's not like they would be sent straight to the frontline, most would just be assigned to support roles due to purely physical reasons.
They should go even bigger with the draft with ages up to 25 and civil service options such as the Peace corps, habitat for humanity etc. it would be amazing
The only way the US calls a draft again is in a total war environment where somehow nukes aren't used. There is no civil life at that point by definition. Everything and one will be used to service the war in some way or another.
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Women being eligible for the draft makes perfect sense The draft is probably only going to happen in a ww3 type scenario, and in a desperate scenario you're gonna need everyone you can get The argument of women not being as strong on average as men is moot, as there are still some women that are as strong as an average man; and for the rest of them, there are plenty of jobs in the military that don't require strength.
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and thats probably going to skew more and more towards the former the more we get into the future. In a WW3 event scenario, drone pilots are likely already more important than your standard infantry grunt anyway, not to mention the entire naval, air force, coast guard branches etc
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
The War in Ukraine is showing us in real time that this is completely untrue. Not only that, but this argument has been made before with new technologies and has never come true (100 years ago air theorists were swearing up and down that future wars would be fought and decided entirely in the air). New technologies will change the texture of warfare, but they cannot change the underlying task in war is to take and hold territory.
It's a Simpsons quote
I had guessed Zapp Brannigan
Damn, outjerked again.
still true though that for all of this high tech shit, which definitely helps. Having boots on the ground is still going to be required for combat. something, something, War never changes. something something
I still like to think they’ll eventually be fought using esports
Robot Jox or don't bother.
Wasn't that a Star Trek episode?
This exactly. War never changes, which is the whole point. Technology changes, society evolves, but never so much that the reasons for conflict and war and their inevitable outcomes or how they're fought ever actually changes. It's in our nature.
Yeah, until robots can replace infantry, which is a long way out, humans still have a battlefield role. Even then I suspect we’ll need general intelligences operating on or near the frontlines to act as command nodes for all these animal level intelligences doing the fighting.
the solution is clear, a marriage of both humans and machines. Robocop.
I mean, with the invention of the nuke, it could have been decided entirely by the air, if it weren't for the agreement not to use nukes (or modern chemical and biological weapons)
A semi-autonomous drone/mine swarm could hold a city against insurgents without ground troops, if we wanted to be dicks about it. It's pretty easy to make a little flying explosive that can detect faces and crash into people. https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU?t=60
I feel like this is one of those things that is entirely plausible without being demonstrated to be completely possible when rubber meets road.
Did Terry Pratchett write this?
Close
Until the robots gain sentience and overthrow humanity for essentially creating soldier-slaves to do their bidding
Just like the airforce not being able to secure and hold ground today, the future heavily drone augmented force will still need boots on the ground.
So logically the age cap at 25 should be raised as well.
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I don't think the draft is about getting specialized experience
The Selective Service System can absolutely draft people using professional license lists that the Selective Service System has access to.
People *should* be for enough to fight into their 30s. Ukraine has some old fogies kicking ass
If even I, a self-confessed weak beta, can serve in the Marines as infantry so can the average woman. People who are against women serving in combat arms waaaay overestimate it's difficulty. It's not that physically hard, get over yourselves (the people who say this, not the op of course.).
The other thing is you still draft conscientious objectors you just put them in non-combat situations. Just because people are drafted doesn't mean that they go into combat. Increasingly, the military has more and more support people behind the lines where the requirements don't really matter at all as long as people are relatively fit.
An average man is stronger than about 99% of women, according to studies. Men are also measured to have more endurance over both long and short periods of exertion. A woman who spends all day at the gym is probably still going to be weaker than an average slob guy, unless she's juicing. But that's peak performance, and you don't need every soldier to be at the peak -especially in a draft scenario. Women can be trained to meet the physical bar, even if they can't soar over it as men do.
You don’t need to be obscenely strong to shoot a gun either, speaking from experience
need to be pretty strong to haul 70 pounds of combat load for a day
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We make the infantry carry far too much shit and the force basically needs its strykers or jltvs to be functional nowadays
Not to mention the Army's new gun and cartridge are heavier than the old one
I get why they did it. But fuckkkkkkk I hate it. Boy is that cartridge zippy though.
