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The Truth About Drafting Women

February 9, 2016

 
Blogging at Commentary, Max Boot says this:

Ted Cruz should rest easy — no one is going to force his little girls into hand to hand combat with "220-pound psychopaths." (Full disclosure: I am an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations which Ted Cruz has denounced as a "pit of vipers.")

No one knows, of course, how a future draft would work. The odds of having a draft at all are low because of how well the all-volunteer system has worked. The only model we have is Israel, the only country in the world that drafts women along with men. Women constitute a third of all Israeli conscripts but make up only 2.5 percent of combat soldiers – and most of those women are in light infantry units that primarily patrol the peaceful Jordanian border. Women are not allowed into elite infantry or heavy armor units, which can be expected to suffer the heaviest losses in combat.

The odds are that if the U.S. instituted a draft, women would be allowed to volunteer for slots in ground combat units but would not be required do so. In any case, unless physical standards are radically transformed, very few women will qualify for such units.

Boot might be right. Maybe the United States could, in the event of some future draft, find itself in something like the uneasy equilibrium that he describes in Israel. But consider this: Should Selective Service registration become required for women, it is very likely to come as a result of the federal courts, where the 1981 Supreme Court decision Rostker v. Goldberg currently sets the precedent that the obligation applies only to men. The majority opinion in Rostker rested on the fact that the military excluded women from combat roles, which obviously no longer applies. Two lawsuits are currently working their way through the courts with an aim to overturning this precedent, one of which (I kid you not) has been filed by the "National Coalition for Men."

This has become a debate about fairness and equality. These plaintiffs argue that if individual men and women are equal in their ability to serve in combat (and both groups are held to a common physical standard before they join combat units) then it's unfair that the draft would apply only to one sex. Boot is implying that, having come to this national consensus, we'll quietly backtrack on it during some future draft, and treat male and female draftees differently. The men will have to do what they are told. The women will pick and choose.

I'm not nearly as sanguine. The social forces behind the lawsuits targeting the draft (and the prior movement to open ground combat units to women) would not accept such an equilibrium—and if anything has become clear to me over the last few years, it's the fact that those forces have great influence when they have a friend in the White House. Let's not minimize the social significance of registering women for the draft by making a soothing case that the forces which have brought us to this juncture are simply going to lose power, interest, or ideological consistency as the years go on.

This debate has opened an interesting and not entirely predictable split among GOP politicians and commentators. Some argue that the whole debate is a trap set by liberals to fracture the conservative coalition. Very possible! I could see Hillary going either way on this. If Rubio were the nominee, then she could stab feminists in the back and attack him for wanting to send young women to war, or some such. If the nomination goes to Cruz, she might easily go the other way, and mock the senator for his old-fashioned beliefs about gender.

Disagreements among conservatives can provide liberals with opportunities, but that doesn't mean the disagreements are phony or unimportant. On the grounds of both policy and politics there are good reasons for GOP candidates to oppose imposing draft registration on women. As for policy, the assumptions that a draft will likely not occur, or that if it did the military would be willing or able to massage the situation as have the Israelis—well, they are just that: assumptions.

As for politics, why are we so sure that Americans (and especially voters in GOP primaries and caucuses) are happy to vote for candidates who want to sign 18 to 25 year old women up for the draft?