The New York Times reports:
Under the Senate bill passed on Tuesday, women turning 18 on or after Jan. 1, 2018, would be forced to register for Selective Service, as men must do now. Failure to register could result in the loss of various forms of federal aid, including Pell grants, a penalty that men already face. Because the policy would not apply to women who turned 18 before 2018, it would not affect current aid arrangements. “The fact is,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, “every single leader in this country, both men and women, members of the military leadership, believe that it’s fair since we opened up all aspects of the military to women that they would also be registering for Selective Services.”
Requiring women to register for the Selective Service would make them eligible for the draft, were it ever reinstated. Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, who both voted against the bill because of this provision, voiced their opposition on the Senate floor.
“I could not in good conscience vote to draft our daughters into the military, sending them off to war and forcing them into combat,” said Cruz. On the campaign trail, he suggested proponents of the provision were “nuts.” Both Cruz and Lee voted against the final bill.
In December, Defense secretary Ash Carter authorized women’s service in combat roles. And in February, the possibility of drafting women into combat became a point of debate among the GOP primary contenders. THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s John McCormack wrote about “a surprising split among Republicans” on the issue and offered 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.
The House of Representatives passed a version of the NDAA last month, but their bill contained no provision requiring that females register for Selective Service. The differences between the House- and Senate-passed bills will be reconciled in a conference committee.
