The military establishment (with the exception of the Marines) has acknowledged and established the path to full integration including combat and special ops billets. With recent Pentagon announcements this topic has been pretty much laid to rest, with one glaring omission: The Draft. I would like to know how the Dopers stand on this question. Do you or do you not believe women should now be required to register for the draft, same as men?
Maybe this should be a poll…
I foresee that the majority of the responses will be some variation of:
With those two comments, I would like to either require women to register, or preferable remove the facade of required registration with Selective Service for all.
I am pro-equality for women and I am happy they will be fully integrated into the military. And we all should be equally draftable or get rid of the draft.
I have supported including women in the draft since there actually was a draft for which I (a woman) would eventually have been eligible.
I haven’t change my position in over 40 years - whatever is required of men should be required of women as well.
One argument against the Equal Rights Amendment was that it would make women subject to the draft. Where’s that ERA?
If we’re going to keep the possibility of a draft, of course women should have to sign up.
[QUOTE=Bridget Burke]
One argument against the Equal Rights Amendment was that it would make women subject to the draft. Where’s that ERA?
If we’re going to keep the possibility of a draft, of course women should have to sign up.
[/QUOTE]
The United States was the only major Allied power not to draft women in the Second World War; (they were going to, but the Japanese surrendered before it could be implemented)
If you have a situation which needs conscription, then you are looking at an all out war effort like World War 2 and in my rather extensive readings of that conflict, I can say that the attitudes would be unimaginably different than what prevails today. They attitude then was not about “rights” rather it was about duty and doing your bit.
I mean this was the era when the contents of your garden was considered vital to the war effort.
Thanks for the lecture. I read, too–but I was also raised on family stories. During the War, my mother did secretarial work for the commander of a USAAF training base. My grandmother worked in the laundry at that base.
My grandfather worked in the motor pool & a young uncle delivered papers at the base. All my male relatives of an age to serve overseas did. There were draft dodgers in those days, too–and I don’t just mean the principled pacifists.
I’m still pissed at the idiots who stopped the ERA.
I’d say that they should sign women up as well.
Selective service registration is meant to be a way to draft soldiers/sailors/marines/airmen in case of a large war, and if we’re in such dire straits that we have to resort to that, it seems only prudent to register women as well, now that they’re eligible for any military position.
Plus, the notion that suddenly cute young woman draftees are going to be maimed and killed in some war, is likely one that won’t sit well at home, except in some sort of existential crisis for the nation, so maybe it would ultimately be a good thing.
Men and women are both drafted equally in my country. In this day and age, I don’t see how drafting only one sex can stand up legally.
Men and women are also both drafted equally in my country as well. I’m an American.
The reason I’m not outraged over the fact that women aren’t required to register is because I believe draft registration is irrelevant. We’re not going to have a draft. We should stop requiring men to register for the draft
If we do have a draft, then we should draft both men and women, in whatever capacity is needed to fight the war. The purpose of the draft should be to win the war. If we need lots of people to carry rifles and it turns out that 70% of 18 year old men are qualified for this and only 10% of women then it’s stupid to insist that we should draft an equal number of women just to make it fair. Likewise, it would be stupid to draft men who are less qualified for jobs that need doing than some women, simply because they have a dick. If we need more computer operators then it’s stupid to only draft men because women can sit at a desk and punch buttons just as easily as men.
Complaints about fairness are kind of stupid, because the draft is inherently unfair. Drafting people you don’t need for the war effort doesn’t make it more fair, it makes it less fair, because it’s unfair to everyone who is drafted. If you only need to draft 100,000 rifle carriers to win the war, and 94% of those rifle carriers are going to be men, it doesn’t make sense to force another 100,000 women into some alternative form of involuntary servitude just to make it even. It doesn’t make it even. The only way it would be more fair is if the extra people drafted made it easier for the other draftees. If it doesn’t, then it’s stupid. If we were going to draft 100,000 men to carry rifles for 6 months and sit at a computer desk for 6 months then it would be less unfair to draft 100,000 men to carry rifles for 6 months and 100,000 women to sit at the desks for 6 months, and then the men could go home 6 months early. But drafting extra women for a year doing jobs that don’t need doing doesn’t reduce the burden on the 100,000 men with rifles, so it’s pointless.
