Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules
nytimes.com
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For example, if we learned that something large was on a collision course for the earth, we might have years to prepare to deflect it, or to build shelters, or something along those lines, but I can absolutely see a mobilization being necessary.
Of course, there's no legitimate reason why we'd mobilize men and not women.
People aren't your slave. It doesn't matter that there might bad consequences if there is something 'to be done'.
If you don't respect human beings as individuals in the first place, we already lost.
And the path to doing so is quite clear: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...
If you benefit from a society, then you have a certain degree of responsibility to that society. I personally don't think the draft is defensible for anything less than an existential threat to the nation, but the popular notion that the government shouldn't be able to make you do anything you don't want to is silly.
I've seen the same argument used regarding taxation.
I'd argue that people have duties and obligations to their government, just as a government has duties and obligations to it's citizens.
So I absolutely believe that the government has a right draft people to defend the country. Drafting people just to wage war to advance our interests I have a lot more qualms about.
> What is a government except as an entity to ensure people's natural rights are not infringed.
People cannot eat freedom nor warm up in the cold with rights. A government intended purpose is the continuation and stability of a country/culture/society. This does not mean that anything is fine if it is for survival nor that citizens are expendable.
You want to use it in the broadest of senses, including for purposes which the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 excludes, listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfree_labour .
You are of course free to do that, but I believe 1) it downplays the horribleness of, for example, chattel slavery in the US by equating it, among other things, being obligated to jury duty, and 2) you haven't said what isn't slavery.
Most of use are wage slaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
> The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job.[31] However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". ...
> [Marx:] The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.
Nope! You can voluntarily renounce your citizenship at any point.
If the nation is under existential threat by a tyrannical invader and there aren't enough volunteers for an effective defense, should the government stand by and allow everyone's freedom to be lost permanently?
Why is the existence of a particular political entity more important than the lives of people?
An existential threat to a nation doesn't mean the people that live there are all going to die. It simply means that a political entity will stop existing. Thus a draft is trading human lives for the potential continued existence of a political entity.
I think the draft (and war in general) is a bad thing and we should do our best to avoid it. But sometimes you have to pick the lesser of two evils.
Am I okay with it?
I think that depends on whether it's a defensive war or a real national emergency. China invades, or yellow stone's super volcano erupts, yeah, those are legitimate reasons to force humans to cooperate, because survival is at stake. Vietnam type situations, or the Border Wall thing... I'd be protesting a draft.
U.S. law and supreme court precedent both say that a draft is not slavery, but I understand your opinion, or definition of slavery, may differ.
I also believe quarantine laws for infectious people are valid, that police should be able to arrest violent criminals, etc. Basically, I believe if your actions or failure to act endangers the health and well-being of others, then the government has a legitimate interest in compelling or restricting behavior.
Most people would consider providing for the national defense and preserving the lives of citizens to be part of what a government does.
I like his books, but I don't agree with his ideas.
this is completely false. a war is never about killing citizens but about imposing political will. without a defense, the occupier would simply impose their political system on the occupied. a government, being a political entity, is only forcing people to DIE so they can maintain their political hegemony over some people.
I heard long ago (sorry, no reference) that the average French soldier was a couple inches shorter in WW2 than in WW1, which was attributed to the male slaughter (though I suspect that food shortages were a more likely cause).
In France and Germany, after WW1 and WW2, it became commonplace for the women to marry foreigners and old men. I don't know if that happened in Britain as well.
Baby booms are common after the end of terrible wars. I read once that people were copulating in the streets of London after the WW1 armistice was declared.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9hg68w/in_18...
That not supported by your source.
So, what about dating? It's not difficult to see a continuation of pre-war Paraguayan society in this regard. Back then, there were less men than women. After the war, this was still the case. Women were still commonly the head of the family and births out of wedlock were a common occurrence, something that was also the case in the pre-war society.
There is essentially no research into the exact numbers and status of these children born out of wedlock. All that's really known is there was essentially no stigma at this time due to being born out of wedlock:
This is unfortunately where, as Pottshast herself points out, documentation fails us. We don't know. In fact, the documentation in general considering how many of these children were born is not entirely known. With the mother being the identifiable stable force in the family, it seems that identity was tied to the mother rather than the father as in the case of children born out of wedlock. A lack of stigma could therefore be seen as a continuation of pre-war Paraguayan society.
People respond to incentives, both genders.
For a similar example, initially WW1 pilots were selected from the nobility. Once those got massacred, the various Air Forces had to abandon that idea, and allow commoners in. The subtext of the movie "The Blue Max" was about that transition.
(The life expectancy of a British WW1 RAF pilot was 6 weeks. There's also a movie about that, "The Dawn Patrol".)
This also happened to the officers, which ended the notion of officers being restricted to nobility.
It's like how fishing for big fish makes the remaining fish population shrink over time.
If those who are drafted are killed in really vast numbers, a disproportionate share of the children in the next generation will be fathered by men who were not drafted, including those who were too short.
It’s all about being away from loved ones and cut off from sex for long periods of time. This is readily observed in both male and female behavior. I am basing this upon myself and the hundreds of people I have personally worked with during my four military deployments.
