What? No, that’s not it at all. It’s not like including women in any hypothetical draft will ensure twice as many people get drafted. It’s still “risk[ing] half” to protect the other half. The halves are just not distinguished by sex or gender.
It’s still a risk. It just lowers the risk for everyone, but eliminates the non-risk on some. It’s not hard to understand. If four of us put 10 marked dollars in a pot for a total of 40 dollars and then draw 10 bills to pay for lunch with the rest going back to the original owners, all of my money is at risk. There is a chance that I’m going to get saddled with the whole bill. On the other hand, if we put 5 dollars in each and draw 10 for our rather cheap shared lunch, then there is a larger chance that I will lose some of my money, but there is a zero chance that I will lose all of my money. I am mitigating my risk of total bankruptcy. It’s the same reason that you don’t put all of your money in the stock market and invest some in low-yielding bonds. I am guaranteeing that some of my assets (ie my family) are protected, even if it means that other assets become riskier. Currently, if WWIII blows up, I know that some of my assets (my wife and daughter) are protected. It ups the risk to my sons, but I know that at the end of the day, two of my family members are safe. Under the ‘draft them all plan’ I have no such guarantees. We could all end up dead and then what exactly was the point of our fighting?
:dubious: If you imagine that “the state” without gender-egalitarian SS registration is in any way “guaranteeing the security of [your] wife and daughter”, you really need to take a closer look at current sexual-assault and domestic-violence statistics (not to mention maternal mortality rates).
I have very little patience with the type of sexists* who chest-thump about their principled opposition to anti-sex-discrimination measures such as draft-registration equality that would have negligible practical impact on women’s safety, while at the same time remaining complacently passive in the face of the far more serious actual threats to women’s safety that are rife in our current societal setup.
- Or with any other type of sexists, tbh.
To be fair, Israel ***is ***by far the most liberal nation in its Middle Eastern neighborhood, and is also by far the most pro-feminist and pro-LGBT nation in the Middle East, but that may be getting off-topic.
Not to disagree with you in one of the only areas we may agree (:)) but it seems as if you have two sons, a daughter, and a wife. What if the regulations stated that only two of your children could be drafted, regardless of gender. At least your son and your wife would be safe. You then know that “some of [your] assets” one of your sons and your wife, will be safe.
I don’t think this works unless we go back to what we agree: that daughters are special, largely not fit for GI grunt work, and should be protected by a civilized society until the absolutely most dire circumstances (which Israel may now face; I do not know so I can’t really say).
Also that and the number of cultures where familial resources (food, money, time, etc) go disproportionately to sons rather than daughters, especially when those resources are limited. That isn’t biological hard-wiring; it’s cultural.
Getting back to the OP topic, is there any reason - other than just bureacratic inertia (“it’s a lot of hassle and we don’t feel the impetus energy for it”) - that Selective Service shouldn’t be required of both genders or scrapped outright?
Regarding scrapping it outright: I suspect that doing so would be perceived, politically, as degrading the country’s ability to respond militarily in the event of war.
As noted upthread, that may well not be a realistic perception, given that the nature of how the U.S. wages war (and its need for unskilled draftees) has changed substantially in the past 40 years. But, in most of the country, it’s pretty hard to win an election if your opponent can successfully paint you as as not supporting the military.
Ah, gotcha. I was about to suggest that this was the very scenario that the Sole Surviving provision was intended to address, but apparently it doesn’t officially apply to actually declared wars.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate Selective Service registration, and he won 489 electoral votes. (He didn’t actually do it, obviously.)
Make it fully uniform or do away with it. Right now it is little more than a ritualistic hoop to jump through to qualify for educational or training assistance or public employment, for half the population. And mind you, is that address *ever *updated?
We have, for better or worst, the technology in place to know where 19-21 year olds are and to track their life activit. And once we got them at the MEPS, we have the tools to evaluate where he or she could be the best use… Athletic young chap, quick witted but far from an intellectual colossus… maybe he *should *be out there humping a ruck full of grenades. Little slip of a gal, but with kicking analytical skills, put her in intelligence. UN-athletic pasty young fellow raised on a diet of Dew and online gaming? Drone operator or hacker team member.
Some of the discussion here seems to be implying some scenario where if the draft is activated things must be going so badly that *everyone *WILL levied to head straight for the meatgrinder. Or where the gender exclusion line implies some sort of guarantee or promise of protection for the wimmenfolk and young’uns (I dunno, in modern warfare there is no guarantee the front line won’t come to your and my hometown street and take Mom out). I don’t see either as especially supported.
