A Draft for Women?

In testimony to Congress February 2, the commandant of the Marine Corps and the chief of staff of the Army both said women should sign up for the Selective Service just as young men are required to do: “Now that the restrictions that exempted women from [combat jobs] don’t exist, then you’re a citizen of a United States,” Gen. Robert B. Neller, the Marine Corps commandant, told a Senate panel. “It doesn’t mean you’re going to serve, but you go register.”

The issue was injected into the Republican presidential race during the February 6 GOP presidential debate, when three candidates—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie—were asked if women should register for the Selective Service. All three said yes.

“I have no problem whatsoever with people of either gender serving in combat so long as the minimum requirements necessary to do the job are not compromised,” Rubio said. “I do believe that Selective Service should be opened up for both men and women in case a draft is ever instituted.”

The next day, Ted Cruz came out as a voice of dissent among GOP contenders: “I didn’t have an opportunity to respond to that particular question,” Cruz said. “But I have to admit as I was sitting there listening to that conversation, my reaction was, ‘Are you guys nuts?’ ”

Cruz denounced the idea as dangerous political correctness and said “the idea that we would draft our daughters to forcibly bring them into the military and put them in close combat I think is wrong. It is immoral, and if I’m president, we ain’t doing it.”

Heading into the South Carolina primary, the issue could help Cruz peel away support from Bush and Rubio. A national poll conducted by Rasmussen found that 53 percent of Republicans oppose requiring women to register for the Selective Service. The issue may have even more resonance in conservative South Carolina.

But it’s unclear just how much of an advantage Cruz really has. Questions about a draft are highly theoretical, and lawmakers will likely act to ensure that no changes are made without congressional approval.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah is drafting a bill that will prevent the executive branch or the courts from changing current law. “We simply can’t trust this president or the courts to honor the law and protect our daughters,” Lee said in a statement. “We need new legislation making clear that if the United States is going to change this policy, Congress must be the one to do it.” Congress would then have the authority to prevent women from being drafted into combat units, should a draft ever be instituted. Rubio and Cruz will cosponsor the Lee bill, according to their spokesmen.

On the real and immediate issue of opening up combat infantry roles to women, Cruz and Rubio essentially have had the same position. When I asked Rubio last October about a Marine Corps study showing that integrating women into combat units harmed unit cohesion and performance, he replied that the Armed Forces “should be able to perform at peak efficiency” and “if there’s evidence that any sort of change would undermine that, it’s something we should be deeply concerned about. I don’t believe that the military should be used to make social impact statements.”

But then Rubio hedged, saying, “as you’ve seen through the Ranger program and others, it is clear that women already serve a role in combat. They do in the Air Force, increasingly in the Army. We interacted with them during my visit to Afghanistan. They’re playing a critical role in combat operations that are occurring.”

The Obama administration ruled in December that all combat roles must be open to women, and in January Ted Cruz told the Center for Military Readiness that the Marine Corps request for exceptions “must be reconsidered.” He added that as “long as the requirements are fair and universally applied, the military must always place the best person for the job at hand, whether male or female, but we cannot let political correctness compel the military to lower its standards.”

In other words, Rubio and Cruz both believe that as long as physical standards aren’t lowered, they have no problem with the full gender integration of the infantry.

But critics have two main objections. The first is that political pressure will inevitably lead to the lowering of physical standards, despite current promises to the contrary from the Obama administration and Republican presidential candidates.

The second objection is equally significant. Yes, physical standards—such as whether female members of the infantry would be at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat or would struggle to carry a wounded 230-pound infantryman to safety—matter. But it also matters a great deal that gender integration harms social bonding and unit cohesion.

Lance Cpl. Chris Augello was one of the Marines who participated in the Marine Corps study that found that exclusively male units outperformed gender-integrated units on 93 of 134 battlefield tasks. Augello “arrived at the integrated task force believing that women should get a shot at service in the infantry as long as they could meet existing standards,” the Marine Corps Times reported. But by the time the study was done, he had changed his mind: “The female variable in this social experiment has wrought a fundamental change in the way male NCOs think, act and lead,” Augello wrote in a 13-page paper he presented to Marine leaders and shared with the Marine Corps Times. Those changes, he wrote, are “sadly for the worse, not the better.”

Put young men and women together day and night for months in close quarters: No amount of social conditioning will prevent some from becoming romantically involved with each other. No amount of social conditioning will teach men to ignore their natural instinct to protect women. And the problems that necessarily arise from gender differences in this context—favoritism, jealousy, resentment—will lead to much worse consequences in infantry units that face more stress and danger than support units do.

If Ted Cruz wants to have a debate about the far-off possibility of women being drafted, he’s free to do that. But if he, or any other candidate, really wants to stand up for the military, he’ll speak out against the Obama administration’s decision, which, for the sake of gender equality, is weakening the infantry and needlessly endangering the lives of American troops.

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.