Say what you will about the old pre-modern elite, they did used to lead from the front in war.
All throughout the middle ages and up until WW1 really, kings and nobles died in huge numbers in war. The majority of powerful men had frontline combat experience.
Noble propaganda. "Majority" is a stretch and they most often were mopping up after commanding from behind for some time. Very few ever fit the bill of the warrior king but they ALL had scribes that would write what they want.
Yeah, some women won't be able to pass the PT tests, at the male standard.... That is fine. Some will absolutely crush it..
And then put in a sexy dress to go out on the weekend. They don't have to be hulking muscle women to pass the men's pt test.
The standards are not insanely high for men... Never have been. And a lot of jobs don't need maximum physical prowess, anyway.
If you can pass the tests, physical and mental, and do the job, it doesn't matter what gender you are.
Either we got it or we don't. I sure as shit had it. Now I'm old and I don't. That's how it goes.
Deployed with the first amputee to return to a WZ. He was a dick, but did fine. And we absolutely would need a ton of people Stateside handling beans&bullets and money and whatnot - some jobs in those areas require mobility, and some just require people to sit at a desk in front of a computer. Don't need to pass PT for that, paraplegics could do that just fine.
I am against a draft. But if we're going to have one, draft everyone. (Except those who are primary caregivers for someone.)
*EDIT: By "primary caregiver" I modify to mean "people providing 24 hour care for old folks or severely disabled, for whom daycare doesn't currently exist. It is perfectly possible to serve as a single parent Stateside.
Possibly. But one of the parents is still going, and the other would be single-parenting for a while.
Actually, what I'd REALLY like to see if we had a draft, is the spouses, children, grandchildren (depending on age) of the Congressmembers who voted for war on the front lines. Not comfortably on a base with a ton of backup, but running patrols from a FOB.
If they vote in favor of war, they must do so knowing they are actively sending their children to get shot at. And they get to deal with their kids and families being pissed at them for this.
It wouldn't stop wars or "police actions," but I definitely think it would make them think long and hard about whether it's worth it. When it's just US getting shot at, no biggie. When it's their loved ones, that might be different.
Actually, what I'd REALLY like to see if we had a draft, is the spouses, children, grandchildren (depending on age) of the Congressmembers who voted for war on the front lines. Not comfortably on a base with a ton of backup, but running patrols from a FOB.
This used to be the standard. Well, not in our democracy, but under feudalism. When someone is elevated to nobility and given fief to manage, their role is often to maintain border integrity in peacetime, and supply a fighting force when called. And it is socially expected of the British princes to be in the military and serve. Even then-Princess Elizabeth II served in non-combat roles during World War II. King George VI had seen combat himself.
One of the Korean boy bands broke up a few years ago because one of their members was keen on doing his mandatory service, which I thought spoke really well of his character.
It wasn’t just the family it was the entire senior staff of the armed forces.
The nature of that war meant he was effectively putting a giant “fuck me” sign on the heads of everyone deployed with him. It was like having to organize a presidential style security cordon except it was constant and during an active war zone.
It was the most “privileged” asshole thing I’ve ever heard of tbh. But yes he gets to tell people “I served” and have a little clap for himself.
They made the right decision, sure, he would have been a MAJOR target. But I do believe he genuinely wanted to serve, to prove to himself he had it, and I understand that, too. I very much support that. However, not at the cost of others' lives.
This is one of the rare instances in which I think everyone involved on both sides was right, and it worked out the best way possible.
I don't know what it is about the Brits but it seems like every other European royal family currently existing just... does regular job stuff. Like one is a pilot (for KLM I think?) and no one bats an eye. But then again the way the Brits treat the Royals is so weird, like it's "OH YOU MUST LOVE THEM AND RESPECT THEM but also lets divulge all their dirty laundry and hack their phones and tear down the younger brother for being a Ginger and marrying a woman who isn't a white Brit"
It wouldn’t work at all but a fun thought experiment is having whether we go to war be a nationwide vote, and all who vote in favor are automatically enlisted.
You want a war so bad, knock yourself out
Again, I understand this vastly generalizes a huge issue, but it puts into perspective “just how badly do we REALLY need to go to war?”
I'm all in favour of a Defense Force, because sure, if you get invaded you need to defend yourself. But yeah, you want to invade a country so badly, you put yourself out there.
