Congressional Republicans criticized announcements from the White House and Pentagon in support of a controversial amendment to expand the draft to include young women Friday, even though the amendment had already been removed from annual legislation setting defense policy.
Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said Thursday, “[Defense Secretary Ash Carter] thinks it makes sense for women to register for Selective Service just as men must,” although he “does not advocate returning to a draft, as he has said in the past.” The spokesman for the White House National Security Council said roughly the same Thursday, in a statement to USA Today: “As old barriers for military service are being removed, the administration supports—as a logical next step—women registering for the Selective Service.”
The response from Capitol Hill was cool to the statements.
“Members are comfortable with where we ended up, deciding to study the Selective Service system broadly before making any robust changes,” said an aide on the House Armed Services Committee. The decision of the White House to weigh in at the last minute is “befuddling,” the aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
“Clearly they didn’t want to actually influence the debate or they would have made their views known earlier.”
Rather, the administration’s statements reflect, and likely conclude, a familiar pattern of the last eight years: using the Pentagon as a vehicle for progressive policy regardless of its practical consequences.
Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, who led a coalition of conservative senators in successful opposition to the Selective Service expansion, condemned the administration’s last-ditch effort to weigh in on the issue as a “sadly fitting end to eight years of foreign policy failures.”
“Instead of developing a strategy to win the wars we’re in, the outgoing administration is focused on scoring points in their culture wars,” Sasse said in a statement Friday morning.
As if to presage a victory for Sasse and his Senate colleagues, deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz deferred to congressional authority on the matter of drafting women and affirmed the White House’s commitment to an all-volunteer force in a briefing Friday afternoon.
And indeed, next week, Congress is set to pass a defense bill that maintains commitment to an all-volunteer force—and does not include women in the draft.
The administration’s comments came the day before the defense policy package would go the House floor for a vote, with the so-called “draft our daughters” amendment dropped from its final language.
Earlier this year the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of expanding the Selective Service, the federal agency that oversees the draft. But the amendment, which originated as a hypothetical topic for debate in the House Armed Services Committee, never made it into the House’s version of the bill. Opponents criticized the measure as a functionally meaningless and symbolic gesture for gender equality and, as such, an irresponsible distraction from matters of national security.
The conference report that the House and Senate Armed Services Committees agreed upon, and that the House passed in a vote on Friday, instead commissions a broad study of whether the Selective Service should continue to exist at all.
