GREENWOOD — It is debatable why the United States, with an all-volunteer military force, continues to require men to register at age 18 for a draft that the country hasn’t used in over four decades.
But if young men are required to do it, there’s no good argument any longer to exclude young women from this obligation, now that the Pentagon has dropped all gender distinctions in active duty service.
Yet, recently, a Republican-led Senate panel — made up mostly of men, by the way — took a paternalistic attitude and stripped from the annual defense policy bill a new requirement that women between the ages of 18 and 25 sign up for the draft.
Conservatives see such a universal duty as further blurring of the gender lines.
The lines, though, have already been all but wiped out by U.S. military policy.
Last year, the civilian leadership of the Pentagon — contrary to the advice of some of the top military brass — adopted the official line that there is not a position in the military, including front-line combat jobs, that a woman can’t do as well as a man.
Feminists demanded that change. They should also be demanding now that U.S. women fall under the same obligation as men in time of war — namely, that if the situation were to demand it, both sexes should be subject to military service, willingly or not.
The only reason that the Selective Service remains in place is as a contingency plan. If an all-volunteer force could not provide enough military personnel to meet a global conflict, the draft could be resumed without much lag time by already having eligible draftees on the books.
If this nation is going to hold that the biological differences between men and women are mostly artificial distinctions, then fairness and consistency demand that this egalitarian philosophy not only be applied when it’s advantageous to women but also when it’s not.
Kalich is editor and publisher of The Greenwood Commonwealth.