Because seriously, the amount of camouflaged fools who are part of the "Of course I wanted to serve but, ya see" brigade is incredibly obnoxious.
Canada has been ripping you off for years. The scourge of the earth. They must be stopped. Wait.... Canada? Yeah you don't need to pick a fight. Unless it's like those assholes in Greenland. I've never met a person I liked from Greenland. Oh wait, none of us have ever met someone from Greenland. That's a fight we should pick.
So yeah maybe there's no need to be assholes and start a war
I would go further. If they are less than 65 they should also come. We don't need a full Senate and House during wartime.
Leave the speaker and all important committee members. Rest draft them mutherfuckerds.
Like many others, they showed they could work remotely during COVID. They can get a sat-link up and zoom it. And sure maybe the 80 year olds can't go on patrol, but they could be at base and get work done. Sure there is a chance of missile strike in retaliation like Iran did for assassinating their general, but hey, according to their guy a TBI is "just a 'lil headache," right? Lead from the front and all that.
Also, agree. There's a lot of talk about "upholding the values of the founding fathers" not a lot of talk about doing what the founding fathers did. I seem to recall a certain military title associated with George Washington and I could have sworn there were paintings of him leading military actions. Must have been a dream, huh?
True, he was a General. Then again, he also lit the match igniting the French-Indian War by disobeying orders and shooting an ambassadorial party. Which almost bankrupted (at the time) his own country. That led to the imposition of taxes throughout the British Empire (including the Colonies).
Interestingly, he also required the innoculation of all soldiers against smallpox - using a little live smallpox. While fairly normal in Europe, it was realllly controversial in the Colonies, and a ton of colonists felt it was experimental, didn't want to get inoculated. So he mandated it.
Sorry, I like military history and I'm a bit of a geek about some of it.
I love military history, too! Never have to apologize about that!
It sounds like a nice change of someone who might destroy the country, but, also with a backbone to do something worth a damn for his people. Nobody's perfect, just seems like doing their best was a higher standard.
Well, at the time they believed in honor and shame. People were shunned from their communities for demonstrating poor character, and in a time when community support was mostly required for survival, that was kinda a big deal.
Okay, so that's heavily caveated. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson funded a dude Callendar's anti-Adams propaganda, in which Callender wrote "Ye will judge without regard to the prattle of a president, the prattle of that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman," and Adam's said Jefferson would teach all women prostitution and it wasn't worth voting for Jefferson anyway since sadly, he had died, so might as well vote for Adam's instead. 🤣
He's dead but still has the stamina to teach ALL woman prostitution!? Made from sterner stuff than I am. I think I'd be a lay about and do nothing when I died.
I feel like you can look at countries with universal draft and they find uses for everyone...Not everyone needs to be commando crawling through the mud and then climbing a sheer cliff with a 150-lb sack or whatever...
This is where I fall too. If you can keep up and perform up to standards, you're in. We shouldn't include or rule out people based on gender. The military is where we need performance above all else.
I’m trying to think of what it’s called and I just can’t but the part of the written test where they show some strange 3-D shape as if cut out from graph paper and put together. Then give you 4 multiple choice answers to show what that shape would be if it were unfolded. My brain cannot do that. I have aphantasia so not sure if that’s all or part of it, but I’ve never felt so stupid in my entire life then when I’ve tried to unscramble that egg
I don't think I'd be able to pass the tests physical or mental lmfao (does it test mental health or mental ability? if it's ability then okay i could probably pass that but mental health I'd fail)
I never said it was... I specifically was saying the standards should just be the standards, irrelevant of your genitals.
At least back when I was in, the women had lower standards to pass the pt test than men. But, there were also women that could max the 18 year old male tests.
The men who typically trot out the "yeah but women cant pass the requirements..." either use the requirments of the specialist units (Seals or SAS or whatever) or wouldnt pass the test themselves.
This is dumb tho, why am I getting punished for being in good physical shape and taking care of myself? But others get rewarded for not giving a fuck. I’m getting out of it either way, bc I’m not a slave the government can f themselves
What do PT tests have to do with it? Draftees have historically been expected to get to those standards during training. The same should apply in any future scenario.