>Boy is that cartridge zippy though. The vast majority of the 6.8 cartridges in use are going to be the XM1186 "general purpose" round with brass case, not the high-power XM1184 "special purpose" hybrid steel/brass round that 6.8mm Common has received so much attention for. IIRC the Army has orders for something like 20 million XM1186 rounds and only a few hundred thousand XM1184 rounds. We don't know the ballistics of either round, but it's likely that in order to reduce the notorious recoil of the hybrid round the general purpose round is much weaker, likely to around the same power as 7.62. It probably isn't capable of the "body armor penetration" that the SP round was supposed to have. This makes the XM7, for most intents and purposes, just a new M14 with a 13" barrel and optional suppressor.
Gaius Marius in shambles
Love how after this comment all replies are from NATO flags hahaha <3
I promise you a ww3 mass deployment battle kit will look very different than the kit of today if we really go full send we will have troops humping it with iron sights again
Hell no, optics for everybody but the reserves of reserves, we can't skimp on aimbot advantage :P
There's still plenty of noncombat positions that don't require that, either.
I mean then you're still having an unequal draft system. It would create a more effective force, but that means funneling the men into the combat arms even more heavily. A suppose that is a *more* equal burden of war, that service is required, but you're still going to have the vast, vast majority of casualties be men in any war where you needed a draft. The most likely major conflicts the US would be fighting wouldn't be manpower intensive ones either. A conflict with China would be primarily fought with navies and air forces with some moderate, amphibious focused ground combat elements. We'd run out of fighters and ships before we ran out of personnel. Even if we needed to train new personnel, it would be smaller amounts, many of them in pipelines that take *years* to complete. A draft in the outbreak of war wouldn't train up anyone in time. Personally I find a lot of the argument academic on the draft for nations like the US. It's not going to happen again barring the most intense of catastrophes. Risking a key bill to make a point isn't really worth it and just seems like grandstanding.
I don’t think anyone has ever said women shouldn’t be drafted because they’re too weak to pull a trigger. It based on carrying gear, things like that.
Not to mention that if a draft happens, it's not like all women instantly become grunts. The services will need nurses, doctors, linguists, programmers, etc. Including women just doubles the pool of people they can select from.
pilots, sailors, engineers, truck drivers, comm specialists, linguists/translators, meteorologists, admin, cooks, intel specialists, etc, etc
That could be an argument, except the US has about 10-25% women enlisted depending on the branch.
Yeah, and I’m not making that argument, just pointing out that the comment about how much strength it takes to shoot a gun really serves no purpose.
The real reason is that the role of women in war is seen as producing the next generation of fighters.
I mean, if we’re being nit picky the draft was abolished in 1973. This change refers to the selective service system, which realistically is just government paperwork without a draft behind it. I don’t see any situation where we reinstate the draft any time soon (in fact, most folks affected by this change are more likely to age out before we ever see a draft again, if ever) so I’ve really got to wonder why anyone in their right mind decided *this* particular brand of political kryptonite was a pressing issue to tackle in an election year..
>I mean, if we’re being nit picky the draft was abolished in 1973 Thank you Milton Friedman.
Bingo. Really low priority issue at a time we have much larger concerns. Take this up literally any time outside of an enormously consequential Presidential election.
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I actually like this angle. Good old fashioned skin in the game
This is basically the only good argument I see for this idea. Kill the draft by making it so universal that no politician would ever institute it.
> “the notion of the United States of America requiring women to register to fight our wars is simply untenable and must be opposed at all costs.” > Forcing America’s daughters to register for the draft is UNACCEPTABLE They can't even articulate arguments against it. At best they give some broad anti-draft arguments.
> Forcing America’s daughters to register for the draft is UNACCEPTABLE Women dying in war = BAD😡😡😡 Men dying in war = EPIC😎😎😎😎😎
I'm reminded of Phyllis Schafly, one of the reasons she was so against the Equal Rights Amendment is that she saw that if women were equal, stuff like the Draft would require women to sign up for it. Keep in mind this is mid 70s, so the Draft was clearly fresh in everyone's memory. She saw that women were afforded extra protections in exchange for having less freedoms, in a way. I find it so interesting that the conservative cause she fought so hard for is now trying to do one of the very things she did not want women to do. Granted, she also assumed that women and men wouldn't have Their Spaces in society, instead everyone being some kind of "blah gray" middle (I guess she envisioned everyone becoming nonbinary?).