But it seems to be a natural human tendency to want to create new life in response to the threat to existing life. I always liked the line from Rent, "The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation" because it captures that peace is the neutral territory between the destruction of war and the creation of trying to fix what was broken. When the pendulum swings towards war, its return path will swing past peace and towards reconstruction, in all its forms.
Anecdotally, from friends of mine who are Russian women, there was such a durst of men that keeping any man became a very large challenge. This shock to the marriage markets fundamentally changed the culture. To this day, with Russian male life expectancy still low [3], Muscovite women will 'dress to the 9s' at all times, as a matter of course. The saying is akin to: "any man is a good man, as long as he's your's"
The changes that WW2 gave to the Russian family still echo.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#USSR
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_the_Soviet_Union#Fam...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=male+life+expecatny+russia&o...
It turned out that the amendment actually had broad support among Republican leaders and women in both parties. However, it was fiercely opposed by conservative law makers. Hunter ended up voting against his own proposal (he is a vocal opponent of women serving in combat). The amendment ended up being stripped from the final bill in a procedural move.
It seems that there is a lot of support for including women in the draft both on the Democrat and Republican side. It's disappointing that in 2016, instead of having a genuine conversation about equal responsibility, the amendment was proposed to mock the idea of women being drafted, and to make the idea of gender equality seem hypocritical.
Here are some relevant news articles on the topic from 2016:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-unl...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/us/politics/congress-wome...
EDIT: Point out another group's reasoning that hasn't been mentioned yet, get downvoted. ???
For all the "forced impregnation" replies, forced impregnation isn't analogous to the draft. The draft and pregnancy are fundamentally different things that can't be made equivalent. The argument being cited here never implied that this would be an equivalent exchange. It's not.
Of course, in the interest of equality, both parents would be eligible for the child-rearing exemption but only one parent would be allowed to claim it.
> The draft and pregnancy are fundamentally different things that can't be made equivalent.
If they are fundamentally different and can't be made equivalent, then having a male-only draft in no way compensates for women having to give birth. Which directly contradicts your first statement that it is a valid counterpoint.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the idea of being okay with sending my mother, or daughter onto the battle field is more unethical than treating the different sexes as if they have biological differences.
If women want to apply, then fine, but I do worry about a society whos men are willing to send their women to war.
>What if there were a genocide occurring in another country?
How does a military solve this? Create an even bigger genocide?
I'm very much against war but if there was impending danger locally I would sign up to sit near the beach and shoot down any danger coming my way.
The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children or doing housework - to me this reads simply as another manifestation of what feminists since the 60s at the latest have been arguing against - the separation of women into the private sphere of life. There isn't much reason I can see why that should be further carried over to the matter of war.
In the end, I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I must admit they are almost entirely ideological ones, based on new rationalizations of ancient ideas of 'the fair sex' and influenced by modern attitudes towards masculinity and femininity.
There are two good papers on the topic of women and conscription and their actual experiences in places where it's practiced (e.g Israel):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538
https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refer... (see section V, "Analysis" on whether women are "different" enough to be exempt from conscription).
From a survival standpoint, it's not about raising the children but creating the children. Men went to war and the ones that came back fathered all the children of the next generation. Even heavy losses in battles wouldn't really affect the ability to grow the tribe's population that much. And the fathers of that new generation would be the strongest and most able to survive combat.
A good example of this is Paraguay, which lost about 70% of its male population back in the 19th century in a war with its neighbors. But the population recovered in the course of 1-2 generations because the women mostly survived.
But in militaries that aren't going to experience the kind of staggering losses that Paraguay's forces did and in societies that have no shortage of population like ours does, the policy of sending only men to war makes less sense.
In the past, there were exemptions for pursuing higher education, and (not surprisingly) many people went that route. I would guess that people would do the same to avail themselves of a motherhood exemption.
a) Plenty of roles for women to do that don't involve the kind of 'direct combat' type scenarios we may have concerns over.
and b) That they are effectively just as good as men.
Only a small portion of fighting forces actually 'fight'.
The argument remains 'should women be in front line combat' - but my point is that in reality, it's kind of moot. We don't even need that kind of debate in order to have women broadly in the forces.
I'm saying that for 90% of roles 'gender doesn't matter' really. So it's 90% a 'moot point'.
Without taking a stand on the issue ... I believe that in reality if there were a relatively major conflict today, women would be getting close to the lines but not on front line units for the most part. Pretty much every other role they would do.
I'm not a parent but if I had kids I can imagine not wanting any of them to go to war.
1. Women are on average physically weaker (I hope this is not controversial) and therefore are much more likely to die in hand-to-hand combat or just plain not be able to carry the gear soldiers have to carry today, let alone another soldier.
2. After a war of attrition women are crucial to population replacement, due to biological limits on procreation frequency, whereas men have much greater "fanout", and you don't need that many of them, even if you're concerned about inbreeding.
That said, I do think women should be draft-able, for two reasons:
1. Women too can be "strong enough" for combat
2. There are lots of non-combat roles
And to anyone who says there can't be another WW2-style war, I bet people said the same in the aftermath of WW1. And yet, here we are.
2. WTF? When has that ever been important? What sort of situation will we get into where scores of millions of women will die, where they wouldn't die if there wasn't conscription or volunteering, and where we don't have nuclear Armageddon?
WWII wasn't simply a do-over of WWI.
People who don't understand why this is important have a view of history that doesn't go back beyond the 20th century.