In the specific case of the USA, conscription has always been used to make up the difference between the number of people volunteering, and the total numbers the strategists determine are actually needed. The USA has never had a real system of modern compulsory Universal Service, a-la Israel (for everyone) or Switzerland (for males), whereby *everybody *in the respective clade has to show up, be evaluated and if fit, given training and placed in reserve after serving. The American system was, as the words themselves say – selective service; *draft *-- a selection from among the eligibles of who’d be inducted as the manpower need progressed, ordered by a drawing of lots.
The reactivation of the Selective Service registration in 1980 was a political decision, a “we’re serious” gesture (that only revealed how little we could really do), more than any actual plan for rebuilding a force model to which by then the serious military professionals had said “good riddance”. And even had it been at that time necessary to repopulate the database of eligibles, by now there are surely other ways to do so.
So if you keep up this formalistic gesture, then make it so everyone who applies for college aid or a public job has to check the same box in the forms, regardless of gender, since that’s its only current use. Or do away with it.
I keep seeing “But a higher percent of young men are combat ready-able, so it’s better to just draft them, because you have a better chance of getting a keeper”. Really?
From “The Other End of the Spear: The Tooth-to-Tail Ratio (T3R) in Modern Military Operations”, stats for Operation Iraqi Freedom, starting at page 53:
“organizations whose primary mission was the conduct of combat operations consisted of about 53,768 troops or 40 percent of the deployed force. Accordingly, the functional T3R was 1 to 2.5 (combat to noncombat).” That gets broken down into 40% combat, 36% logistics and 24% HQ/Admin.
Page 54 of the same report adds in the contractor support, and numbers become:
28% combat, 14% life support, 41% logistics and 17% HQ/Admin.
So roughly 28% of positions during operation Iraqi Freedom were non-combat positions. So even if not a single woman was combat trainable, there are still lots of positions to be filled.
The “women are dainty flowers that need to be coddled” crap needs to be kicked to the curb. At 18, I probably couldn’t have gotten into good enough shape to pass the physical requirement for infantry, but I sure as hell could have driven a truck, run an office, learned to run communications equipment, worked in a mess hall, or any number of other positions, including front line jobs that don’t involve schlepping a pack cross country.
“The women and girls are more important and need to be protected” isn’t doing us any favors. It’s taking away our ability to make our own decisions, and telling us that someone else is better able to decide what is good for us. It reeks of the same patronizing ideas that lead to men deciding the fate of women’s healthcare and their rights to an abortion.
Final note - I doubt the Rosie the riveters of WWII, those women that stepped up to fill factory and shipyard jobs left open when the men went to war, would agree that they weren’t able to get the jobs done.
Like other European-style countries, in many ways Israel’s right is to the left of America’s left. And that’s now; Israel was even more left-wing when it started drafting women.
Yes, Selective Service registration should be required of everybody or nobody. As has been pointed out, women can take a variety of roles even if they aren’t able to pass certain physical exams. War has become more and more technological; a woman and a man can both usually press a button.
I know this. I was being sarcastic.
I’m female, over 50, and quite obese. But I promise you, in a foxhole you’d much rather be trusting your well-being to me than to my brother. Or for that matter, the vast majority of the men I know.
As has also been pointed out and repeatedly ignored, the draft is to replace soldiers. We start out a war with an all volunteer army complete with HQ, quartermasters, tech people, etc. and then a bunch of grunts. If we have another D-Day a bunch of people get killed, but it is not the people washing the uniforms back at the base or those at HQ launching drone strikes.
The people that need replaced are the front line grunts. An efficient and good administrative way is to limit the pool of draftees to those who have a higher chance of being able to fill the role. We limit the draft to 18 to 26 (and 18 to 45 in WWII). Is that because of some animus or stereotype against middle aged people? Of course not. Does that mean that there are not some 30 year olds who would be better grunts than an average 25 year old? Of course not? Likewise, many young women could do the job when some young men cannot.
But it is simply a bright line administrative rule to help promote an efficient draft and to keep the draft boards from being swamped with unsuitable candidates. And many times these bright line rules are unfair. I’m sure many 20 years olds are responsible drinkers, many drivers drive safely at 75mph, etc. but we have rules because we cannot simply evaluate every single thing on its own merit administratively.
If the only reason for sending women into the meat grinder is that some men have to do so and we have to be “fair,” then that is an argument from social policy not from military need, which would be at the utmost importance in a time of crisis.
Bump - Federal judge in Texas rules that male only selective service registration is unconstitutional.
As has been pointed out and repeatedly ignored, you don’t have to uniformly call up whatever population is registered. Absent an actual, you know, situation, we don’t know what we would need. Requiring everyone to register means you just have a list of everyone’s information.
Boys as opposed to “little girls”? At what age do you see your daughter as an actual woman of legal age and not just a dainty “little girl”?