Draft Our Daughters

During the 2016 election, a "Draft Our Daughters" meme campaign encouraged families to vote Democrat so that they could send their daughters off to fight in Hillary's wars. That concept has now been memed into reality, as a federal court has ruled that, since women are now permitted into combat roles, military conscription can no longer be restricted to males only. The ruling is technically correct, given that gender equality is supposed to be the national ethos. It's actually not a very feminist ruling. The feminist position would be that women can serve with the boys if they want to, but they don't have to, and they must be paid the same despite lower physical standards, and they must have advantage in promotions to "improve" gender ratios at higher levels. We'll see how feminists respond, but I'd predict a lot won't like the female draft.

If feminists don't like the ruling then it must be good, right? Perhaps it's a silver lining that it forces them to side with either gender equality - which they pretend to be about - or female preference, but we know what they're about already, so that's of little benefit. The ruling is the latest progression towards a military that is doomed to disintegrate when it is inevitably challenged by a competent adversary. Anyone who's served knows the drill. Women find ways to avoid the deployments and the dirty work. Giving a female troop orders downrange is a powerful fertility tool. When I was in, I worked as a mechanic on a busy fighter flightline. It was a guy's job. Grueling hours, dirty work, purely mechanical, with little in the way of perks or social graces. The normal path of female airmen (thankfully they didn't call them airwomen) was to get pregnant, spend most of the remainder of their single enlistment on light office duty, marry, and become an Air Force wife. I knew of only two exceptions. One was a weapons staff sergeant who had a family with kids and was good at her job. The other one was a lesbian who got out after one enlistment and went on to do contractor work in the field. But mostly, when confronted with the reality of flightline life, the women make a beeline for the kitchen.

If that is the reality of day-to-day training operations, what will happen when it's war for real? We already have plenty of evidence. The Marines studied women in combat and came not only to the expected result that male teams consistently outperformed female teams, but that mixed-gender teams were abysmal. The Navy has been running it's people hard for many years now as funding has been diverted to empire building. The navigatresses keep running into merchant ships. These are the women who self-selected for service. The notion that randomly selected women will be of any benefit at all is fantasy. To be fair, the boys aren't much better these days, given that they're soft and weak, and the military is professional and high-tech. Conscription at this point would amount to rounding up cannon fodder. Is that what advanced civilization has come to, dragging women from the home and sending them off to die while some men stay home and castrate themselves? It's such an absurdity that it ensures conscription will never happen, even in this climate. Fathers - white, brown, and black alike - will not stand by and watch as their daughters get sent to the meat grinder. They'd sooner start shooting politicians themselves. There would be immediate and severe insurrection.

So the ruling kills the draft. Do you care? It depends largely on whether you view the US military as a national defense force or as the District's imperial army. Killing the draft means that our children will never be forced into fighting Washington's wars. That's a good thing. But it also means we'll be left to fend for ourselves. We can't rely on the professional military to protect us from an actual invasion.