I got one [Servicewomen are about five times more likely than servicemen to be sexually assaulted (Jaycox, Schell, Morral, et al., 2015).](https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA746-2/handbook/resources/data-on-sexual-assault-in-the-military.html)
A counter argument would be that women in the general population are 10x more likely to be sexually assaulted, so the relative risk therefore be decreased. [source](https://supportingsurvivors.humboldt.edu/statistics#:~:text=An%20estimated%2091%25%20of%20victims,are%20female%20and%209%25%20male.)
That's an argument that the armed forces should be doing more to crack down on sexual predators in their ranks, not to ban women. (Also, it's not like men don't get sexually assaulted in the armed forces, either. And no one's arguing the solution to that is to should ban men from serving.)
Women face the same issue outside of the service. It's not a servicewomen issue, it's a US issue. Not downplaying it, but they are similarly vulnerable at home or any workplace than in the service. Maybe perpretators need to be held accountable for sexual violence in an out of the service.
I'm genuinely curious, do the alt-right types support this as a way to vent their resentment and anger towards women, or oppose it as a way to show their support for a traditional dainty femininity in which women only cook and clean and pop out children?
Yes. Most of the sentiment is boiled down to “women aren’t soldiers, having them serve is woke and woke is weak” with a mixture of “we have to protect women because in war they can’t keep up and will get raped if they get captured”. There usually isn’t any principled argument against it beyond just the typical “this is a man’s work” type of drivel. The only semi-compelling argument I saw once was that having your entire population be draft-eligible in the event of a truly high-casualty war would hurt industry at home, but that seems like an easily solvable problem and if we get to the point where we don’t have enough people to work domestically because of casualties, we’re probably looking at a species-ending event.
>having your entire population be draft-eligible in the event of a truly high-casualty war would hurt industry at home Beyond just "species ending" events, plenty of people of both genders are ineligible for military service for one reason or another yet could still man an assembly line. Factories were full of 4-F men during WW2.
> and will get raped if they get captured oh wow, those guys are in for a shock if they get captured as a POW by the Russian Federation.
Those guys rape their own troops just to establish hierarchy!
trying to imagine drafting the majority of young americans into a high-casualty war in 2024 without the USA collapsing into civil war we'd need to be fighting the mechanized zombie of hitler for modern americans to be willing to go along with that
Depends on why the draft / war is happening. If there was an unprovoked attack on the US, and people knew the only choices were to fight or risk being exterminated, I definitely see modern Americans being willing to go along with it. Like, 9/11 was only the unprovoked attack half, not the existential threat half, and that was enough to lead to a flood of new people at the draft offices and give Bush broad public support to invade a completely unrelated country.
I think the other thing is people who genuinely think women shouldn't be in combat roles and don't understand just how much support is actually needed.
> the typical “this is a man’s work” type of drivel "men have to fight in wars therefore patriarchy" is probably the best way to think about it.
This. Red pillers don't point out all the ways men suffer under patriarchy because they actually want to fix those problems. They point out the ways men suffer to justify supporting the patriarchy. Look, we're sacrificing too, so those ~~uppity bitches~~ feminazis need to stop complaining! This is also why, when you try to propose solutions to these problems, red pill types will either dismiss them as unworkable-- or if that fails, just attack you. Because they don't want those problems fixed, because if they were fixed their excuse to support the patriarchy would go away.
They'll rhetorically call conscription an example of anti-male bias in society and then block any effort to correct that bias.
Because they don't view the anti male bias as bad in the way youre thinking. They view it as roles in society. The problem they have is women changing theirs while they 1.) Feel stuck to theirs and 2.) Think there is value in these roles and society is worse when we push against them.
That's so scummy, because they concern troll from a virtualized, feaux universalist standpoint so people don't ignore them completely, but then deep down they won't let things rest until their preferred non-universalist arrangement is affirmed. (Not that they're the only ones who do this, but yuck).