Most recently, after WW2. 20+ million Soviet people died in the war, mostly able bodied men. If it were mostly women, that'd permanently decimate their population. I imagine any kind of mass casualty-WW3 scenario would be only worse. Weapons are a lot more deadly now than they've ever been. For the time being the most devastating varieties are constrained by peace-time treaties and such, but if a war of attrition were to break out, it'd all be back on the table in no time at all.
And there's no such thing as "volunteering" when dealing with meat grinders like WW1 or WW2. Easily 90% of people who go to war do so very much against their will. A good number of soldiers are executed at the front lines for "cowardice". Imagine yourself having to get out of the trench during a Verdun or Stalingrad style slaughter. You (and I) would need some _serious_ motivation to do so, and definitely wouldn't "volunteer" for any such thing.
1) We know that Russian women volunteered for the military, and fought, and died fighting. ("There were 800,000 women who served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war,[1] which is roughly 3 percent of total military personnel." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II )
If women can't be drafted, because it's better to preserve their wombs for population replenishment, then why should women be allowed to volunteer?
2) Since Soviet women did volunteer to fight on the front lines, and even as partisans in German held territory, your statement "there's no such thing as "volunteering" ..." is wrong.
3) People can be conscripted without being ordered to the front for direct combat.
1) By using the phrase "there's no such thing as "volunteering" when dealing with meat grinders like WW1 or WW2", m0zg denies that any Soviet women volunteered to fight on the front lines, or as partisans in German held territory. Quoting from Wikipdia:
> Manshuk Mametova was a machine gunner from Kazakhstan ... Mariya Oktyabrskaya and Alexandra Samusenko were tank drivers. Tatyana Kostyrina had over 120 kills and commanded an infantry battalion in 1943 following the death of her commander and a majority of the staff.
> The 1077th Anti-aircraft Regiment ... fought during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 ... like many of the anti-aircraft units, was made up almost entirely of young women volunteers, barely out of high school. They are mostly known for their bravery in the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), when they engaged an advancing Panzer unit by setting their guns to the lowest elevation and firing them directly at the advancing tanks.
The fact that there were relatively few such women doesn't detract from my point that they were volunteers, making m0zg's statement simply wrong.
The earlier argument was that women shouldn't be drafted into the military because their wombs need to be ready for post-war repopulation efforts. My question again is, if that is a valid argument, why should women even be allowed to volunteer? And my follow up is that women can be drafted without being ordered to fight on the front lines. .. eg, as service personnel.
2) You write "perceived". How much of that perception is due to propaganda? In the US, post-war propaganda de-emphasized the importance and competence in doing what was previously considered "male" jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II#W... suggest a similar effect in the USSR.
> 1930s Stalinist propaganda promoted the image of women in the home, caring for their families. This ambivalent conception of women's role in society parallels the state's attitude towards females in the military; women's patriotic duty did not include combat until it became absolutely necessary. Even when the efforts of female soldiers could no longer be ignored, state propaganda concealed the full extent of their participation.[24]
> Propaganda concerning female soldiers often functioned to preserve male societal dominance, portrayed them as motherly and sisterly figures, an image more consistent with women's role in Soviet society. Furthermore, propaganda emphasized that women joined the army for patriotic reasons, such as protecting the fatherland or avenging dead relatives. These commendable motivations explained women's ability to kill in combat, a phenomenon that contradicted established gender roles.[25]
> The Soviet state resisted the deployment of servicewomen, using propaganda to justify female combatants after they became necessary.[26] Conze and Fieseler argue that once women soldiers were no longer needed, they stopped appearing in the media. The state prevented female soldiers from marching in the Moscow Victory Parade. The gains of servicewomen towards female emancipation were ignored after the war, and the state encouraged women to return to their duties at home.[
Everyone knows about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in Russia (well, maybe not current generation, but my generation for sure), and about the occasional sniper or pilot. That doesn't change the fact that women were a tiny minority of the forces in combat, and that is how it should be, because women are demographically far more precious than men.
Consider that children also volunteered, and served on the front lines and as partisans. It was a tiny percentage but there were probably more of them there than women, and more than enough to fill up a Wikipedia article. Surely you aren't going to argue that children should go to war just on that basis?
My question again is, if women must not be conscripted in order to save their wombs for postwar repopulation efforts, why should women even be allowed to volunteer?
If women can volunteer, why can't they also be conscripted? As I point out, conscription doesn't require that everyone see combat duty.
I already pointed out that the percentage was tiny. I quoted "roughly 3 percent of total military personnel", and the source describes that many of them were medical personnel, not combatants. But there were volunteer combatants, and my point was to show that you were wrong about the non-existence of volunteers.
I think "people not dying in a war" is common sense. How about "avoid wars". My country - I am a US citizen - loves going to war. It's been at war for 93% of its existence. I can only conclude that my view isn't that common.
The US also has a history of children lying about their age in order to volunteer in the military. But I don't why we should compare the decisions and actions of adult women with that of minors. (To be clear, the US allows 17-year-old minors to join the military with parental consent. That's how my wife enlisted.)
In the US, which is currently an all-volunteer force, woman can volunteer for combat duty in the military. Children under 17 cannot. The question is, since adult men are required to register in case there is a draft, why shouldn't adult women also be required to register?
