We haven’t…You’re putting me on…I left the country for nothing?..Man, that’s a bummer. I mean I like Canada and all that, but it’s not Amarillo.
Israel doesn’t actually require everyone to serve.
Of course there are exemptions, some of which are sex-based (and women are obligated to two years while men are obligated to three). But “requires everyone to serve” is reasonable shorthand IMO.
If women are equally capable as combatants, and the Pentagon has apparently decided that they are, then there is no reason they should be excluded from the draft.
Whether the draft is still necessary is an entirely different question.
The protection of women and children are the reason there is a military in the first place. It’d be silly if we put them on the frontline. Women should be drafted in the same number as men (that is, none), but to a parallel institution. Like for instance nurses or something like that.
Oh come on, Sweden’s not so bad.
Not in the last 300 years anyway.
but you never know
Like others, I don’t see any reason there should be a requirement to register. It’s not relevant to the present-day military and hasn’t been for generations.
I’m more interested in the question of whether physical requirements will be equalized for the two genders. For many years, the Marines had a requirement of three pull-ups for men, and a different requirement for women. There are very few women who can meet the three pull-up requirement. A couple years back they tried changing the rules so that women were required to meet the same physical standards as men. Very few women passed, and the updated requirements were delayed. There are other examples of physicals standards being different by gender as well. I’m not sure if that issue has been resolved, or how it will be.
Last year, every woman who attempted Army Ranger training failed. Likewise for Marine Office Combat Training. There are not only large differences between the physical abilities of the average man and woman in the military, but these have consequences:
The British experience training men and women together supports this conclusion. In 1998, the British Army introduced a job-related gender free selection process, Physical Selections Standards (Recruits) (PSS(R)). In 2002, Ian M.M. Gemmell published a study that observed that after introducing the (PSS(R)), the incidence of injuries among women during recruit training went up dramatically. … Not only did the number of eligible women decline but also the injury and separation rate soared. The overuse injury rate among women rose from 4.6% to 11.1% while the rate among men was unchanged at 1.5% The study’s author, Ian M.M. Gemmell concluded that women face an excess risk when they undertake the same arduous training as male recruits and such training places concerns for health and safety in conflict with equal opportunity goals. The British Army formally reviews its policy excluding women from ground combat positions every eight years. The last review was in 2010. The positions remain closed.
…
Women are not only more prone to injury in training. They are also more likely to suffer non-battle injury during active military operations. In a study of disease and non-battle injuries in a brigade combat team (BCT) in Iraq the injury rate among women was twice that for men. The disease and non-battle casualty rate among the 325 women in the BCT was 408.6 per 1,000 Combat-Years versus 244 for men.41 Half of the women were evacuated for musculoskeletal injuries.
So setting identical physical requirements for men and women would appear to have very bad consequences.
As a Dane I can tell you the only proper answer to that is, and always will be: “No, it’s much worse.”
Lord bless your innocence! Militaries exist to protect the state, and the interests of the political establishments who dominate the state. The military are very rarely involved in responding to threats to women and children.
I’ve been reading Howard Zinn (“A People’s History of the United States”) and it’s become pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of the US military is to protect the economic interests of those who hold the most power.
Following Rune’s logic, then how does he(?) explain the My Lei massacre? :dubious: I don’t see how that was protecting women and children.
So the consensus seems to be that women should be required to register. I suppose that is a good thing, because just yesterday Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) introduced a bill requiring women to register.
The tangential issue of whether or not we need the draft at all is another question, perhaps the topic for a new thread. I will say that in my opinion, believing we do not need draft registration is a shortsighted and naive viewpoint. Effectively processing potentially hundreds of thousands of inductees as quickly as possible is a non-trivial matter. Denying the need for draft registration is tantamount to ignoring some of history’s most important lessons.
Wait…what?
So is trying to fight the last war. We don’t need hundreds of thousands of soldiers any more - we don’t have the infrastructure to do anything with them anyways. Our military is built on the idea of fewer well-trained soldiers and massive hardware advantages. Drafting 100,000’s of untrained, unmotivated foot soldiers is counter productive; they’ll just get in the way of the war effort.
What about only having women register … and by extension only allowing women into the military? Frank Herbert explored this in his book God Emperor of Dune, the fishspeakers I believe they were called. As I remember, Emperor Leto thought women to be more loyal to him than men.
Plus, who do you want serving inside a tiny submarine where there’s not much room: huge guys, or petite women?
*Ten thousand Swedes
Crept through the weeds
pursued by one Norwegian *
But you never need exclusively “rifle carriers”, because all those “rifle carriers” need someone to send them bullets, rifles, food and other supplies. They need someone to take care of them when they are wounded. They need someone to make sure they get paid.
Sex should be irrelevant when setting up a draft: either everybody is draftable, or nobody is.
Rune, my foremothers very much disagree with you. I’m being polite, I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.
Well, for a long time the feminist argument against drafting women was the fact that we didn’t have the same opportunities either before or after, to go in with rank (an Eagle Scout goes in up a rank from an ordinary 18-year-old recruit), and to be promoted. When a woman couldn’t be in combat, she couldn’t achieve the highest ranks.
Now that those things are not true, and there are lots of other ways to go in with ranks, including having taken college classes as a high school student, I suppose women should have to register. But I would rather do away with selective service.
I come from a family with a tradition of service, and I served myself. I’ve seen what unwilling recruits are like; more than that, though: with combat and everything now open to women, I think the US will have a volunteer military never in need of draftees. Women were already volunteering in droves, and they should only increase now-- and the ones who were there before more likely to stay.
For a lot of reasons, selective service is a bad idea. Like someone said, in WWII, draftees had a sense of duty. That doesn’t exist anymore. Anyone who was a draftee in the 21st century would be a fuck-up of the first order. It’d be someone who 1) couldn’t find a doctor to give them a medical out; 2) couldn’t outrun the sheriff; 3) couldn’t find Canada.
In the U.K. we do not have a draft the military is a volunteer force, if we go to war again yes there would be a draft should woman be included? I think to do so would be to forget the vital role woman played during ww2 without them we would have lost. It was not the little woman who done her bit back home it was strong woman who pushed the boundaries. If woman want to fight on the front line let them but do not forget the massive job back home.
Women should not be required to register for the draft.
Men should not be required to register for the draft.
Drafting people is slavery, and the draft is unconstitutional.