senoy, I’ll actually agree with you that men are, biologically, more expendable than women. That’s not a value judgement, just a consequence of the fact that women get pregnant but men don’t. But the thing is, while that’s still true, it’s no longer relevant. In a society where 10% or 25% or 40% of the population is getting sent off to fight, yes, it makes sense for that portion to be drawn almost entirely from the men. But in a society where it’s only half of a percent, it doesn’t matter, because even if they were all women, we’d still have plenty more to bear the next generation.
And yes, we should abolish the draft for everyone. Involuntary servitude is and should be illegal in this country, and it’s a mystery to me why anyone thinks that that doesn’t include military service.
I turned 18 in nineteen eighty-mmph. I am a female type person, but nonetheless I went down to the Post Office and registered for the Selective Service.
The guys behind the counter were kinda giggling about it, but I looked them in the eye and said “Equal rights; equal responsibilities.”
And that’s the way I see it. I don’t believe war is ever the right answer, and wish that the Selective Service could be abolished. But if we must have it, we must be fair about it.
There have been court cases on that. Conscription and jury service have been mandatory for hundreds of years. Then slavery came along. Then we passed the 13th amendment to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude.
People made the argument that you are making and the courts said, no, it is clear from the 13th amendment that it was meant to abolish chattel slavery and not to have any effect on those prior things like conscription and jury service.
The purpose of the draft is to gather people that are suitable for military service as untrained draftees. 80 year old men are not; 18 year old women are.
Do you really think this cute little gotcha proves any kind of point?
No, we should not draft 80 year olds. (We shouldn’t draft anyone at all, but I digress.) But 80 year olds were once 18 year olds, and, if men, had to register. (Or not, depending on the year.) There is no compelling reason why this obligation should not be extended to women, who–and you may want to sit down for this–already serve in the military.
Not all 18 year old women are suitable for military service; not all 18 year old men are. The difference is that if have a crop of 18 year old men, I am going to find far more suitable for military service than if I have a crop of 18 year old women. It is an administrative tool to make the selection process easier.
I know an 80 year old guy that runs half-marathons. He is in better shape than me. If it is simply going to be about fairness, then we should pick through the 80 year olds as well.
It’s not a gotcha. We need people for military service that are fit to perform the task. It is not based on fairness or any such thing. If I am the selective service, then how will I do this?
Well, I could pick names out of a hat. I would get children and elderly people and those unfit for service that I have to pick through. I want to winnow it down a bit.
So I pick people 18 through 26. But then I realize that a full one half of those people will be women. And yes, we have many capable women in the military now, but those are volunteers and one of the few fit for service. I understand based upon real world knowledge, not learned at a left wing university, that most of these women will not be fit for service. Indeed I would rather have an average 40 year old man than I would a 25 year old woman. Again, my job is not to spare feelings, but to raise an effective fighting force.
So I limit it to men. There is nothing irrational or unfair about it. We don’t draft 80 year olds because, as you said, as a rule they are not fit for military grunt work. Neither are most women.
Heh. “Left wing university.” Again, explain how Israel maintains its very effective military while using female conscription. Are Israeli women just tougher than American women? The last I checked Israel was a real world entity, not a creation of a left wing university.
I have no idea what Israel does. I would assume that since it is a very small country surrounded on all sides by other countries that hate it and are inclined to attack at the slightest provocation or lack thereof, then Israel’s military has a different need than ours.
As I said, it is possible that we could have a doomsday scenario where we have our children, and grandmothers, and young women on the front lines to prevent a conquest. I just don’t see the need for a draft at all right now, and especially not an expansion of the one to include women.
Of course women should have to register for SS if men have to. But I agree that it doesn’t really make sense in our current military configuration to have mandatory SS registration of civilians at all.
We don’t really have equal representation in the US Army under current policy so that’s a bit of a strawman. Only a bit, because I acknowledge that a lot of people argue for equal representation and think that’s what we have now.