It's not concern trolling? That implies they're being disingenuous, these are legitimate beliefs about how they think society would function best.
anti male bias enacted by ... a bunch of men in gov't. I don't understand the gymnastics to blame it on "femi-nazis" who seem to either advocate for abolishing selective service or cool with a draft that is gender neutral.
Some of the more 'read theory' types in the manosphere would say that it's feminists pulling strings from the shadows. Personally, I think it's just a fundamental (and perhaps intentional) misunderstanding of the social role of soldiers in the West since at least the time of Classical Greece. Anti-war literature since the 19th century, intensifying during WWI and the Vietnam War, has tended to (quite ahistorically) treat soldiers as unwilling pawns sacrificed for the interests of the elites. Logically, one would assume that those pawns would be the disadvantaged in society that no one would miss. Reactionaries tend to lift a lot of their propaganda from the Left, just scratching out "capitalist" and writing "Jews" or "women" instead. In reality, having the right to serve in the military has generally been understood as what distinguished a free citizen from a serf, a slave, or a foreigner. That's why blacks were barred from service in the US for much of its history, why Jews were forbidden from carrying swords even in less antisemitic societies in early modern Europe, and why the Caliphates barred Christians and Jews from learning to use weapons. Nobody sane would argue that barring blacks from military service was a sign that the US valued blacks over whites--yet that argument *is* often made to justify keeping women out of combat.
I mean, young men getting duped into dying by political rhetoric is more of the common theme there. I wouldn't say most anti-war material is about "unwilling pawns" (though that's true with how racially fucked up the Vietnam draft was) but more about people being fooled into wanting to fight.
> treat soldiers as unwilling pawns sacrificed for the interests of the elites. This is generally supported by the history of rich people exploiting the system to avoid the draft, however. The marxist would say that the bourgeois state creates a nationalistic myth of service as honorable to exploit the lower classes by duping them into fighting wars for the interests of the moneyed class. Gender/racial segregation then gets projected onto that, a means to divide the working classes by making them compete for the privilege of dying for an oil company.
I'm actually a bit more materialistic than that. In many societies, military service is a genuinely good risk/benefit analysis for the lower classes. Looting and rapine were widespread until very recently, as the most obvious 'benefit,' and it's not like life for civilians was actually that great (instead of dying of dysentery on campaign, you might die of plague at home--big whoop). Similarly, right up to the present, young men in rural areas with few prospects were funneled into the military because that's better than peasantry in a dying town. And, as the old saying goes, "Join the Navy, see the world"--there *was* some excitement in it. Bluntly, a lot of soldiers were doing that job *because it paid off for them*. Obviously, that doesn't hold true for the wealthy who already have prospects. I argue there's a difference between that and being an unwilling slave soldier, which has been often forgotten in our culture as social mobility and general wealth have improved.
Just tell them we’re fighting in the glorious worker’s revolution and they’re the valiant vanguard
It's been a pretty recent development that the rich do not serve, I think, especially as Officers. Non-landed people even being able to become Officers is a fairly modern development, and many have scoffed at the idea of "Mustangs" in the past.
That's not a contradictory viewpoint. A person who opposes conscription would hold that very viewpoint.
And if someone *just* says that conscription should be abolished, fair enough. But there *are* people who think a draft is OK but only if it discriminates on the basis of sex. Given that Trump proposed bringing the draft back, I think we can safely say a big chunk of the Republican party fits that description. That *is* contradictory.
"No way I am having feeeeeeeeemales in my manly armed forces, this is a job only men are worthy to do" That's what I imagine they would think, specially the Tater types.
A smug "this is what 3rd wave feminism gets you, it's what you wanted right?", but retaining sentiment about traditional gender roles.
The answer is obvious: they support whatever Democrats don't.
They manage to say both things at the same time
Guy with two buttons meme.
Yes.
It's both. It's a convenient argument when they argue about men being oppressed with dangerous jobs: women aren't roofers and don't get drafted. But at the same sime they oppose women being roofers or soldiers, because they belong in the kitchen. All while willfully ignoring the most dangerous profession is mostly held by women, and that one the most dangerous human tasks is giving childbirth.