Even if there is a draft, it doesn't require that all or even most women must fight in hand-to-hand combat, or other places where they are physically unqualified to work.
why? one woman can have 5+ children. so even if you had a 25-fold decrease in population, you can repopulation in a few generations. Why would that result in 'permanent decimation'?
Those conventions predate modern technology. There are obvious reasons why the Roman Legion was entirely male. (In terms of upper body strength, the bell curve for men and women is almost completely disjoint, with the top 10% of women overlapping with the bottom 10% of men.)
Those rationales apply less and less as military technology evolves. There is no obvious reason why fighter pilots should only be men, or Navy gunners, or army helicopter pilots.
> If women want to apply, then fine, but I do worry about a society whos men are willing to send their women to war.
Israel seems fine.
so a war broke out and half of your fighter pilots got pregnant and can't fight anymore.
If you're worried about them getting pregnant, provide access to contraceptives. This is only a problem in the minds of people grasping at every possible straw to prove women can't do something they've successfully been doing at scale for decades.
And women serve in combat in multiple countries, and have for decades in some. The US is rather late to the party, many countries have allowed women in combat roles for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military_by_count...
But even in societies where women didn't themselves fight, women often provided logistical support, as well as working in factories, shipyards, an other places to produce materials for war.
You are describing maybe 10% of the tail in terms of physical performance being on par with their male counterparts. And you're also describing _total wars of exhaustion_, where literally everyone had to fight because otherwise it's extinction. These are not arguments in favor of women in combat roles as policy - they're merely observations that Total War forces everyone to fight. Should we also draft kids because soldiers as young as 12 were fighting at Stalingrad?
In the event of an existential threat to the US I don't think we'd stop at just women. Anyone who is able bodied and can carry a weapon might have to fight.
The determination for duties that would be performed based on physical fitness is to be had after conscription.
I'm not describing total wars. Canada, for example, has had women in combat roles for 36 years, and not because they were fighting for the country's survival in the early 1980s.
And even if your un-cited 10% figure was true, and most women couldn't fight as infantry because of a lack of upper body strength, there are combat roles such as being pilot where physical strength is of limited importance.
But it's not true, and it seems you are disparaging female veterans and their contributions.
Even if there weren't women combat roles( and a big part of this decision is because there are such roles now, since 2015) a draft could still bring in women as doctors, administrators, analysts, logistics officers and other roles, because the military isn't just about combat, it's a vast coordinated enterprise.
Ask yourself this: the ostensible “villain” (Russia) is doing the opposite of us with their Infantry units. Ask yourself why.
You can also pursue higher education.
I don't have answers for what choices you have once you've actually joined the military.
Unfortunately, the Selective Service does not recognize conscientious objectors when there is not a draft so it’s hard to get that status now.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali#Vietnam_War_and_r...
Do keep in mind that 90% of the jobs in the military aren't fighting on the front lines so chances are, you would be some support clerk.
But a lot of what I'm seeing here amounts to discounting the importance of this because the "likelihood" of a draft is low, or the usual (wrongheaded) arguments about how because the percentage of people in the military who actually fight is low, so adding women to selective service requirements isn't a big deal. Serious countries don't think like this - especially a country that, allegedly, is supposed to shoulder most of the global security responsibility. You don't get to make hand waivey dismissals and still expect peak performance from these huge complex organizations, nor do we get to put off thinking about it because we think an event like WWIII is "unlikely for a while". On what time horizon does it have to be "likely" for us to have to actually engage with it? 50 years? 20? 10?
I don't think we've thought deeply enough about this at all, and frankly I don't view the prospect of my daughter or sister being drafted into a war as "progress".
Neither is the prospect of only drafting men.
Don't be a whiteknight.
Most of a year later, after a detailed background investigation that included questioning old friends and people in the neighborhood, they offered me the job. Can't prove it, but I got the feeling they wouldn't have unless I had registered for the draft, denied smoking pot, etc. The registration record was used as a test for lawfulness by that law enforcement agency.
Ladies, you might want to keep that in mind if you think you might ever want a government job or a security clearance. Your choice will be remembered.
* people from different backgrounds and walks of life would live and work together at least once in their lives.
* people would recevie excercise and discipline training at it's most basic form.
* there wouldn't be a caste of people that serve in the military from one generation to the next.
* a lot more people would be exposed to the world outside of the US
* exposure to different types of work and training opportunities can alleviate labor shortage issues.
* last but not least, unity! America is dying as a result of extreme social fragmentation. I'd bet a lot less people would see issues as affecting the country as a whole as opposed to their "tribe" this way.
Look at how the society is in countries with mandatory military service (S. Korea,Switzerland to name two)
That liberty is only made possible by those willing to step up and do their civic duty.
If there is going to be a 'service' and there has to be in 2019, then it makes much better sense for everyone to serve.
The issues, to me are when we get into 'unneeded' interventions etc..
Perhaps people could 'chose their corps', because there'd surely be a lot of medics, non-combat Engineers, IT etc. volunteers.
Sweden, notably one of the most socialist countries on the planet does this out of obvious necessity: Russian on their doorstep. They stopped mandatory service and then re-started it again.
"and the benefits of these don't outweigh the costs, risks"
What costs and risks? To you? Or to the nation? It might actually be a lot cheaper. And I don't see any endemic risks in having everyone serve a couple of years.
