redblueamerica

By Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, both testified this month that because all combat roles are now open to women, women should register for the selective service as all American men must do when they turn 18.

Although Republicans have long opposed women serving in combat, several GOP candidates for president, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, endorsed the idea ahead of the New Hampshire primary.

Is this equality realized? Or equality gone too far? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, weigh in.

JOEL MATHIS

Women? In the military? Fighting wars? If I had pearls, I'd clutch them.

The debate we're suddenly having about drafting women is very silly, for two reasons. First, you may have noticed that we don't actually draft people anymore - modern American conscription ended in January 1973.

America has fought a few wars since then. A couple of them - both in Iraq - were kind of big. In fact, the first Gulf War took place my senior year in high school. I remember old hippies offering lessons in how to avoid the draft, if it were reinstated, but it never was. The war came and went, the troops came home, and the emergency faded away.

The second invasion and occupation of Iraq might have justified a draft. That war stretched our military - along with reserve and National Guard units - to the breaking point, making it increasingly difficult for the all-volunteer military to recruit and retain, ahem, the volunteers. Still, renewal of the draft was never a serious likelihood.

Absent some big change in our political mindset, then, a draft is only likely if civilizational survival is truly at stake - if the barbarians really are at the gates. If that ever becomes the case, it won't matter much whether the hands holding weapons belong to men or women.

The other reason the argument is silly? Women already fight and die in our wars. Roughly 140 - different sources offer different counts - died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. You really didn't hear all that much about it. Our hatred of seeing women come home in caskets, it seems, is more theoretical than proven.

Listen: The draft is an awful tool. It rips people away from their families to go kill and risk being killed for causes they may or may not support. It has always fallen most heavily on poor and working class men. If we're only now disturbed by the prospect of conscription, it doesn't necessarily mean we hold women in esteem. It probably just means we value the lives of poor men too little.

BEN BOYCHUK

What kind of man would think it a good idea to compel a woman to fight and die in a war? What sort of man would put somebody's daughter or mother harm's way before himself?

It's bad enough when the elite consensus no longer objects to women in combat, in practice let alone in theory. Political expediency demands that women have the opportunity to serve on the frontlines. Politics will also require the armed services to change the standards to make sure they do.

Still, it's one thing to let American women volunteer for an infantry or armored unit, assuming the standards remained untouched. The question is whether they should be compelled to serve and fight.

Of course they shouldn't.

(To anticipate an objection: Yes, Israel requires men and women of a certain age to serve in the military. Israel is also a country roughly the size and population of New Jersey, surrounded by enemies that would kill every man, woman and child given half a chance. We aren't Israel.)

Say what you will about Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, but his response to his fellow Republican presidential candidates who lent their support to this Selective Service scheme was precisely right: "Are you guys nuts?"

"I'm the father of two little girls. I love those girls with all my heart. They are capable of doing anything in their hearts' desire," Cruz said. "But the idea that their government would forcibly put them in the foxhole with a 220-pound psychopath trying to kill them doesn't make any sense at all."

Not only that. We hear so much about the "rape culture" that supposedly permeates America's college and university campuses - a crisis so great that the Obama administration has made combatting campus sexual assault a top priority. Yet this same government would subject women to rape, torture and slaughter at the hands of an enemy because equality somehow demands it. Strange.

Extending the draft to women isn't about fairness or equality. It's madness born of forgetfulness. We're forgetting what it means to be men and women. We're forgetting why our daughters and sisters should be protected, not made into cannon fodder. We're forgetting what it means to be a civilization worth defending in the first place.

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Ben Boychuk (bboychukcity-journal.org) is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Joel Mathis (joelmmathisgmail.com) is associate editor for Philadelphia Magazine. Visit them on Facebook: www.facebook.com/benandjoel