Should Our Daughters Be Drafted into the Military Services?

Families, communities, and nations are stronger when men are men and women are women. However, society today often makes it difficult to be who we are. Elizabeth Lapporte, Grace Blythe, and Wilson Beaver shared a recent example of how messed up society has become. 

A piece of legislation was left unaddressed in the U.S. Senate when senators left on a monthlong August recess. The bill is the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – sometimes known as “Draft Our Daughters.” The authors shared the following information.

“The Senate defense bill’s provision for mandatory registration of all young women for conscription puts ‘fairness’ over military necessity,” notes Victoria Coates, The Heritage Foundation’s vice president for national security. “It would waste time and resources during a war in order to evaluate and train thousands of draft-age women to find the subset qualified for the requirements of military service. Including women in the selective service is pointless virtue-signaling form those who believe the military should be a social experiment and not a lethal fighting force.”

“Draft Our Daughters” is just the beginning. The provision alters the language of the Selective Service Act by replacing the word “man” with “person,” equating gender equality with sameness while ignoring the diverse and different ways in which men and women may contribute to national security.

Intentionally ambiguous language like this expands woke ideology, which undermines military readiness and distracts the military from its core mission: Defend America and its interests by deterring or killing its enemies.

The authors explained that the last military draft was held in the U.S. in 1973, when volunteers began to make up the entire armed forces. However, Congress and the U.S. President retained the authority to use a draft in case of war or national emergency.

However, the U.S. military faces “substantial recruitment challenges” to maintain armed forces. In 2023, the Army, Navy, and Air Force missed their recruiting goals by 41,000 recruits.

In this context and amid a more dangerous security landscape globally, some argue that expanding the draft to include women is a necessary step to address these shortfalls. However, including women in the draft wouldn’t resolve the fundamental problems leading to today’s low recruitment numbers, nor would it improve the existing system of voluntary recruitment.

This provision overlooks deeper, systemic issues that deter young Americans from enlisting in the first place. Some of these issues include fewer young men who qualify, more opportunities in civilian careers, and fewer instances of families with a history of military service.

Rather than addressing the root causes of recruitment struggles, this provision opts for a superficial solution that raises both ethical and practical concerns.

The idea to draft our daughters comes from the same cesspool that breeds other terrible ideas – the principle of equity. Supporters of this wrong idea argue that women should be subject to the draft IF men and women are truly equal.

Such thinkers do not consider that men and women “are innately different.” Therefore, such their ideas are divisive and politicized but do nothing to solve the problem of creating the military that America needs.

The authors suggest that the idea to register all women for the draft should be discarded. Instead, they suggest that Congress should instead “focus on enacting measures that support military recruitment, such as quality-of-life improvements for service members.”

Governments should recognize that women and men are not the same, but they should be given equal opportunities to reach their full potential. Families, communities, and nations are stronger when the unique qualities of women are recognized.