I have to disagree with this one. Rich kids would be butter bars and everyone else enlisted. They would probably also get to go to college first since you need a degree to be commissioned. Also, it would likely eliminate the only guaranteed escape hatch for non-wealthy people to finish at least a four year degree without crushing debt.
The USA has always had a culture and set of laws (back to the founding documents) that prioritizes individual volition. Mandatory (ie, enforced with violence) military (or civil) service would be a refutation of the very things the military is there to protect.
We (the USA) are really not at war (despite the problems with the executive branches' increasing power to use military force without declaration of war). Mandatory military service is very wrong and immoral in that context.
I do think that military service is a bad idea; but that some kind of civil national guard / social service like EMT, nursing, and service to the poor and elderly might go a long way to bringing the country closer.
Second, The US did not "always" have such a culture - in fact the DRAFT i.e. forcing young men to join the military, was in use until the second half the 20th century (heard of Vietnam?). The very rights you speak of are defended via a military, globally, with the blood of draftees up until recently. Also, all laws are ultimately "enforced with threat of violence" - from speeding tickets to taxes.
Also, the US "culture" of prioritizing individual volition did NOT extend to women or black people, until the suffrage movement, and the very historically recent civil rights era. US was basically a European colony that first removed the Native inhabitants with genocidal frenzy, and then enslaved millions of Africans, basically to make $; i.e. not this land of the free you speak of. More like we'll take your land if you're native, and your liberty if you're black, to make a living.
Third, the US is most definitely at war in multiple countries. It's bombing ~7 of them actively, with thousands of them falling every year. "The U.S. military is officially fighting wars in seven countries, according to the White House’s latest war report. Known formally as the “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States’ Military Force and Related National Security Operations,” the unclassified portion flags ops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger — all under the banner of the same war authority granted in the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to fight al-Qaeda-linked militants." Reference: https://www.defenseone.com/news/2018/03/the-d-brief-march-15...
* Young people dying for causes they don't believe in and didn't volunteer for.
* Absolutely massive opportunity costs for each individual pressed into service.
* Dramatic expansion of the US military, which is already far too large given our real defense needs and our military strength compared to teh rest of the world.
* Significant economic drag as money and time is diverted away from productive ends toward largely wasted military training. You'd be surprised at how little non-military utility there is in knowing missile destroyer subsystems.
* Labor shortages!? Try diverting ~5% of every able-bodied person's career to military service.
> Look at how the society is in countries with mandatory military service (S. Korea,Switzerland to name two)
Look at how society is in some other countries with mandatory military service! Myanmar is fucked. North Korea is fucked. Russia is fucked. Israel is semi-fucked. You have seriously cherry-picked some of the highest functioning examples out of a set that is not obviously better or worse than the overall population of countries.
Or France, or Germany, or Israel, or Eritrea.
The US is unusual in that it never had a mandatory peacetime military service program [1]; this is a practice that has been fairly typical in many countries, particularly European countries. There doesn't seem to be much actual correlation between having a mandatory military service and having a cohesive social structure.
[1] We have had conscription, which was a lottery system, and we even had peacetime conscription, although that was in a period of time where the US knew it was likely to be drawn into a major war very soon and that preparing before war broke out might be a good idea.
Not to mention, the countries with mandatory service don't often send those soldiers to foreign locations anyway.
It made sense to give up mandatory military service, but I still think it was a bad idea we also gave up the civil service system instead of making it fair and mandatory for everyone.
Some sort of motivation for civil service would be pretty sweet though.
Without making any further analogies to litigate, isn't it pretty straightward that we shouldn't encourage a thing just because it frequently happens?
Responding to your edit...I'm not really following anymore. Taxes are necessary and mundane. Warfare is mundane, but it's not obvious to me that it's necessary. Therefore why not get all the individual benefits of military service without joining the military?
Warfare's not strictly necessary, but your adversary gets a vote as to whether it's desirable.
A person pays their taxes and they aren't arrested. If they don't resist that arrest, they'll "only" be imprisoned. A country gives up land to their stronger neighbor and they aren't attacked. If they don't resist that annexation, they'll "only" become a vassal state.
Civilization goes through a form of natural selection the natural outcome is for our civilization to die and a another one to take its place. Betterment is not a criteria for natural selection, survival is... and if cavemen replace a technological civilization because of survivability then we have lost from a cultural standpoint.
Aim for something better.
Iraq would have been a political impossibility.
History is full of conscription, and far from leading to less war it correlates with endless warfare. The term “cannon fodder” isn’t new!
The military nowadays is more of a subsidized project building unnecessary war machines to help the economy keep moving and to show off. I mean look at the f-35.
If you truly want to contribute to killing and violence the special forces arm of the military is where it happens.
And seeing as the f35 has been used in active combat, I wouldn't feel comfortable being forced to be an engineer at Lockheed either.
If you make an F-35 you are making a tool to further the machinations of the military industrial complex not a killing machine as everyone knows the F-35 is a complicated disaster of engineering.
You can be counted out but someone else will be counted in to start those conflicts. Soldiers are not mindless but if only those who like soldiering join then you have mostly soldiers that follow most orders.
Lol is this meant to be satire? Too bad most of “the world” doesn’t wish that kind of exposure
It was a stupid meat grinder and after a decade, do you think soldiers wanted to be there?