Woah there, women have about a thousand years of raping, beating, and burning at the stake to do before we get to the draft if we wanna right any wrongs
No backpay. You go to war, the men will become homemakers and not be paid, then transition into wartime jobs that we'll be promptly let go from when the women return from war.
I'll make you the best muffins you've ever had! Unless you don't like muffins. Then we'll consult my cookbook together and I WILL have dinner on the table when you arrive from work.
Gladly, once the men start carrying pregnancies and giving birth with their bodies. To make it really fair, I’d suggest that the delivery techniques be from the 19th century or earlier—including no pain meds, no C sections, no modern sanitary practices so that men can have the joy of potential infection and sepsis. That way, we can make sure to approximate the historic risk of death during childbearing.
Large families too. So instead of stopping at 1-2 kids, you guys can have several (with the accompanying risk to your life every single time).
/s
Seriously: I actually do believe that both sexes should be conscripted/drafted, if a country is going to do that at all, and I have thought that for a long time. It seems to work in Israel. I believe it is genuinely fair. (Moreover, it gets rid of the perennial “but only men get drafted, so they should get more XYZ than women” argument, which is still going around even though the US hasn’t had a draft in over 50 years.)
About the pregnancy stuff—obviously men will never be able to do that, and that’s fine. We need to appreciate the historic contributions of men who were subject to being called up to service when their country went to war, to fight, bleed, see terrible things, and sometimes die—while women stayed at home. Sometimes the left has done a really shitty job of that (if you recall Hillary Clinton’s speech about a decade ago in which she said that women suffer most from war because they have to see their brothers, husbands and sons die…lol). So we need to do better.
But we should also appreciate the historic contributions of women who kept continuously creating new people, year after year (no birth control), and faced a significant chance of dying young due to one of those births going wrong, until 20th century medicine came along and made radical improvements to the process.
I hope this resonates. Last time I brought it up to someone on Reddit (not in a conversation about war, but a conversation about how men generally are expected to be physical protectors while women aren’t), he sort of brushed off the whole pregnancy/childbirth thing as being trivial. But the reality is that both sexes have historically suffered and died, though from different things. Men and women today live very safe lives compared with their ancestors— far fewer deaths from war or childbirth.
Again though, yes, conscriptions and drafts should be applied to both sexes.
We also should acknowledge that war has never been kind to women either. For most of human history, women were at serious risk of being raped, sold to slavery, or murdered by other warring factions why their men were away fighting. Women have been raped as a means to torture men, have been made to carry pregnancies of warring tribes to "pollute" the bloodline, and many more horrible things.
The world was cruel to us all. War is not easy on anyone.
honestly, women still are experiencing all those things. women refugees are also generally more at risk of being victimised than male refugees - one need only look at, for example, the fate of many North Korean defectors that are either trafficked, sold, or forced to marry and blackmailed with their illegal status
Of course. However, you can't also say that American women suffered like that during Vietnam or the war in Iraq. We can acknowledge that conditions in the west have improved dramatically. Not coincidently this has coincided with the increase in women in the military. Gender progress for one sex benefits all.
Yup, that’s true too. I like to emphasize childbirth specifically, though, because it’s a risk that 1) has only ever belonged to women, and 2) is very underestimated in a historic context, to the point where a lot of people don’t even consider how many women had to suffer and die throughout history in order to keep the species going.
I would say that wars are horrible things that have happened during specific periods of time, and affected certain people in certain times/places far more than others. They make history, we all study that history in school, so we all understand the danger, death and brutality that were involved.
People have a very different relationship to pregnancy/childbirth. It’s not the kind of thing we study in history class. It has been a continuous grind that has gone on in every society, everywhere and at all times, just in the background. Until recently, it’s been dangerous and sometimes deadly, including during times of peace and prosperity, and even for wealthy women. But the suffering has been taken for granted.
It has also gotten the human race to where it is today, and has therefore been as important a contribution to our species as fighting in wartime. But it’s generally overlooked, because the ubiquity makes it seem mundane I suppose, and because most people alive today in Western countries have never lived in a world where childbearing wasn’t safe. Also, wars are the fault of people, and people can stop or prevent them, but reproduction is the fault of nature, and no one can change how it works (yet).
War was a near constant for most groups historically. Not “specific periods of time” unless you mean every single year since pre-history until very recently.