Implementation of the opening previously excluded positions to women include a tool that systematically discriminates against women going into most of the associated specialties. It’s called the OPAT (Occupational Physical Assessment Test.) To qualify for training in an occupational specialty you need to meet the OPAT standards established for that specialty. The OPAT “measures muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, explosive power and speed.” The scoring system is gender neutral. Nature is definitely not gender neutral in those tests…
A small study focused on a different aspect, whether the OPAT was a good predictor of ability to complete a battery of MOS specific tasks, also has data on pass rates by gender. From Table 14 (on page 40) 8.7% of female recruits and 71.7% of male recruits in the study met the requirements for the highest physical demand category. All combat arms specialties require that highest physical demand category on the OPAT.
Ground forces are the majority of the US military; the Army without including the USMC is a majority by itself. Now, guess which ground specialties historical experience typical shows have the highest casualty rates during combat against peer/near-peer powers? The current implementation of Selective Service is focused on only using conscription in those types of conflicts under Total Mobilization. We should expect that any system feeding personnel into those types of conflicts would either have to put a premium on providing men to the combat arms or accept the risks of higher casualties and mission failure that comes with the lowering of physical standards. We can skew towards a system that sends more young men or expect to pay a higher butcher’s bill.
There’s different ways to provide conscription that skews towards providing more men without simply exempting women from the draft. We don’t have equal representation, though. Our system isn’t designed to provide it. We have gender-neutral standards. Those standards still exclude a large majority of women from the roles that we opened to women.
They were in gender segregated roles through 2001. In 2007 12% of all IDF jobs were completely closed to women. That same 2007 report has women having an easier time getting legal exemptions from service.
There’s still limits on their usage too.
I’m not sure the IDF experience provides all that much data to support the assertion that they are doing ok.
But your numbers bear out my point. If I am a draft board, do I not want a pool of candidates where 71.7% of them will be fit? Or do I slog through a pool where I am sending more than 9 out of every 10 home? I am not conducting a social experiment; I am trying to get soldiers out in the field in a time of national crisis.
First, while I did use those numbers as a proxy we do need to be careful about applying them to our entire population. Those were numbers from those who enlisted. There are gender-normed physical standards for enlistment in general. There can also be cultural factors that skew those numbers differently based on who actually seeks enlistment. We probably do need to lower standards some to significantly increase military size anyway; the gender skew may narrow if we’re making men at the 50-60 percentile level into Infantry on the OPAT. It’s the best number I’ve got but it is not data for our population as a whole. If I were actually setting draft policy I’d want better data.
Let me channel that inner voice from my experience as a staff officer that wants to consider at least three courses of action for a decision.
COA 1 - Don’t draft women.
COA 2 - Register women and draft them in appropriate numbers to fill the demands they are able to meet without adjusting standards. That likely produces female Soldier heavy support units and male Soldier heavy combat arms units. It may well require gender bias in totals drafted to fill requirements; it’s guaranteed to not be more gender biased than male-only conscription.
COA 3 - Create tiered capability assignments and units in the combat arms and other high physical demand MOSs. Use the less physically capable in assignments like training in the US or less critical ongoing missions like in the Sinai or Kosovo. That frees up the most physically capable for the most demanding missions.
I had an old battalion XO that would have hammered me into the ground like a tent stake if I tried the false dichotomy of your post. As a battalion XO and commander I was not happy when my staff tried the “there’s only one way to deal with this” spin
Your daughter sounds kind of shallow and incompetent. Your hypothetical son world be more user to the military than your actual daughter? Killing someone might break a nail? The military can’t afford to buy her enough clothes?
Obviously you know WAY more about this than me, but I would just guesstimate that a volunteer army self selects for people more generally physically fit than the average population. So, the numbers of fit people in the population should naturally be lower for both men and women, but my point remains.
As far as filling non-combat roles, I’m with you there, but we don’t need a draft to do that. Assume we have a full army. We have a battle like at Guadalcanal. A bunch of grunts are killed. Well, we didn’t lose any quartermasters or training staff or IT people. They were all behind the lines. We lost GIs.
Based upon my foray into this topic, those are the ones we draft. We didn’t drag Eisenhower or Patton off of their sofas and whip their fat asses into shape. The top people and the support personnel were volunteers and the people that needed replenished were the front line guys that ate bullets. We need fit people for that, and as women are underrepresented in that group, it makes more sense to draft men.
As a battalion XO and commander I was not happy when my staff tried the “there’s only one way to deal with this” spin