Back in February, during a GOP debate with seven candidates remaining, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush answered in the affirmative when asked if women should be required to register with the Selective Service in case of a draft. Chris Christie excitedly interrupted to say he too thinks women should be subjected to the draft. It seemed like a question which would recede into the background of a wild election never to be mentioned again. Yet this week the National Defense Authorization Act passed the Senate 85-13 and included a provision requiring women to register for Selective Service. Ted Cruz was one of the more vocal opponents of the provision and was slammed by John McCain, a supporter of it, who called Cruz’s military background “not extensive.”
Is an extensive military background needed to realize a bad idea when we hear one? Are women supposed to celebrate that we have to register with the government to be sent against our will to fight in a war? This isn’t progress for women, it’s regression for society.
In the 1960s, Richard Nixon ran on the issue of ending the draft and made changes to the Selective Service requirement. President Ford then eliminated the registration requirement altogether. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, President Carter retroactively reinstated it. Gen. Robert B. Neller, the Marine Corps commandant, one of the main voices pushing for women to register for Selective Service, sees it as a rite of passage and said, “It doesn’t mean you’re going to serve, but you go register.” But why create the show of registering at all then? We currently spend in the ballpark of $20 million a year on the registration process. Why waste even more money registering women if it’s superfluous?
Those in favor of the move talk about the equality of it. Our bigger issue is that we can’t admit that equality doesn’t mean sameness. The sexes are not the same and it shouldn’t take sending women off into battle to prove that.
In the book Musculoskeletal Injuries in Military Women, Barbara A. Springer and Amy E. Ross note that military women suffer double the “incidence of injury” of military men in Basic Combat Training and are 67% more likely than men to receive a physical disability discharge. The book goes into great detail about why these injuries occur. Reasons include women having “more body fat and less lean body mass” than males, “increased pelvic width” and a whole host of other reasons which seem to point toward the conclusion: men and women are built differently. And these are women injuring themselves in a volunteer military, women who actively want to be there. Are we really supposed to pretend that civilian women will be able to perform to the same level as men in the military in case of a draft?
According to Military OneSource, a Department of Defense site that provides resources and support to service members, women make up fewer that 20% of active-duty military personnel. Of course women serve, and serve well, but let’s not pretend that joining the military would be something that women would ever choose to do in large numbers.
Rand Paul may have the best idea of all: He introduced a bill to end Selective Service for everyone. He called it the “Muhammad Ali Voluntary Service Act.” Would that 85 of Paul’s colleagues head in that direction and not into a politically correct quagmire.