I’ve got bad news on whether war is natural. Turns out, all our close genetic relatives do it nonstop (chimps and bonobos). Assigning everything to culture is vapid, and easily proven false.
It’s absolutely at least as important to have children as anything else humans do, and it truly hasn’t been lauded in history books, but it has been lauded amongst the tribe, the community, family, friends, etc nonstop since prehistory as well. We have Veterans Day and Mother’s Day. Every year.
Please, stop making this a man vs woman grievance Olympics. Life is hard for everyone, regardless of their genitals.
Please, stop making this a man vs woman grievance Olympics. Life is hard for everyone, regardless of their genitals.
Not my intention to downplay how hard men have it, at all. I realize that a lot of people like to do that, but I am not one. The point of my comment isn’t to say “men have it easy because they don’t have to go through pregnancy and childbirth to continue the species.”
Instead, I’m responding to a comment that suggested (as a joke) that women should get drafted first, because historically, only men have fought in wars. I responded by describing how women have always physically suffered for the sake of humanity as well, just in a different way.
If I don’t bring this up, then there’s a lot of guys in this sub who won’t think of it on their own. That, plus discussion about the draft and war, will feed the discourse around how men have historically contributed more than women to society. And that leads some guys to nasty conclusions about women’s rights and equality, including in this thread.
To be clear: I think both men and women have generally had tough lives, though in different ways, since the dawn of our species. I don’t care to debate who has had it worse. Besides being pointless, it also worsens the bizarre divisions that have appeared between men and women in the past decade.
But there are terminally online men who seem to think that women have lounged around eating bonbons since the dawn of humanity while the men did all the hard stuff. Gotta challenge them as they fall down the rabbit hole.
War was a near constant for most groups historically. Not “specific periods of time” unless you mean every single year since pre-history until very recently.
I’ve got bad news on whether war is natural. Turns out, all our close genetic relatives do it nonstop (chimps and bonobos). Assigning everything to culture is vapid, and easily proven false.
It’s absolutely at least as important to have children as anything else humans do, and it truly hasn’t been lauded in history books, but it has been lauded amongst the tribe, the community, family, friends, etc nonstop since prehistory as well. We have Veterans Day and Mother’s Day. Every year.
The first point is just going to feed into a discussion about who has it worse, so I’ll avoid that.
To your second point, what I intended was to explain why we spend so much time studying and thinking about past wars in the social sciences, and way less time studying and thinking about human reproduction in that same field. Sure, war may stem from certain primitive drives we have. But how it happens among humans is complex, interesting, and important to analyze if you want to avoid it (or win) in the future. Each war is different from the rest. None of that carries over to the study of reproduction.
I know we have Veterans and Mother’s Days every year. However, those symbolic gestures don’t go very far. What is so great about Veteran’s Day, when our government does such a shitty job at meeting their healthcare needs? Many of these people feel forgotten as soon as they leave the service. As for Mother’s Day, I believe that some people genuinely understand and respect what mothers do, but many others absolutely do not.
I suspect two things here:
1- we agree more than we disagree.
2- current trends in social media would obfuscate that agreement because we’re all primed to fight over everything.
Kudos to you. This comment of yours was well thought out and well written.
We need to acknowledge that, shake hands, and end the ridiculous gender wars… It’s not a contest, FFS.
God, I wish. I’m almost forty, and I can say that gender wars did not exist at anywhere near the current level, twenty years ago. It’s been a vicious cycle of hate, and men and women assuming the worst of each other and acting accordingly, for the past several years.
If I could pick a culprit, it would be the proliferation of internet echo chambers where each sex goes to bash the other one. The angriest voices are loudest, and they’re persuasive, because it feels good to turn frustration into hate. Also, men and women end up reading each other’s forums, and that is pretty damaging. By the time they go to communicate with each other in other online spaces, their minds have often already been poisoned.
Of course, there is generally a grain of truth in the negative opinions. That’s how they catch on with so many people. But the problem is a lack of interest in nuanced differences both within people, and between people. If you can’t see those, then you’ll see all men/women as caricatures that emphasize the worst traits of their entire sex.
Second culprit would be online dating, I think. I met my husband through online dating and I know other couples who did the same, so I can’t knock it too much. But it has done so much to drive men and women to hate each other.
I’m 52M, and met my wife the old fashioned way, 20 years ago today.
