Ultravires, my late friend Bob fought at Guadalcanal. Were he still here, he’d say, “GI’s? What GI’s? That was us Marines, and don’t you forget it!”
At ease. 
We had already pursued what is closest to what we now doctrinally call total mobilization well before that; well before Pearl Harbor and US entry into the war in fact. Total mobilization is where we still have a role for a draft. Full mobilization is a lower level. That’s where we call up the entirety of the US reserve components for up to the duration of the conflict plus 6 months. The draft is currently envisaged primarily in a strategic situation where we are creating entirely new force structure on top of our current force structure. Those new divisions, corps, or armies* are going to need their full complement of support personnel. They will mostly be composed of people in jobs with lower physical requirements even now when we can be pickier. At that point we’ll also probably need to be drafting a lot of replacements for specialties that typically take higher casualties. Where we currently envisage the draft in law and doctrine we likely are still drafting more people going into jobs with lower demands. Let’s not overstate the case to force the solution.
…and yet I came up with two other approaches in less time than it took to type that still offer the potential to meet the requirements without limiting the draft to strictly men.
Let’s take a step back from just recommending the best one to the comparison. What criteria are you using to evaluate which of the three I recommended is best?
Jumping straight to comparison without really stopping to think about the criteria we are using is problematic. It means the decision is extremely susceptible to our subconscious and irrational biases. Taking the time to lay out how we evaluate different actions is a big step towards rational decision making. I’m not asking for a full comparison using the criteria you develop.** Some of the criteria you develop might have data that is hard to accurately gather. It can be a lot of work doing the analysis even with all the data. Don’t worry about whether the data is available at this point.
Let’s just start with a recommendation of 3-5 criteria that you think are key to making the best decision between those three. Be as specific as possible in your defintion and rank order them. Try to avoid criteria that you’d reasonably expect to be highly correlated with each other. 5 slightly different measures of the same thing aren’t really separate criteria. Let me give an example that I you might not include in your list.
Minimizes gender disparity (Higher is better) - defined as expected number of female draftees divided by expected number of male draftees
- Army as the force structure name for elements composed of multiple corps not the entire branch of service. Patton’s Third Army is an example.
** Let alone a Squidmat decision matrix using those criteria as part of a full decision brief…with supporting sensitivity analysis on a hidden slide. Don’t worry I don’t expect any of that to make sense.
If LTG Patch, US Army, were still alive he might point out that his XIV Corps relieved the First Marine Division in December and finished the battle that ran until early Feb. XIV Corps was composed of three infantry divisions. Only one of the three was from the USMC.
Those GIs! 
No. Mandatory registration hurts people, and we shouldn’t double the number of people subject to that. It doesn’t actually fix anything.
Like, to make a really extreme analogy, it’s bad that the police are more likely to shoot black people than white people, but fixing the disparity solely by increasing the number of white people who get shot would be even worse.
Oh for God’s sake, this is exactly the point. I am pushing back against your whole “Wimmin and mens are differtent. I know this cause I got mah edjyoocation in tha reel world, not in no ahvy leeg you-niversity.” Israel is a small country surrounded by foes. They are immersed in the real world. If they thought for a second female conscription was bad, they wouldn’t do it.
To** Dino R’s** more intelligent point, yes, you are right, women would not fill half the combat infantry slots. No one is expecting that the Tenth Mountain Division would become 50% female if conscription happened. (Which it won’t). If America re-started the draft (which it won’t) Women would mostly find themselves in support outfits, like they do now in both the Israeli conscripted forces and the American volunteer forces.
But this is all moot. We will never have the draft, at least not in the near future. What is happening is that 18 year old American boys have to complete a silly ritual–with draconian penalties for non-compliance–because Jimmy Carter wanted to look tough to the Soviets. (No one seems to remember what a hard core cold warrior Carter was.)
It’s kind of funny how the MRA’s are all “Feminists say they are about equality, but really they just want advantages” when here in this very thread women are saying “Well if boys have to do this mandatory bullshit ritual, then girls should have to as well.”
True, but on the flip side we’ve also had men say that if their son died, they’d be sad for a couple months and they’d get over it. But if it was their wife or daughter that died, it would be the end of their world and they would die of grief. Strong gender stereotypes still persist in our society, not always to the advantage of men.
And how would the mothers feel about their dead sons? Really, are we still only listening to men on these issues?
I don’t have any polling data on hand, but I think the same trend would hold. Nobody wants their child to die, but when push comes to shove female lives are more valued than male lives.
Who said anything about only listening to men? Certainly not me. Let’s stop acting like women are powerless in our society. They make up more than half of the electorate! The point I was trying to make was that even men value the lives of other men less than they value the lives of women.
It’s strikes me as a utterly unuseful opinion - everyone feels differently about their children, gender regardless. And this idea that women should be protected because ‘society values them more’* just goes right back to paternalistic sexism. The whole point of equality is that women are treated equally, and women get to decide how much danger they’re prepared to throw themselves in the way of.
(*a ridiculous idea anyway - historically women have only been valued more in the sense of property, not rights).
Oh, yeah, and if you think women are just as powerful as men, even now, then you have no idea…
While there are certainly individual differences, with some parents valuing their sons lives more than their daughters lives, I think society as a whole values female lives more. There’s a lot of talk about closing up the gender paygap, but I don’t hear anybody talking about equalizing the workplace fatality gap.
I agree, we should question it. Maybe it made sense back when we were living in tiny hunter gatherer tribes and we had a high rate of infant mortality that we needed to maintain peak reproductive capacity to survive. But no longer. There are 300 million people in this country, and 7 billion on the planet.