> the most dangerous profession is mostly held by women Which one are you referring to? A quick Google search mostly returns logging.
Prostitution. Too often by force or survival.
Just so we're clear it is still more dangerous than any other illegal profession?
I’d imagine being a gang member or drug dealer would be more dangerous than prostitution
It could be but then again misogynistic men don't hire drug dealers just to murder them. That's why I asked.
A drug dealer in Chicago is more likely to die than someone on death row in Texas, or at least that was true. I’m pretty sure it’s more dangerous than prostitution.
50% of prostitutes should be men! Hiring quotas in whorehouses now!
The biggest argument I've seen from them unironically has been "if all the women die in war, there will be nobody to have babies at home with to repopulate for the next war. Plus, having to protect the women at home would give me the motivation I need to fight!"
> "if all the women die in war, there will be nobody to have babies at home with to repopulate for the next war. My brother in Christ, they aren't going to have those babies at home anyway.
This is already a reality in Israel, Noway, Sweden (all with active conscription), France, Portugal, the Netherlands (their own version of the selective service), will soon be in Denmark (active conscription will be extended to women from 2027). Meanwhile in America:
>Voting to require women to make themselves eligible for the draft could come back to bite Democrats in Republican-leaning or battleground states, such as Montana and Nevada. This is an intentional poison pill to get the bill to fail while keeping up the appearance of a good faith argument and pointing out Republican hypocrisy.
Not really, they already tried this in 2021 and 2022.
It was also ruled by a Federal Judge that an all male draft is unconstitutional. Before throwing away registration all together, the judge stated the Military and Congress should research anyway going forward and make the necessary changes they want. Few years later and surprise, surprise... Dems trying to at least keep the thing constitutional and not thrown out in the next lawsuit.
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I feel like they've done the calculus and getting 50% of the population who wont be affected by a draft to care about a draft is somehow bigger than a group that wants a draft but *only* doesn't want the section where women get drafted in it and is also a marginal voter and not already a die hard Trumper who won't vote for Dems no matter what they do anyway. Who knows though That Republican optics you were referring to is tied to the underlying assumption that the draft is a good thing, which i imagine a larger % of people oppose than support
I feel like just abolishing it would have done this better.
There are no relevant optics. No voters actually give a shit about this.
Is that photo old or are some poor saps out there still wearing UCP?
Some National Guard units still have UCP battle rattle floating around.
This is an old picture. According to Los Angeles Times, this photo is from Oct. 4, 2017. A female U.S. Army recruit practices building-clearing tactics with male recruits at Ft. Benning, Ga. The Army's introduction of women into the infantry has moved steadily but cautiously this year. (John Bazemore / Associated Press)
I'm blown away by those of you arguing in the comments that women aren't fit enough to serve and even those of you arguing women can't/shouldn't be drafted to combat roles. Other than the realpolitik argument against doing this NOW, there isn't an argument here. We wouldn't be the first military to draft women. Israel has drafted women in Combat Battalions, one of which is majority women. There are female Israeli Troops in Gaza right now. I haven't seen any negative stories about their fitness and lack of performance. Sheesh. EDIT: typo
Not just that, Caracal Battalion (70% women) was actually one of the first IDF units that came to the rescue of the attacked kibbutzim on 7 October. They had to come all the way from the Egyptian border and were on the scene before many other units that were closer, they were among the first to engage Hamas and saved many lives.
Although even in Israel, women's mandatory service is shorter, so it's not entirely gender egalitarian.
Yeah, that's not the debate we're having here though. Bunch of people seem to be arguing about capability.
Women can already join voluntarily so I consider the debate on capability settled.
Doesn't seem to be enough for the arguers. What can I say?
Women, in aggregate, are going to be less capable fighters compared to men, in aggregate. That doesn't mean many millions of women are still capable
A study by the Marines in 2015 found that mixed units performed worse than all male units in about 70% of events tested. It also found that the top percentiles of performance amongst women consistently overlapped with the bottom percentiles of performance amongst men. It also found that women were twice as likely as men to get injured. That said, I don’t think there should be a categorical ban on women serving in combat roles. But women should be held to the same fitness standards as men if they want to be eligible to serve in one. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2394531-marine-corps-force-integration-plan-summary.html
Even assuming that's true, there's still the fact that a unit with 100% manning with gender integration is a much much more effective fighting force than a unit with 50% manning while being male exclusive. The issues the draft are trying to solve don't involve one to one comparisons of gender performance.
