Not only is this move immoral on its face — it’s also just bad politics.
Not only is this move immoral on its face — it’s also just bad politics.
I n December, a small group of courageous Republicans managed to kill a bipartisan effort to make women eligible for the military draft. The maneuver, led by conservatives such as Chip Roy (R., Texas) in the House and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in the Senate, was a surprise victory; a provision expanding the language of the Selective Service System from “all men” to “all Americans,” included in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), initially looked as if it would pass. But after a surge of last-minute opposition, Senator Hawley successfully inserted an amendment striking the language just before the legislation passed the Senate. Politico dubbed the move “a stunning turnaround.” Conservatives declared victory. “We have a calling to stand up for the people in this country,” Roy told National Review. “And that’s what I think we just showed you can do if you unite to do so.”
But this week, proponents of the provision are mounting another effort to draft America’s daughters. And shamefully, many Republicans are lending their support. On Wednesday, Politico’s Burgess Everett reported that an amendment to make women eligible for the draft in this year’s NDAA passed the Senate Armed Services Committee, with just six Republicans — Jim Inhofe, Mike Rounds, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Kevin Cramer, and Roger Wicker — voting “no.” That means that seven Republican senators — more than half of the 13 GOP members of the committee — voted yes:
Joni Ernst
Thom Tillis
Deb Fischer
Dan Sullivan
Rick Scott
Marsha Blackburn
Tommy Tuberville
Not only is this move immoral on its face — it’s also just bad politics. An August 2021 Ipsos poll found that less than half of Americans favor the provision, and support has been falling precipitously — a full 18 points — since the issue became a topic of public debate in 2016. (The ban on women in combat was lifted in 2015; just a few months later, lawmakers introduced the Draft America’s Daughters Act in an effort to begin a “conversation” about the initiative.) And American women are particularly opposed to the idea: The August Ipsos poll found that 55 percent of men thought women should be forced to register for the Selective Service, whereas only 36 percent of women agreed. A 2016 Rasmussen survey broke down similarly gendered lines, with 61 percent of men supporting the proposal, in contrast to just 38 percent of women who said the same.
So why force women to register for conscripted military combat, over their consistently expressed opposition? On the left, the answer is obvious: A military draft that excludes women stinks of antiquated, patriarchal gender roles. The left-wing activist push to make women eligible for the draft is predicated on a long-standing hostility to the recognition of any distinction between the sexes whatsoever: “The requirement that only men — but not women — register for the draft is one of the last examples of overt sex discrimination written into our federal law,” the ACLU wrote in 2021, announcing the launch of an effort to challenge the practice at the Supreme Court. (The ACLU’s ally in the court challenge, ironically, was an anti-feminist men’s-rights group, the National Coalition For Men.) “It reflects an outmoded view that, in the event of a draft, women’s primary duty would be to the home front — and, on the flip side, that men are unqualified to be caregivers.”
But the Right — ostensibly the voice of reason in our raging cultural debates over sex and gender — should know better. Some of the Republican backers of the draft-women provision seem to have no problem with the effort to dissolve gender distinctions — Ernst, Sullivan, and Tillis all publicly opposed then-president Donald Trump’s 2017 ban on transgender troops in the military, for example. In an emailed statement to National Review in response to a request for comment on his vote, Sullivan — noting his service “as a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve with more than two and a half decades of experience as an infantry and reconnaissance officer” — said “the brutality of combat is inherently gender neutral — it does not discriminate based on gender, age, or any other factor.” (He went on to note that he did “not believe that our country will reinstate the draft at any time in the near future.”)
Others, however, have voiced their objections to this trend in other areas: Blackburn is an outspoken critic of biologically male athletes competing in women’s sports, as is Scott, who called the practice “not right” in March. Just a few weeks later, Tuberville told Fox News: “You got to have a level playing field. And there’s just not a level playing field when you allow somebody that’s that much bigger, faster, stronger, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.” But if men and women can’t compete on “a level playing field” in sports, how can we expect them to do so in military combat?
Other than Sullivan, none of the Republicans who voted to forward the measure out of the Senate Armed Services Committee responded to requests for comment by publication time. But even those who ostensibly believe in sex differences have — perhaps unwittingly — handed the Left a victory in its sustained effort to deconstruct those distinctions. They’ve done so in the face of growing public opposition to the policy, and at the expense of American military readiness, to boot — as National Review’s editors wrote when the Army eased its “gender-neutral” fitness standards to accommodate women last year: “The Army is not a social-engineering NGO, a jobs program, or an institution set up to allow its members to achieve their highest self-actualization. It is an institution whose only purpose is to kill people and break things on the nation’s behalf. Any policy, however benignly intended — such as the arbitrary desire to increase the number of women in the Army — that interferes with the goal of attaining maximum lethality for the unit or individual is a betrayal of the nation and the soldiers — men and women — who volunteer to serve it.”
So who, then, will stand up for American women? Thankfully, a coalition is forming to oppose the measure. In a letter sent Wednesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hawley and ten other Republican senators urged their colleagues “in the strongest possible terms not to use this year’s NDAA to try to force America’s women to register for the military draft. Reviving these efforts would be a grave mistake and would needlessly inject divisive social policies into important debates over our national security.” Major conservative institutions such as the Heritage Foundation have thrown their support behind the effort to kill the provision, too: “Opposing Draft our Daughters should be a no-brainer,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, told National Review. “The NDAA is supposed to strengthen the common defense, not cater to the Left’s ideological agenda. Instead of forcing women to sign up for the draft, Congress should be spending its time focusing on military readiness, or better yet, reforming the Selective Service altogether. Every member of Congress should hold the line in keeping Draft our Daughters out of the NDAA.”
And in the House, conservatives are also readying themselves for the fight. “If the entire Republican establishment ends up getting behind drafting my daughter, then I will dedicate my efforts to burning that establishment to the ground,” Congressman Roy, never one to mince words, told National Review. “You’re not going to draft my daughter, and I don’t care who I piss off in preventing that.”