Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., kicked off a furious national debate about gender, equality and war readiness this month by posing a simple question to military leaders during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: Should women register for the military draft, now that combat jobs are open to them?
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., kicked off a furious national debate about gender, equality and war readiness this month by posing a simple question to military leaders during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: Should women register for the military draft, now that combat jobs are open to them?
Too bad it was the wrong question. A better one is this: Why should the country require anyone — male or female — to register for a draft that’s purely hypothetical? Or this: Does it make sense to extend the Selective Service rule as a symbolic gesture of gender equality without first examining the rationality of maintaining a registry at all in the digital era?
Congress should start with the last two questions first, setting aside the role of women in the military to look dispassionately at the practicality of registration and its function as a sort of security blanket for the military. It might well be that this Cold War relic lingers on because it gives the illusion that a massive force of armed Americans could be mobilized immediately to fight whatever threat might come along. It can’t; registry aside, it takes tremendous resources to screen, train, house and feed thousand of new recruits.
Meanwhile, registration comes with a real cost to taxpayers and a steep penalty to teenagers who do not comply. In some states, young men can’t get a driver’s license if they haven’t filed the necessary forms with the Selective Service System.
The reality is the country hasn’t had an actual draft since 1973, when public support for conscription was sapped by year after bloody year of the Vietnam War. Short of an invasion by foreign troops or extraterrestrials, a draft is unlikely in the near future. Military commanders now see the benefit of a highly trained and professional all-volunteer force, while the public continues to be wary of conscription.
Yet, the draft registry was reinstated in 1980, and the agency charged with its keeping continues chugging along. Why? That’s a question the Government Accountability Office explored in a 2012 study. In a report to Congress, the GAO noted while defense department officials cling to Selective Service as a “low-cost insurance policy in case a draft is ever necessary,” they hadn’t reassessed its requirements for inductees since 1994 and therefore it wasn’t clear whether the system was even needed anymore. The national security picture has changed dramatically, as has warfare, since the Cold War ended and the war on terror began. Furthermore, the report noted the collection of registration data is largely automatic. Much of the Selective Service staff’s day-to-day work is letting people know they have to register and training volunteers how to screen conscriptees in the event a draft is ever activated.
Though it is difficult to imagine a modern-day military scenario that would benefit from having hundreds of thousands of untrained, and possibly unwilling, young people forced into service, it is a possibility for which the country needs to prepare.
But we don’t necessarily need an active registry, or the make-work assignments required to sustain it, to effect a draft should it be required. …
If Congress decides, practicality be damned, not to explore the relevance of draft registration, by all means it should change the law so women must participate. Equality comes with benefits as well as responsibilities. If men must continue to comply for the sake of the nation’s peace of mind, then women should do so, too.
— Los Angeles Times