Also, that study had [serious methodological flaws](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/marines-study-casts-doubts-mixed-gender-units), and there were accusations the officers who ran it were cherry-picking data that supported their argument while ignoring data that went against it. And, like... I'm not sure why we'd give more credence to the results of one study, than the decade-long track record of women serving in the US Armed Forces with no issues or drop in readiness levels?
That study had [serious methodological flaws](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/17/marines-study-casts-doubts-mixed-gender-units), and there were accusations the officers who ran it were cherry-picking data that supported their argument while ignoring data that went against it. Also, I'm not sure why we'd give more credence to the results of one study, than the decade-long track record of women serving in the US Armed Forces with no issues or drop in readiness levels.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko has entered the chat
They make this sound like they would be sending all the drafted women to the trenches. Most military is behind the line these days so I don’t see it as anything but increasing your personnel
I doubt the social conservative military worshipers have any idea what the serving in the military is actually like.
Relevant onion: https://www.theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864
You would think people might change their perspective on this, seeing as how Russia clearly screwed up on the logistics front in the early part of their invasion in 2022. Doesn't matter if you get everyone to the battlefield if there's no steady stream of backup to supply them.
Gender equality in the draft is especially important when it comes to conscientious objectors. Why should a man be drafted to serve into a non-combat role while women aren't drafted at all?
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Because those are two different types of people, who happen to agree that "feminism is going too far". One is against this measure because it's feminism going too far, the other supports it because it's feminism finally giving women the "bad side of being a man" too.
One pretty common rhetorical technique I see online that often goes underdiscussed (probably because it doesn't have a cool name) is the act of taking two different ideological groups that both disagree with you, lumping them together, and then calling them out for hypocrisy, going "isn't it weird how the same people that support \[X\] also support \[thing that is contradictory with X\]?" This is a really common tactic with conservative commentators, and once you notice it, it's pretty hard to miss. Back during January 6th, you had a lot of people going "Isn't it weird how the same people that say they want to abolish the police are out here showing their support for the police at the capitol building?" It's like, I'm sure there's some overlap between the two groups (police abolitionists and normie dems) but it's probably not as big as you think it might be. In this case, it looks like the MRA types on the mensrights subreddit are celebrating the idea of adding women to the draft and accusing the republicans against it, as well as society in general, of "gynocentrism".
> taking two different ideological groups that both disagree with you, lumping them together, and then calling them out for hypocrisy I see this a LOT. Someone needs to come up with a catchy term for it.
Different people disagree even if you lump them in together in your head, shocker
We have not had a draft in a very long time. I genuinely hope we never have to draft our citizens ever again, but I do understand under certain scenarios it may be a necessity.
Ukraine is a living example of why having good infrastructure for a draft in an emergency is vital. We're never going to use it, but if we ever did it would sure be a good idea to have maintained the basic administrative structure.
This is a TERRIBLE thing to try and pull politically in an election year. Like, guys, come the fuck on
They have been trying for some years. Nothing wrong with it. As a man I personally wouldn't vote for the party that tells me I am more expendable.
And as a woman, I wouldn't vote for the political party that treats me as so incompetent / incapable that I'm not even worth drafting in an existential crisis for the country.
We got gender neutral bathrooms. Why not a gender neutral draft?
Make women eligible for drafts **and** put them on the frontlines with equal probability if I was in charge. But I'm just a redditor
You don't want a soldier on the frontline who is physically incapable of e.g. dragging an injured comrade to cover. It's just statistically less likely a woman will be able to do that. But there are also plenty of men who couldn't, and plenty of useful roles in the military that don't require that degree of physical strength.
