Congressional House and Senate Armed Services Committees have approved language requiring women to register for future military drafts as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2022. Conservative organizations, including our own, object to the drafting of women in combat arms.
According to American Military News,
The House committee voted 35-24 in support of the provision requiring women to register for the draft. All Democrats and some Republicans on the committee voted in favor of the amendment. The amendment now advances with the full NDAA to the House floor for a full vote.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), a U.S. Air Force veteran, introduced the provision to extend the currently male-only draft registration requirement to now include women.
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The legislative effort to now include women in the selective service registration requirement comes after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit against the male-only draft requirement after the Biden administration argued the matter could instead be addressed legislatively.
The Senate Armed Services Committee passed a similar measure to extend the draft to the female population in July.
In an August letter to the 117th Congress, several conservative organizations, including the Center for Conservative Women, asked that Congress “strike the Reed ‘Draft Our Daughters’ amendment … and oppose any House or Senate legislation that would have the same effect.”
Noting that the military draft was instituted to “quickly provide qualified replacements for combat casualties,” the letter argues that including women would be counter-productive. It would divert “scarce time and resources to the challenge of evaluating and training thousands of draft-age women [only] to find the few who might be minimally qualified for the requirements of combat arms.”
Numerous studies, including this one for the Naval Health Research Center and others mentioned here, have shown that most women cannot meet combat arms standards while most men can. “Gender-neutral” call-ups of both men and women would jam the induction pipeline and slow mobilization at the worst possible time – when our soldiers are fighting and dying on the battlefield.
The letter further argues that the military has already discovered that “gender-neutral standards” (84% for women, 30% for men) to reduce initial failure rates have not worked. “Equivocal ‘percentile’ scoring systems still will not disguise immutable physical disparities that the battlefield will expose without mercy.”
Conservative organizations argue that this issue is not about “fairness.”
Women have always volunteered to serve in times of national emergency. It is an affront to suggest that women would not do so again. … Though rules regarding women in combat have changed, Congress can reasonably, rationally, and appropriately determine that it would not make sense for Selective Service to register or call up thousands of female draftees just to fin the few who might meet standards in the combat arms.
The measure has passed the Armed Services Committee in both the House and Senate and awaits consideration by the full House and Senate.
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