Anyway, neither is going to happen. We’re not going to draft anyone, men or women. The selective service registration is useless, and won’t help us get up a draft faster if we ever did need a draft. But we can’t get rid of it because of reasons. We should get rid of it. But if we don’t I’m not going to complain very much, because it’s a very very small unfairness that only causes a very very small amount of harm to the men who have to uselessly register. Give me a magic wand and I’ll abolish it. Make me president and I’ll abolish it. Give me a chance to vote for congressperson or President who wants to abolish it and I’ll vote for them, but I certainly won’t vote for the Socialist Worker’s party candidate just because they’re the only candidate who pledges to abolish selective service registration.
Well, we don’t draft anyone right now, and it’s really pretty hard to come up with a scenario where drafting mass quantities of untrained youth makes sense in this day and age. So it’s unlikely to ever matter.
Still, the way selective service registration is in place today doesn’t make sense in light of the gender equality. It should either be eliminated or made gender neutral.
This has become my position over the years. 2 years or so done following high school would be an effective program. See if kids could get some discipline and post-secondary education through it. God knows I could have used it given what a terror I was as a young man.
And it’s not just the Israelis. Many countries, including Austria, Brazil, and Switzerland - as well as other less desirable locales - do as well.
Yes, but lots of other countries have abolished universal service.
If we really need a bunch of untrained 18 year olds doing unpleasant jobs, how about we raise taxes and pay them to do those jobs?
Since, as I understand it, anyone with a drivers license or state ID is traceable/trackable. Abolish selective service and if we ever need bodies, just look them up and call them in.
And I still think anyone in power who votes for war should have to enlist their entire family in the conflict before even considering anyone else’s family.
I agree that there is no realistic circumstance in which Americans will need a draft.
I am from Norway though. We are a small, rich country bordering a very large and unstable one. Our circumstances are different. And I do not think the concept “rifle carrier we do not need” in a war situation has been dwelt on much.
The thing is with modern warfare (as in 20th century and later), there’s been at least a 1:1(WWI) all the way to a 1:3(current) “tooth to tail” ratio in US military forces.
What this means in terms of your 100,000 infantrymen is that we’d actually need to draft something closer to 400,000 people to properly support and supply them in the field. Many (most?) of those jobs are entirely suitable for female troops.
So what would likely happen is that they’d draft their 400,000 troops, half male, half female, and they’d split them up however they fit in best; your 100,000 infantry-persons would certainly come out of that however it worked out.
I don’t really see a US draft happening anytime soon, but I hesitate to say “never again”. Odder things have happened in the course of world history in very short historical time frames.
That said, I suspect that it’ll either be quietly abolished, or there’ll be some kind of lawsuit involving it, and it’ll either be abolished or equalized.
I’ve been saying since the '70’s that equal rights means equal responsibilities.
If men have to register, then women should also be required to do so.
If men are subject to a draft, then women should be, too.
Or alternately, if we ever do get in the sort of trouble where the Powers That Be are seriously considering a draft, we’ve probably got some sort of misrule that also implies a massive wave of Patriarchy to go with the Militarism.
In other words, co-morbidity. If we have a draft, we’ve probably got a society screwed up enough to want the women on Kinder, Kuche und Kirke duty rather than in the military.
Seriously. The Selective Service System is a Cold War dinosaur that should have been abolished when the Red Army left Afghanistan. It only exists because of bureaucratic inertia and a fear on the part of politicians to look weak on defense. Taking the amount of money we throw in a pit and light on fire and doubling it in the name of equality is moronic.