By Chris Good January 24, 2013 Today's announcement that women will be allowed to serve in combat was hardly the first time the subject has come up. When it cropped up during the Clinton administration, it drew opposition from the likes of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who offered a now-infamous medical assessment of why it was a bad idea to let them fight. "Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," The New York Times quoted Gingrich as saying in early 1995. Men, on the other hand, "are basically little piglets; you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it." More recently, Rick Santorum caused a minor controversy by bringing "emotions" into it. "I do have concerns about women in front line combat. I think that could be a very compromising situation where, where people naturally, you know, may do things that may not be in the interests of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved," he told CNN in February 2012, in the heat of the GOP presidential primary. -- Parts of the GOP were always nuts.
>Females Women. Stop being weird. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
https://preview.redd.it/avoypc1vzq7d1.jpeg?width=4928&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d7900aa9f54c6fb05f93a31e8f185c69cec6062 "Lol no."
Why is "registering for the draft" even a thing? What purpose does it serve? What, the government doesn't know you exist if you don't register for the draft? In a hypothetical future where we need a draft, I'm struggling to understand why the government wouldn't just use social security numbers or something. Let that future government that's implementing the draft decide who to include, there's literally no point in having this discussion now.
It's just a holdover from times before widespread use of databases. The new bill that was passed included modernizing the process so that people no longer have to manually register.
!ping SNEK
Just get rid of draft registration lmao.
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I never want to hear red pill or men’s rights bros talk about drafting only men after this if they don’t even support it.
Are men's rights groups opposing this?
No. In fact the National Coalition For Men has repeatedly sued the Selective Service on the basis of sex discrimination. It got all the way up to the Supreme Court who then refused to hear the case because "that's for Congress to decide".
That's what I thought. It's weird to go after MRAs on this where they seem to have been fairly vocal and RIGHT for decades.
Which was likely the entire point to adding it.
Not really a firestorm, just culture war weirdos hyper reacting that maybe if we're in a situation where we need to mobilize our civilian population to defend our country from total destruction... don't let sexist attitudes prevent us from going all in on that dark possibility. Can't have it both ways here, either have everyone answer that call or don't bother having it. And while we're on this topic, my hot take on the draft is that 25 is too low a cap. Raise that to 35, maybe even 40.
So fucking stupid. The scotus literally requires next time we draft it applies to women. Like ???? Edit: never mind I completely misremembered I’m smoking crack or something From wiki article: The Supreme Court declined to review the case in June 2021.[2] In an opinion on supporting the denial, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh, stated that while there was a constitutional argument about discrimination on sex on the current draft, they agreed to decline because Congress was actively evaluating removing the male-only requirement of the draft through the 2016 Commission, and that "the Court's longstanding deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs cautions against granting review while Congress actively weighs the issue".[3] So they probably would change it but I was wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_v._Selective_Service_System
Can you cite this? I’m almost positive there’s special military case doctrine that allows specifically for stuff like this.
Never mind I’m fucking stupid. Edited my comment
Happens to the best of us
> scotus literally requires next time we draft it applies to women How so?
Never mind I’m fucking stupid edited my comment
No it doesn't
Did you not read my edit? Lol
No I'd loaded the thread before your edit, my bad
Lol nw
I volunteered, served, got in a few TICs, yada-yada-yada. With my bonafides out of the way: This is some horseshit. Sign them up post-haste. These arguments always have one side acting like we’re sending 100lb girls into combat. You can be the most sexist person alive and agree that a woman can be a dental hygienist on a boat, right? Barely any MOS are combat arms in terms of raw numbers. The leviathan is almost all tail and maybe 10% tooth. I’m amenable to conscription, but only if it’s not discriminatory. I think the good arguments for conscription are actually about the social effects more than the military readiness of adding people to my squad who don’t want to be there, but that’s another argument for a different day.
If women are considered physically capable of serving in the infantry, they need to be signed up for the draft. The double standard of rights versus responsibilities here is plain to see.
Flashback to 2016, when Reddit MRA types loved to say that if feminists were committed to their principles then women would have to sign up for the draft, too. And yet, somehow they didn’t cheer when Hillary proposed exactly that
Conservatives: waaa the women don’t get to be drafted Also conservatives: NOOOO YOU CANT MAKE IT SO WOMEN ARE POSSIBLY DRAFTED. THEYRE TOO PRECIOUS!!