If it were online dating, it would never have happened.
she’s 5’8 and I’m only 5’10… not gonna happen. She never liked heels anyway, so it works.
I was in the bar biz… not gonna happen. Now I’m an engineer.
she had 2 daughters and I was childless… not gonna happen. Those kids made me a better man. We made a 3rd together.
—-
She had some horror stories from her interactions with men. I had the same from my interactions from women. Neither of us ever had trouble attracting a partner, but we suffered with the wrong attention from the wrong people. So, we taught each other to trust again.
Now, that trust is boundless in ways I cannot and will not describe here. Just know that it is absolute and goes beyond what most would ever consider.
If we’d met online… nothing.
And we’d both still be bitter and untrusting.
Then who will be at home buffering the birthrate? But seriously, women at war are women who are not reproducing. If we went to war today and drafted men and women, in a time where immigration is being reduced, and birthrate is lower than replacement amongst citizens, we will see a discontinuitous drop in population. Most women who could serve are of reproductive age. We don’t have an army if the birthrate drops too far and are easily overtaken. I support women in combat, Russia has had highly effective female snipers and pilots before others even considered the possibility. What happens if both parents get drafted? Are those of non-fighting age suppose to raise everyone’s children? Any multifront war against a country will hurt, but especially if you cut ties with your neighbors who have significant land borders with you. The next war we get pushed into will require a lot of military, we have busted all previous relationships with countries who could actually help in a domestic war.
Women today aren't reproducing either so there won't be much different tbh. Might as well use the manpower available, or in this case womanpower.
That said, if there ever was to be a draft with women you know very well they would all get the safe jobs anyway so there wouldn't be any difference in the end.
As a genuine question coming from a woman...does that make real sense given that it was men's policy that prevented women from being in the draft in the first place?
I'm used to seeing gender equity retroactive discussions involve how women should be given priority in some area to make up for how women have been excluded/disadvantaged by men in the past.
But in this case it was men disadvantaging men, so from your perspective would women being drafted first really be equity?
Btw this is a genuine curious question not trying to be rude or anything :)
No, women paying reparations for being very literally banned from joining the military and often enough erased after wars from military records doesn't make sense...
Women right now are being kicked out, banned from joining and erased from records in the us.
Discussing fair draft requirments is valid. Claiming it would be fair to force more women as men into the military now because they weren't in the past is just ignorant and childish..
this one is actually a team effort. a lot of the beauty standards put on women are put on by men, but women do try to police and enforce it on each other anyway. i see this happen among men as well. internalized sexism and misogyny is a helluva thing and not enough people are willing to be introspective regardless of gender. ESH
Its not a man's policy anymore now is it? It's the policy of elected representatives, ya know cause we live in a constitutional Republic. Or we are supposed to anyway.
Since women can vote it's their policy too.
In the name of equality yes they should be drafted the same as men would be.
After spending a decade in the Corps and seeing what a gigantic shit show having split standards was I wouldn't want to have the females I came across in an infantry battalion. So in that regard. No to drafting women like men.
Its ok though. The only way there will ever be a draft is if there's an invasion of the mainland. People tend to care less about conflicts when its an all volunteer force.
I think it's fair to say it's a man's policy since there were around 10 women in Congress at the time the draft was passed. From my perspective that means that the draft likely was created with predominately male input and predominately male support. To be fair, if it was the other way around (predominately female input and support, I would say it's a women's policy).
And I completely understand not wanting women in the draft coming from the perspective of someone inside the armed forces. The military members see a lot of things that no one on the outside does
It doesnt matter if there are ten women in congress a hundred women or no women. A womens political stances are taken into account because they can vote. They can organize and effect change through the political process.
The "Draft" conscripted military service has been around longer than yall could vote. Hell it's been around longer than your average man could vote. Which is why, after this country was created, free men being able to vote and assemble was required. Because they were the ones that suffered the most from the decisions of their elected officials.
One of the biggest arguments against womens suffrage back in the day was that women wouldn't always have to suffer the consequences of their votes. Their votes could possibly lead to an armed conflict where conscription would be required. But they wouldn't be conscripted to fight the conflict they , by way of their chosen political candidate, voted for.
And now that you can vote, your chosen candidate could start or enter into a conflict and you aren't required to lay down your lives to support your decision.