I'm well aware of Vietnam as it didn't go too well for some of my relatives.
The US military is actually somewhat small considering the size of the population, so a mandatory draft wouldn’t apply widely enough for the mentioned benefits to materialize in a meaningful way for social change.
It would also change the internal social nature of the military by filling it with people who don’t want to be there. In addition to being a part time military officer I am also a senior developer at a really big bank. The disciplined young people in the military seem substantially less entitled than some junior developers I have worked with. In the military I can choose to raise performance standards for the people I manage, but in the civilian world if you try that people will bitch and go get a different job.
I would argue that teaching people about how to be free and respect the freedom of others is more important than teaching them how to follow your every command that might go against their morals.
> Look at how the society is in countries with mandatory military service
Greece, Turkey, Iran, North Korea, multiple African countries. Does not sound that good. Why not look how society is in countries without military service instead?
Thing is, in the US, we have the 14th amendment to the Constitution, that among other things, guarantees equal protection under law based upon sex. This ruling was long overdue, even before the female combat restriction was removed. In a time of need for a draft, there are still plenty of non-combat roles to be filled.
Military service isn't the only way to instill that, but most ex-forces people I know have good self-discipline.
This is literally government mandated slavery. The current system already incentives you quite a bit to join the military for all the perks you get once you're done.
I'm honestly surprised the top comment is advocating for something that goes against every core value of the United States.
> lynched without justice
While probably not lynched I do not think that you will have a lot of justice if your superior is pissed with you in the military.
You're forcing people to do work. What happens if someone says they don't want to do this civic service?
This is upside down, but maybe an understandable perspective for someone who is from (or very familiar with) a totalitarian state?
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" - JFK
Civic duty is absolutely a 'core value' of the US, and most other successful nations.
I'm constantly amazed not only at the level of civic cynicism among large swaths of people, but also that so many don't seem to grasp that our social systems are utterly dependent on civic duty, not self interest.
Civilizations are not made by Mark Zuckerbergs, they're made by your mother, father, brother, neighbour, guy down the street - all doing their jobs responsibly and effectively, and being good citizens irrespective of what the laws are.
We have a crumbling infrastructure. This isn't going to be solved by having a boy scouts system of free labor.
Pay people out of high school to do work for the government and for the cities they live in.
'Civic duty' is not a 'job' - it's the responsibility that every citizen has to be conscientious and to consider their acts in the context of the greater good.
Also, you fail to consider that many acts of civic duty transcend notions of 'money'.
How much would you have to pay someone to risk their life for your little startup's capital shares?
Imagine the 'worker protections' and kind of power a Union might have for a fully privatized military force that had to operate under real rule of law.
It would be infinity.
Well, in reality, some poor people would be forced into it on the cheap, and then you'd have a real social problem.
Again - I'm always fundamentally amazed at the selfishness of some people who cannot grasp that a cause greater than the dollar in front of them is essential to a well formed nation.
All functional states depend on this, if anything, the civic ethos is taken advantage of by selfish people unwilling to do their part, or to consider that it's a requirement.
As this cynicism creeps into the population, it rots from within.
See: the assassination of Roman Emperor Pertinax, who's murderers - the Praetorian Guard, literally sold the seat of Emperor to the highest bidder. The Praetorian Guard originated before the Roman Empire, and was made up of equestrian families i.e. those who could afford to bring a horse into combat. During pre-Empire Rome - all citizens were required to be part of civil defence - and the more money they had - the more they were required to contribute. 'Laymen' brought their own sword and shield, the 'wealthy' brought horses etc..
When a critical mass of individuals within a group fail to recognize their inherent responsibility to the greater good - it eventually collapses.
I dare to hope that you have some military experience to make such a boldly false claim; It's nary impossible to grasp these kinds of organizations from the outside.
'At it's core' - the military is an organization charged with the defence of the community via (mostly) the use of managed violence.
What appears to be fairly extreme elements from the outside (haircuts, indoctrination etc.) make sense, and they work well in that ethos. Almost every participant is essentially voluntary, and it is their 'will' to be a part of the team, because they know by doing so, they will have considerably greater effect.
And FYI - when 'the world comes together' really means 'when the world becomes a 'mono-American' culture, and actual diversity is wiped out in lieu of the false diversity of pop culture. Yes - we can and should all get along, but remember that political boundaries are also usually cultural boundaries.
As for the ruling - it's about time.
Welcome to equality ladies. (I'm not being cynical or sarcastic)
The invention of army is itself a psychological wonder. A person wants to enforce his will using large swath of other humans. So he pays these other humans for no reason except getting trained day after day at following orders without any questions. This requires continuous suppression of counter-thoughts and de-rationalization. One might think this would be impossible to achieve at scale and consistently but apparently there exist a regime and synthesis of moral framework that allows to do this! Technique of creating organized armed forces that can move in unison at the command of a single person despite of any level of risks while heavily suppressing individual counter-thoughts is one of the most powerful innovations that stands in shoulder to shoulder with things like farming.
In many countries (Korea, Israel), they are defending their homeland. American military has been engaging in military conflicts all around the world, and right or not, many may disagree with them.
