BTW, I am one of those totally demented folk that think women are just as capable and should be equally responsible when it comes to serving this country.
One factor that I haven’t seen in this thread…if the draft is truly abolished, the hawks will be less able to wage wars like Vietnam, since the resources won’t be there or as readily available.
OTOH, if the country was truly threatened, I can’t imagine a shortage of volunteers, so the draft wouldn’t be needed.
And there’s this strange American belief that this hypothetical future war that requires a draft will be a replay of World War II, or Vietnam. That is, everything is more or less normal back at home, except a bunch of our boys have to go overseas to fight.
If we really did have a war going on that really did require a draft, it wouldn’t be like that. The only conceivable sort of war that would require a national mobilization like that would be a war fought at home. A civil war. And you think your little girl and your wife is going to be safe back home while you’re off fighting some crazy foreigners? No, your wife and daughter are going to be in the danger zone because there won’t be any front lines. You’ll be safe and sound at some army base, while your family is being rounded up by death squads and dumped in a ditch.
In any case, if we really do need a draft in the distant future, then we start from fucking scratch. Getting a list of all the 18 year olds in the country isn’t exactly a backbreaking task, and the current system of requiring people to send the government a postcard when they turn 18 is just ludicrous, and won’t help a bit.
That does raise an interesting question of what the bureaucrats of such a useless agency do on the clock. Is it all “executive time” that makes Lord Orange look like a workaholic?
I don’t know I think getting drafted or the threat of would calm down some of the mindless military worship
As in you could see the people who really wanna serve and whod run for Canada the minute he or she received his notice……… as in if you really support the military well youll have no prob joining it then"
Actually modern warfare [post call it 1875 or so] is very different from earlier forms - we have in the US at least a history of our military going elsewhere for combat … so looking at it from the viewpoint of some random East German [um, not sure of the location names offhand, blame the US school system] who saw their men get marched off to feed the Third Reich’s military and leave them effectively defenseless to being washed over by random groups of American troops, Soviet troops, and whatever random units made up the Allied armies sweeping across Germany. While I have no direct stories of US units pillaging and raping [well, except for one story my dad was willing to share to a bunch of under 18 year olds at a family get together about being billeted in some villa somewhere that the owners had run off leaving quite the selection of wines in the cellar that ended up down US GI gullets … ] but there are many stories of Soviet troops raping their way across teh country side in revenge for the pillaging and rapine of the German troops. Post combat lust is a quite well known effect of combat. One that we in the US do not have experience of being the targets of.
Many women did end up ‘contributing’ to the war efforts - the various resistance units [one dutch 16 year old girl lured German soldiers out into the woods for a piece of ass and I think her death toll before getting caught and executed was 30 or so German combatants] and I for one would not want to have had Lyudmilla Pavlichenko mad at me, she sniped over 300 confirmed kills, the female tank crews, the Night Witches [588th Night Bomber Regiment] who flew wood and canvas planes into war zones to drop bombs … if we did end up being invaded, I can damned well guarantee there are a fair number of women like me who would grab a long arm, set up somewhere and see how many we could take out turkey shoot style before getting caught [hell, they tried getting Simo Haya/White Death with an artillery strike … he was a serious badass. Could you imagine what a kid between he and Pavlichenko would have been like?]
[though I am 57 years old and physically handicapped, a couple of my special forces buddies love it when I come to hang out with them, I get to give my favorite lecture with a 3 month supply of my normal medications and bottles of water standing in for booze on exactly how many men I could kill in particularly nasty ways - cascading unstoppable organ failure, anybody? All I need is access to a pharmacy and set myself up as a barmaid, or abandon my house with a fully stocked pantry and bar cabinet and there will be some seriously distracted combatants.]
Also, modern wars aren’t really fought with manpower anymore. They are heavier on equipment and lighter on people, and it will only get more automated in the decades ahead.
This wasn’t true the first time it was pointed out and still isn’t. The draft is to replace people who are rotating out of deployment because they have homes and families to look after. We generally don’t allow people to spend six years in a combat theater even if they want to.
