Federal legislation for women to be appointed in the Selective Service System, also known as the military draft, has been debated for years, but is yet to survive in Congress.
According to a 2021 ABC News article, the U.S. Senate has approved a new legislation that removes any reference to “male” specific terms when a military draft is enacted for national emergency. This legislation was authored by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack
Reed, D-R.I., it is intended to include most American citizens and immigrants from ages 18-26 in the draft.
I, a young adult woman, would be included in the draft.
That’s a scary thought: leaving my friends and family behind to serve in possibly a foreign country at peak war times.
No one in my family has served in the military, so most of what I know about it comes from the media. After reading “All Quiet on the Western Front” in English class, watching films like “Forrest Gump” and “Dunkirk,” and turning on any news channel, the idea of being drafted is not the most attractive in my eyes.
I am so privileged that the first worry on my mind is not living or dying for my country like it is for a lot of young people around the globe. I am privileged in the fact that I’ve never had to worry about someone close to me having their life threatened in the military.
The war movies that scared me as a kid were a reality for millions of young men who drafted in America not long ago. The last draft enacted was in 1964 during the Vietnam War according to the statistics from the Selective Service System’s website.
There are still so many veterans and those currently serving in the military that face the horrors of coming to terms with not only their own mortality, but others’.
This is especially a worry with all the war and civil unrest worldwide we’ve seen recently in the news.
I do my best to say “thank you for your service” to uniformed people I see in passing. I commend those who have put themselves at risk to give future generations more freedoms. I do this while also having the privilege to not have to worry about being drafted.
I guess until now.
I can’t ignore the fact that being drafted is an experience a lot of young women, men and people would not like to be forced into. Even though a draft like this is unlikely, I predict that a lot of American individualist youth will take issue with it.
According to the same ABC News article, Biden was supportive of the change to include women so that “men and women are treated equally in the event of future conflicts.”
I agree that encouraging more women to be involved in male dominated spaces is important. Whether women work as engineers, firefighters or in the military, they can socially inspire young girls to believe that they can also work in these positions.
Revising the draft to include women, and anyone who isn’t male, may be a necessary step to ensure equity.
According to a 2023 article by Detroit Free Press, “women make up less than 20% of America's active-duty force” and if more women serve, there would be more opportunity to see women leaders in the military.
There is the biological debate that men are stronger, and women should take a traditional role of child-bearing during wartimes.
According to another 2023 article by Detroit Free Press, women have been serving in the military since 2013, “when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the Pentagon's 1994 ban on women in direct ground combat roles.” It wasn’t until 2016 that women were eligible for every combat job.
Historic roles of women stereotypically taking care of the home country while men were out at war are now challenged by shifting gender roles. Why should men be the only ones fighting when a lot of women, including fighter jet pilots and leading officers, have the same talent?
My take is even though women biologically, tend to be not as strong, there are still roles in the military for women to be an asset. Same as men without as much physicality - gender is not the only factor in strength.
Biden, as a presidential candidate, said in a September 2020 Military Officers Association of America candidate forum that "The United States does not need a larger military.”
According to the Institute for Policy Studies website, military spending reached “$801 billion in 2021 representing 39 percent of the world’s military spending. That’s more than the next nine countries combined.”
Most of the next nine countries, including China, India, the UK, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea, are geopolitically aligned with America.
“Over-investment in the military is a factor that left the US so vulnerable to the pandemic in the first place,” according to the Institute for Policy Studies, all while the world is “dangerously unprepared to invest enough to prepare for ongoing crises like climate change.”
As early as the 1920s, military spending has been in great excess to the rest of the world. Do we really need to be thinking about our military when there are other pressing issues at hand?
All in all, I support women being included in the draft for equality, but investing in the military in general should not be a top focus of Americans.