The majority of the developed world has no mandatory service, and "look at the society" in all of those places, many of which border Switzerland that you mentioned as an exemplar. Are Iceland, the Netherlands, or Canada violent hellholes of tribal insularity? No, and they didn't need conscription. Meanwhile there are plenty of horrible places with mandatory conscription, per the maps on Wikipedia.
You can't magically make people love each other by putting them in proximity or the middle east would not currently be on fire.
Particularly in America, mandatory conscription would be a fantastic way to get people to resent the government more than they already do, which is probably currently at an all-time high.
Finally, you go serve if you want to, but it's tyranny to tell other people what they have to do, esp. when you're talking about many months or years of their life. What's next, mandatory church? Wouldn't that also be great for society, according to some opinions. Church attendance, also, is extremely high in South Korea, are you sure it's the conscription and not the Church responsible for the society you admire?
But many things about the Soviet forces were utterly broken so I don't know if they serve as useful case studies.
Incidentally it'd be good if we could eliminate 'not unlike' as a phrase in favour of 'similar'.
The US is much more diverse so I don't see how you are going to dodge the issue there. Even sending everyone near home will cause the same issues since the local population is already diverse.
It seems like many of those countries did have compulsory conscription until very recently. Couldn't find any info on Iceland, but the Netherlands phased it out from 91-96, France from 96-01, etc.
Crucially they had it during the period where the most important social reforms were made, so it may back up OP's point.
Australia is less of a model society, and Japan is culturally homogenous (so maybe you could argue its the homogeneity that begets unity), but neither are bad places to live and neither have conscription.
Europe survived two of the largest, deadliest wars in history within living memory, so of course they recently had conscription and were rightly worried about letting it go.
However, the argument that conscription begets unity is weak and deeply flawed, as is proved by these diverse island societies and Canada, and those are off the top of my head, there are many more proofs.
America, the most powerful hyperpower in the history of mankind... doesn't need mandatory peacetime conscription for any remotely conceivable military reason.
So, if we've shown that we don't need it for either reason, just "some guy's opinion", then I think this argument is resolved.
New Zealand had compulsory military service from 1909-1972, a period which saw a lot of social reform including the creation of social healthcare. Au, NZ, Canada, US and UK all had conscription during the great wars, so maybe a better framing might be why did Aus lag and US avoid the social reforms? They seem to be the biggest outliers and I know for Australia at least it was more about the domestic political situation (a divided left wing), maybe for the US it was because they were undergoing other big social reforms, like racial equality.
Of course a lot of that could just be timing and competition, but have there been countries performing a lot of social reform (healthcare, welfare, equality) in periods well outside periods of mandatory service?
> So, if we've shown that we don't need it for either reason, just "some guy's opinion", then I think this argument is resolved.
You're assuming there aren't more reasons. Having people trained with a lot of practical skills along with some discipline and fitness are some other positives.
I mean, we do already have kids captive to be taught for over a decade, and a lot of that is repetitive.
Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada are much smaller and more homogenous than the US which greatly reduces tribalism. And proximity alone isn't the point, it's about working together and sharing a higher purpose while learning discipline, teamwork, leadership and other valuable social skills.
There's also a massive difference between church vs state. Serving your nation isn't exactly a high price for the privilege of being born in the US.
Ah yes, the great privilege of no healthcare, stagnant wages, the worlds highest incarceration rate, and largely nonexistent public transportation... and I'm to pay for this privilege with mandatory military service and perhaps cast carelessly to my death with no say in the matter.
Strong sales pitch. If I don't like it, it'll cost me over two months of minimum wage to file the paper to renounce my citizenship.
That's tyranny. If it were such a privilege, conscription would not be necessary, since people would join up for their great nation that they love and that loves them back. That's not where we are, though, is it?
Lastly, I mentioned the church because it's yet another thing some people think ought to be mandatory for the good of society.
Everybody has an opinion about what everybody else ought to be doing.
Healthcare is available. Incarceration rate won't affect you if you're not a criminal. Wages are the only serious issue and more related to global trade and changing industries than any country-specific policy. There are far worse conditions in other countries but my experience has shown people who list these complaints usually do not have any understanding of the plight of billions of poor around the world.
Nobody likes to pay taxes either and won't willing do so if we didn't have laws and enforcement, but it's obvious that it's needed and positive.
Yes, everybody has opinions. That's irrelevant to this discussion. If you really don't like staying in this country though, please do leave. Why would you stay? There are plenty of ways to raise the funds to move and renounce your citizenship, ironically many of which are way harder in other countries.
Minimum wage is about $1300/mo, good luck paying rent and health insurance with that and not starving. Good luck paying rent and food and power on double that income and still being able to afford even remotely decent health insurance.
As for incarceration...
When everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal. Famous lawyers are writing books about that. https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
If you don't think just about everything is a crime, then you're uninformed. You probably committed a felony when you violated a website TOS today.
I have no problem with taxation as a concept.
Everyone says "if you don't like it leave", but that's a bluff -- until 2010, it was free to renounce your citizenship, and in 2010 it became $450. Four years later, it became $2350. If more people leave, it'll go up again. We say it, but we're afraid of people actually doing it.
I won't renounce my citizenship, but I do think it's silly for us to pretend we want people to do it when we provably don't.
Nobody is afraid of people leaving the country famous for individual liberty, it's just administrative cost. You're attributing another reason without any evidence. And really, why blame the fees as if that's what's really keeping you here. Get your visa, move your stuff, and then worry about the renouncing when it matters.