You’re all seeming to forget that there are tons of support roles, more combat fighters means you need more combat support.
Basically as soon as they allowed women in the military at all it should have been both.
Male only draft has already been ruled unconstitutional.
They’ve also done one more thing that makes a lot if sense. Begun the transition to gender neutral role oriented physical fitness tests.
https://www.themilitarytimes.co.uk/hm-forces/new-physical-fitness-standards-for-combat-roles/
One issue that has been around for a while was that fitness tests had vastly different qualifications for males and females. For many roles this basically made sense. Though it did create some issues with some female mechanics or certain upper body strength dependent jobs with being physically unable to do their jobs, not a big deal though, and you had a few squirrelly boys unable also.
This becomes a big deal in a combat role, so the army has started to transition to gender neutral role oriented fitness tests or at least is headed that way…will it stick…hard to say.
If you can do the job and you want to, sex will no longer matter in any significant manner.
Another D-Day? How about another Pearl Harbor, where a rear-ward base with “HQ, quartermasters, tech people, etc.” in U.S. territory (not a State at the time, but not some isolated forward military-only island either) was suddenly attacked? That attack didn’t affect only “front line grunts” by a long shot, nor was it intended to by the Imperial Japanese Navy. :smack:
Your premise was already out-of-date in 1941, with 1941 tech. It’s even more out-of-date now, when a goodly handful of nations could lob missiles into Hawaii, California, or the like. Even if the targets in such an attack were strictly military, it wouldn’t be “front line grunts” who’d be doing the dying or need replacing. Nor would keeping women out of the military keep them out of harm’s way.
There will quite possibly never be a draft ever again. That being said, the symbolic nature of this court decision is important.
Also, in an actual draft scenario things would probably play out something like this;
Your " might break a nail" daughter and your " might break a nail" son are drafted
Daughter finishes basic maxing out at 13 push-ups … congratulations you’re gonna be an administrative specialist
Son finishes basic able to do 30 pushups … Well son, you’re slotted for infantry so if that’s the the best you can do I guess you get recycled ( basic again) and thanks to the magic of testosterone by the end of basic 2. He’s doing 65… congrats you’re infantry and you don’t have to do basic for a third time.
Nobody should be forced to join the military. This is pretty simple. The draft should be narrowed instead of widened. They should exempt men for any number of reasons: they aren’t American enough, they aren’t strong enough, they are too heavy, they are too smart, they are too dumb, etc.
This reminds me of people complaining about the drug war because minorities are more likely to be prosecuted. Perfectly valid in a polemical sense, but kind of misses the point.
Please elaborate.
I don’t think it would matter. IIRC it would take the military longer to prepare for an influx of unwilling bodies than it would take to set up a whole new draft registration system from scratch, so there’s not any time saved by making people submit their information and then punishing them if they’re unaware of the requirement.
Any means to narrow the pool from which young men can be enslaved is good. Eliminating candidates on the basis of nationality is one of those means. If the enslavers want to come up with nonsensical qualifications like the person must be sufficiently “American”, whatever that means to them, I would support it.
Slavery in the Americas was terrible. It was largely limited to those of African descent. Would the extension of slavery across all ethnic groups have been a move in the right direction?
The court’s decision is in direct contradiction to binding Supreme Court precedent.
That Supreme Court decision (Rostker v. Goldberg) was predicated on the fact that women were not allowed in combat roles.
As that is no longer the case, it seems to me that there is a strong argument that the precedent is no longer binding.
-
A Supreme Court decision is binding until that Court says it is not, so it was pretty ballsy for this judge to flout the controlling law like that.
-
Simply because women are now permitted in combat roles, why does that change the fact that males are largely more suitable for combat roles so as to limit a draft to males only? Rehnquist said that the ban on women in combat “fully” justifies the exclusion on women in the draft. It doesn’t follow that it is still not at least partially justified. If not, see #1.