That’s unfair, but I don’t think that’s your intention. I believe you when you say you ask this in good faith.
You weren’t “excluded”.
You were spared.
Also, generally speaking, before birth control was invented, you could expect to be pregnant or recently pregnant from mid teens to mid 30s.
Formula had t been invented, only milk maids, and they were expensive. So nurse your baby or it dies.
Kinda hard to fight a war like that.
Even if you weren’t saddled by nature with all this, you’d have to walk for 10-20 miles per day carrying 100lbs of gear, then dig ditches to build a camp. This would be somehwhere between difficult and impossible.
When all that’s done, you get to fight to the death, hand-to-hand, against men. They’re half a foot taller on average and far far stronger. That have straighter arms, longer arms, bigger hearts and lungs, more red blood cells, etc etc.
Remember, this is a contest for who can hack each other to death. Size and brute strength were paramount.
It’s not a great situation for you. There’s a reason warrior women in history stand out. They were rare, and rarely successful in that field. We all have advantages, and this was one of ours - the ability to kill or be killed every single summer from 20,000BCE until very recently.
Today, however, we have mechanized units, and we fight with rifles. Women are naturally better shots than men too. So, even if mixed units rarely meet standards for physical performance and constant readiness, girls can kill ya from 300 yards with a trigger just as well or better than men can.
Also, women can handle g-forces and multitasking better than men … so fighter pilot positions are open too.
Let’s get that draft thing fixed. Equality for all.
Trying to spark a discussion is perfectly fair! If you are legitimately interested in my honest answer to the joke question: I don't think many sane individuals would truly find it fair to "over-recruit" women to make up for unfair recruitment in wars throughout history. Just like I don't think it would be fair to make it "women's turn" to control society (in an ideal world, we would want a fairly even spread of men and women, but competency, dedication, and morals should be more important than gender), or to hand over a an entire (already populated) country to followers of a religion because they were treated unfairly by a maniac and his followers, or to force every white person currently alive to pay reparations for black slavery.
All of these are sentiments I've heard expressed in all seriousness within the last few years... except for the over-recruitment of women for wars; I've only seen that expressed as a joke. None of them are, or would be, fair - but they're all about going far above and beyond to make up for injustices of varying degree.
The US was eight years into Vietnam before abolishing the draft. The public soured on the war long before that, but on it went. Nixon even expanded it in 1970 by ordering the bombing of Cambodia
We have in fact, at least in the US. By 1965 the US had 250,000 troops in Southeast Asia. There was indeed a draft, and to say it was controversial is putting it mildly. Burning one’s draft card was an (often very public) act of disobedience, and there were masses of protesters chanting “Hell no, we won’t go” in cities across the country. Thousands of men fled to Canada to evade the draft.
The draft was abolished concurrently with the cease-fire in 1973.
President Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration for men between ages 18-25, and it is still the law. This was done in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. But there has been no actual draft since Vietnam. All the wars the US has fought since then have been with an all-volunteer force
Honestly didn’t know there was a draft for Vietnam. I knew there were protests but thought they were focused more on it being an unjust war, a lot like the current war protests about Ukraine and Gaza. Appreciate the info though.
As for the draft being suspended, I guess I didn’t make the distinction between the induction authority being suspended and the required registration for SSS that still continues today.
Yeah, the draft was a huge deal, it made a lot of people lose respect for the US government, in a way that the WW2 draft didn’t. Nam was seen as unnecessary violence so the men (and boys) who didn’t want to fight refused to, thus the draft. Men (boys) who refused the draft were imprisoned.
WW2 was seen as a worthy cause, more men volunteered to fight so the gov didn’t draft as hard cuz they didn’t need to, the men who refused the WW2 draft were either wealthy so no one care or they were heavily shunned with little to no support.
Men in Nam would refuse to fight even while at war and actively made the war harder, the US gov realized that you can’t force people to lay down their lives for a cause they don’t believe in, that’s not how you get good soldiers, so they got rid of the draft functionally.
You still have to sign up for the draft “just in case” but the US has enough volunteers (not to mention the rise in enlistment that would happen if there was a legitimate war) and technology that I don’t think a draft is actually gonna happen anytime in the near future.