You're mixing up right-leaning overly online people with genuine social conservatives
So, like, yay equality. But, like, BRO. Now? You're doing this *now*? Can you go kick a hornet's nest in a non pivotal election year please? This will piss off so many suburban women.
Suburban woman here weighing in. No, not really. I fucking hate the idea of drafting my son. Drafting my son and not annoying Suzy next door? Suzy who plays rugby and never wants kids? Why? Because vagina/penis? WTF?
> This will piss off so many suburban women. Drafting Karens? That actually sounds like a good idea.
I propose first call is "influencers." In fact, draft priority should be in inverse order of time spent on tiktok. So many problems addressed at all.
"PRIVATE! DROP AND TOUCH GRASS FIFTY TIMES!" "SIR, YES SIR!"
They’ve been trying to do this ever since women have been allowed to serve in full combat roles but it’s keeps getting blocked.
> This will piss off so many suburban women. Some of the few downsides of democracy
Hope this leads to the end of the draft. It's a fundamentally illiberal policy in a country as safe, wealthy and militarily powerful as the USA.
We'll probably never need a draft again. With that being said in the incredibly small chance we do, the situation is so dire that there is no way to build that infrastructure at that point in time. It's far better to have this infrastructure in place and never use it than need to somehow scramble to build it in a total war environment.
What infrastructure does "registering for the draft" provide that is actually of any use? What information does it give the government that the social security administration doesn't already have?
Prior to modern databases, the government didn't have an index of males between 18 and 26. The data may have been there, but it would have required tens of thousands of people combing through files. The draft registry is basically an index that allowed the government to go directly to the list of people who can be drafted without having to comb through everyone who could not be drafted. This bill modernizes the process, there's not going to be a need to register for the draft anymore.
You need background infrastructure on how to select and call people up assuming the worst. You need to know when and how the government has the authority to do so. You need some information on who is able to serve and who would be exempted in specific situations. The government at this point could probably do most of this with other information they collect and not actually have it be in people's face.
Are you telling me we shouldn't have a draft during world war 3? You can't really mean that can you? Are you joking maybe?
There shouldn't be a world war 3. And if there is the US should be prepared to win without a draft. Not joking. This is not /r/neoconservative, draft is bad policy. Volunteer armed forces are better than unwilling armed forces. The US is a civilian controlled government, not a military controlled government. Last time the US used the draft was horrible.
And before that last time the entire success of America in war was with a draft? The issue isn't a draft, which should be preserved for true emergencies. It was using the draft for a low intensity miserable war with low political support.
> And before that last time the entire success of America in war was with a draft? War has evolved to require much less men (and women) than WW2 times.
Ukraine v Russia argues against this assumption.
US military != Ukraine/Russia military Edit: Even with these examples, the number of dead in this current war is *nothing* compared to WW2.
Broadly I agree this is extremely sensible. Although to cover all bases, there is at least one historical example of the draft actually being deemed *more* efficient and manageable than a glut of voluntary enlistments - in WW2, the US actually *stopped* taking voluntary enlistments outside of the Selective Service system and basically switched to *draft-only* in 1942 in order to prevent domestic manpower bottlenecks and disruptions due to *too many volunteers* from some areas.
Neocons don't want a draft, why are you trying to paint the proposal with a buzzword?
Even if this was passed, I feel like the rules would suddenly change if we actually wound up in a war. The military would just add “being a woman” as one of the draft disqualifications, even if it disqualified 50% of the pool. Realistically, there’s no way American women are ever going to be forced into the military, even though it would be fair.
Why? Other countries already do this. It's not like they would be sent straight to the frontline, most would just be assigned to support roles due to purely physical reasons.
They should go even bigger with the draft with ages up to 25 and civil service options such as the Peace corps, habitat for humanity etc. it would be amazing
The only way the US calls a draft again is in a total war environment where somehow nukes aren't used. There is no civil life at that point by definition. Everything and one will be used to service the war in some way or another.
I think it already goes to 25, no?
They probably mean above 25 rather than up to 25.
Well, if that’s the case WW2 had ages up to 44. Doubt many people would be very enthusiastic about that though lol.
Selective service should be abolished.