Perhaps we can have free and automatic citizenship renunciation and revocation for failure to register for service, would you take that deal?
The military is part of the Government. If the country is invaded you will be required to serve and even kill people. Mandatory service is no more mandatory than taxes or jury duty with respect your rights and the governments authority.
I didn't say lack of mandatory service was the cause for tribalistic divide in america,I merely stated it as a solution. Forcing people to seve together will not automagically make them like each other but it fosters opportunity to know each other better. It makes citizens be sevrvants of their country so that everyone takes politics,war,elections and the government as a whole something they took part in building as opposed to a corporation they pay bills in tax form to and complain about like politicians as if they received bad customer service.
And China, and Russia, and Thailand, and North Korea...
You really can't simplify something that huge. There are pros and cons. Even Israel's military, often one of the first countries bandied about for compulsory service, has seen negative side-effects from the implications of compulsory service. If you just conscript everybody, often they'll perform poorly because they're not really motivated to make it their career. And often religious or other reasons will cause people to want to find a different way to serve, or they'll end up draft-dodging.
With regard to the US, conscripting is a very quick way to make the "undesireable" parts of society "more useful" without actually doing anything to support those populations. The US military often chews up poor people and then doesn't support them once their tour is over. So this policy would have very real oppressive effects on certain populations.
Here's a list of all countries and their military service policies: https://www.quora.com/What-countries-presently-require-manda...
To look at it a different way, would you rather be shoulder to shoulder with people who had all signed up willingly, or with people who had been drafted against their will?
That will probably get you shot for treason, so the smarter thing to do is to take decisive action preemptively. I'm not making any claims as to what that action should be, but I can't think of any reasonable possibilities that would be good for the ones who forced you to be there.
Here's a couple more: North Korea, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia
I would like to know exactly what you mean by this.
I wonder what the fratricide rate was in times of conscription.
You could explain why you are cynical about it happening, but just saying you are cynical about no exemptions is pretty boring.
In my opinion any politician calling for war needs needs to at least have a family member fighting in real combat. If I find out they don't then I will happily vote against them, even if it means voting against my ideology.
That would not work because it would work only after the fact. You want to prevent this kind of things from happening BEFORE they are even elected.
What if it's a family member they don't like?
> Why don't the Presidents fight the war? > Why do they always send the poor?
It's easy to send someone else to die when they're just a number on a report.
You said "no exemptions".
Another, technically in a combat role, spent his tours in the radio room of navy destroyers banging out Morse code.
The problems you list are mostly surmountable.
USA: "We done have an army."
ECIFCMCC: "Nevermind then."
Drone operators in air-conditioned office buildings in Nevada: "Bring it."
Instead the president looks to raid funding for military housing for his own boondoggle.
Who's we? And what peace? America's been at war for the last 17 years. It is America's longest war and it's still not clear when it will be ended.
At this point what is the win condition? How do you know when you're finished?
Say what? Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Iraq, Panama, Grenada, ...
If upper middle class families knew that their sons+daughters were going to Iraq, we wouldn't have done that stupid thing. Instead, we relied on a 'volunteer' class who didn't have anything better to do and then we kept them there with a backdoor draft.
The Vietnam War protests ended when the draft ended. The war didn't end. Just the draft.
Having a draft means that if you're opposed to a dumb war then you have to get out in the streets and in the politicians faces.
In the US the draft just allowed the US government to continue the Viet Nam war far longer than it otherwise would have gone. Over 2.7 million Americans served in Viet Nam. If the politicians could have possibly gotten millions of young people to drop what they were doing and go 5 thousand miles to fight in a civil war in a country most had never heard of before, they would certainly have done so. There is simply no obvious way they could have gotten that many troops on a volunteer basis, or they would have done so.
>...The Vietnam War protests ended when the draft ended. The war didn't end. Just the draft.
Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. The war continued, but US involvement ended.
Having a volunteer force means the soldiers have to treated better and paid more than a draftee. Having a volunteer force in the 1960s would have meant that if the USA got involved, the Viet Nam war would have been fought with a lot more concern for the loss of life of the solders, and it likely wouldn't have been fought anything like it was fought.
"The ruling comes at a time when an advisory panel, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, is studying the draft system, considering whether it should continue and whether women should be included."
Makes sense too: the government already has all of its citizens' personal information. Why keep maintaining the SSS as a separate and redundant database - after all, they can draft whomever they wish at any time by decree, whether or not they're registered with the SSS.
My preference is, in this order: 1) No draft 2) Universal draft registration-only 3) Universal draft and national service of some form 4) Male-only registration-only 5) Female-only registration-only 6) Male-only universal draft/service 7) Female-only universal draft/service
The main value of undertrained infantry soldiers is to provide literal boots on the ground to bolster the mass of a fighting force, but modern warfare tactics have generally lessened the effectiveness of this kind of mass: an integrated combined arms team can easily steamroll a fortified infantry line, as was shown quite clearly in the First Gulf War.
It would help with the lack of discipline in the civilian population, while engendering a better understanding and appreciation for the realities of combat and war.
On the military side I think it'd add some much needed diversity and perspective to a group dominated currently by "America, Fuck Yeah!" types who volunteered to go kill people and blow things up.