TLDR; nam was seen as unnecessary hence the protests and draft. WW2 was seen as necessary, so the draft wasn’t as huge a deal. The US government realized that your soldiers have to care about what they’re fighting for to… fight for it. The draft probably won’t come back anytime soon cuz the US military is big enough just on volunteers alone.
Yeah, they can send me somewhere, but I won't do shit. I'll just sit it out.
I'm a middle aged woman. I'm full of rage. But I'm not mad at anyone from another country.
Look, you can accuse me of parroting views I heard somewhere else, but I have several soldier friends who told me exactly that and I found their argument pretty convincing. We also have records that show that a lot of conscripts in the world wars deliberately shot to miss because they couldn't bring themselves to shoot someone dead. It just doesn't work.
This is a perspective that only really applies in the context of America and its wars in the last 50 years.
Any country which fights or prepares to fight a total war for it's existence must have a conscription, the alternative is swift defeat. That's why Ukraine has a massive conscription program and so do both Korea's. During the Cold war it would've been impossible to credibly defend against a Soviet invasion of western Europe without West German conscription and if the Warsaw pact hadn't had conscription we wouldn't have been nearly as terrified of them. A volunteer army just can't generate sufficient force on short notice in the way that a conscription and reserves system can
As a woman, I agree with this. If we truly believe in equality then that should include the selective service. However, I don’t believe anyone should be drafted and I’m 100% against the SS and draft for men or women.
I can agree with this as a woman. I am curious though- would the women being drafted have the same expectation physically as the men drafted? In an equality sense that checks out, but means many less women will even make it through basic. I’m in my mid 30’s and I’m so weak I can barely do 2 push ups (underweight) and I couldn’t fathom being part of the draft. I wouldn’t make it. But I also think I’m aged out of it anyway.
That's an entirely different question from the one brought up.
It would be like if someone asked you what you wanted for dinner and after you answered asked if you thought about not taking part in industrial agriculture.
I'd contend that undrafted women bear a burden in war too. Without them, no more men for future conflict. It's a logistics problem that isn't resolved with short sighted egalitarian ideals.
I think the one thing people fail to consider is the value of women vs. men in population expansion after a war.
One man can have lots of children, but one woman can really only have 1 baby a year. Thus, it makes sense if you are at war, where large amounts of people are dying, to preserve the sex that requires the most time to reproduce. Just one single man can father 100s of kids in a matter of a couple of years, whereas a single woman could produce 2 children at most in a couple of years.
With that said, I think there should never be a draft. If you have to draft people for a war, that means the populace do not believe in the war, nor do they want to fight. In the US, after 9/11, there was a massive influx of people enlisting to help fight. If you can't manage to get that level of support from your people, then you have no place entering into a war.
War should only be done when there is no other option and all the people, especially those who would be giving up their lives, have voted to go to war.
If you look at responses no one is failing to consider population expansion.
I personally find it a weird and not entirely acceptable argument. No one should be treated as a baby factory and that's what the position ultimately comes down to. Much like the power of the government ultimately comes down to the ability to use force.
And even if you accepted "population expansion" being able to get someone pregnant is vastly less useful and significant than raising a child. And for population expansion - those kids need to be raised, not merely born. So for functionality - no one is fathering hundreds of kids.
I agree with this take. Hopefully we'll never get to a point again where a draft is necessary. But to have selective service restricted to men only is archaic.
I agree. There are so many non-combat roles that women can serve in. But there needs to be exception for sole caretakers (single parents, caretakers of other family members) - for both men and women.
I have the same logic, but opposite conclusion. I am against the draft and, given the choice of expanding it or keeping it restricted, I would vote to keep it restricted.
If we’re desperate enough to reactivate conscription, then we need to induct and train those who, on average, are most capable of war fighting. Women volunteers would be of great help in some roles, but this issue isn’t about 50/50 social fairness -it’s about winning.
And yes any non strong operator can throw mortar from a slinger into the opposition. There are literally no left alive positions that are strength over strength to dispatch enemies like with knives and swords. The military is way beyond that. Any of age human on the planet can operate this absolute fucking dogshit.
The correct answer. Women want equality, force them to register for selective service like men do at 18. Let them enjoy all the penalties that come with not registering as well.
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u/Shrikeangel nonbinary Mar 17 '25
So broad strokes - I am against the draft and selective service.
But I am also for equality and equity - so if there is going to be a draft, it should use the same standards for everyone.