I recall reading a book - maybe it was Bogeys and Bandits by Bob Gandt - that said that this disparity in perception extended to within the military itself, and that there was an incident in which a female U.S. Navy pilot died in a crash and was given a lavish Navy funeral and official paid-respects that went far beyond what dead male pilots got, and that that disparity in “bureaucratic grief” made some male Navy aviators complain about the double standard.
I’m still really not seeing how gender has anything to do with it.
Either women are to be treated and accepted as equals to men, up to and including being drafted, serving in combat units, etc… or not. And we’ve pretty much decided that “not” isn’t an option.
The solution, I suspect is to require women to register, and allow them to serve in combat units IF they meet the criteria. That’s no different than men- I don’t doubt that there are some men who can’t quite hack being an infantryman for whatever reason, but who can drive a truck, turn a wrench, aim an artillery piece, drive a tank, etc… Or just work at a depot or something.
There would probably need to be reasonable gender-neutral standards- nobody wants to see anyone getting killed because they weren’t physically/mentally capable, but ends up getting sent into combat anyway for political reasons. Kind of like a McNamara’s Morons situation, only with women who can’t meet the physical requirements.
That said, I suspect that a bunch of women soldiers fighting and dying alongside men would be the single biggest impetus for true gender equality that we’ll ever see. Much as black soldiers fighting and dying alongside white ones was a major driver for racial equality, I foresee the same thing being true for gender equality.
Of course, it’s not easy to question it. Most of our evolutionary history took place back in those hunter-gatherer tribes and before, with the result that the instinctive drive to protect females is pretty strongly hard-wired into our brains. UltraVires’ position might not actually be logical, given current conditions, but it is logical that he would hold it, since he comes from a long line of ancestors who lived in conditions where it was logical.
That said, we are humans, after all. While we do still have instincts, we also have the ability to examine those instincts logically, and to choose to act against them.
I question how “instinctive” this alleged “hard-wired” response is, given the significant percentages of men who not only don’t protect women but actively assault women.
Yes, I think that a lot of men are culturally conditioned to protect women, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that the behavior is biologically hard-wired.
I’m not sure “Look at these traditional gender roles men who support the draft status quo” is the opposite of “Look at these feminists who support equalizing the draft.” It seems to be in agreement.
Assuming (for the sake of making a starting assumption on the topic) that anyone should have to register for selective service, the obligation should be gender neutral, period, end of story.
The National Organization of Women (NOW) has said so for decades. Most feminists who dissent craft their dissent in terms of “no one should have to register for the draft”.
Even if you assume it makes more sense to draft men first (which I don’t agree with), that doesn’t mean it makes sense that only men should have to register. Truth is, we don’t know what we’d need if we needed a draft, so if registration serves a real purpose (which I don’t think it does), you might as well require everyone to register call up a disproportionate number of men. It’s not an argument against registering women.
Yeah, because “equality” is a left wing idea. WV, get out of the 17th century please.
And how is it that Israeli’s have compulsory draft for both genders. I guess they’re leftists too. :rolleyes:
To be honest, I am kind of 17th century. I’ve always felt an affinity with the Levellers, so I guess it’s not bad company to be in.
I suppose if the 21st century motto is line up your daughters to be fodder for the rich man’s wars, then the 17th century might just fit me better. It’s bad enough they take our sons, you want them to have our daughters too? Well, to be polite, you can take that position and place it in your nether eye, push firmly and twist. When your jack-booted thugs come for our daughters though, don’t be surprised if I’m hanging out in a holler up in the mountains not exactly welcoming their company.
Going back to social contract theory (which I guess is 17th century as well, although I prefer the 19th century version advanced by Proudhon) we cede individual rights and the power of coercive violence to the state as a guarantee of security-if not for ourselves, at least for our families. If the state is not guaranteeing the security of my wife and daughter (and not merely not guaranteeing it, but actively threatening it,) then why am I ceding any rights? I recognize that there is an implicit responsibility toward maintaining the supremacy of the state that requires a certain amount of risk. That risk I am able to distribute largely to the male members of my family. You’re asking me to also distribute it to the female members of my family and that to me is an unbridgeable gap. You’re asking me to give up a measure of security that I enjoy, for what gain? The knowledge that other people are giving up theirs too for some sort of ideological reason? That seems pretty foolish to me. Ideology and five bucks will buy you an overpriced latte. If I were in Israel which is a not really, but kinda is a religious state, maybe I’m sacrificing my daughter for God and I guess that might be worthy, or at least I’m sacrificing her for ‘my people’ in some vague sense, but the US is based on a secular understanding that citizens enjoy mutual benefit for supporting the system and I fail to see any benefit other than a bunch of incels will be high-fiving that they showed those women’s rights activists to take the bad with the good and women’s rights activists can rejoice that at least now they are being oppressed the same as everyone else instead of in their own unique way and that’s a dumb thing to risk my wife’s life over.
Let’s boil it down here. Right now the government is saying that if my family is willing to risk half of our lives, they will guarantee the protection of the other half. Not a great bargain, I’m not happy about it, but there is at least a quid pro quo involved. Your stance is “In the name of equality, everyone’s life should be at risk.” That’s a great stance to have and if your family wants to sign up, I’m all for it. You all have fun storming the castle. Personally, I’m not in favor of risking everyone’s life just to say I’m being fair about it. Again, if they want to risk their own lives, then that’s fine by me. Your wife is more than welcome to grab herself a uniform and start shooting Talibanis. I support her fully. Semper Fi, ma’am and whatnot. Don’t tell me though that you want to coerce my family into risking theirs. If that’s a 17th century attitude, then so be it.