Should we draft women?

And we conduct an experiment

We haven’t had a military draft in 50 years, but once men turn 18 years old, they’re still required to register.

Until about a decade ago, there wasn’t any serious talk about also requiring women to register.

That changed when the military opened all of its jobs, including combat jobs, to women.

A long time ago, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional to exempt women from the draft because they couldn’t serve in combat. 

But now they can - and they are. In the last few years, allowing women to serve in combat jobs has proven very successful. We now have female Army Rangers, Marine infantry platoon leaders, and fighter pilots. (I’m a Major in the N.C. National Guard and we’ve now had women command infantry and armor units.) 

Their new freedom to serve has become a debate in Congress about their potential obligation to serve. It’s highly controversial.

Here’s the latest:

Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed its version of the annual defense bill. One of its many provisions included a new requirement that women ages 18-25 register for the draft.

And holy smokes I got smashed on social media for it - even though I don’t serve on that committee. I serve on the House Armed Services Committee. But hey, for folks just glancing at headlines, I could see how those two could be easily confused.

Let me tell you up front that I think this is unlikely to happen this year. There’s some bipartisan support for it, but probably not enough to overcome the strong resistance.

It’s worth noting that the real push here is from military leadership, and their reasoning isn’t about fairness - it’s about readiness.

One of the big differences between every previous conflict involving a draft and any future conflict involving a draft is that now we would need a large supply of highly educated people.

Instead of simply swelling the ranks of infantry battalions, we’d need to fill countless technical specialties - stuff like cyber operations, medical support, signals intelligence, UAV operation, and network admin.

Pulling only from the male population would miss a huge number of qualified personnel for those harder-to-fill jobs.

(In fact, this is the same reason we came very close to drafting women during World War II. We needed more nurses.)

The opposition is a little more straightforward. As many members pointed out, the idea of drafting women into combat is almost globally rejected, as evidenced by the extremely small number of countries that require women to register for the draft. Not to mention, as one member told me, “We don’t need to do this. We have nukes and NATO. We’re good to go.”

But for many members of Congress, this is ultimately about the exact same thing that most of our major military decisions are about these days:

China.

China is undergoing a massive military build-up.

And while our active military personnel is about 10% larger than China’s, their law says that they can draft women. They’ve never done it, but the law is on the books. The potential is there.

Which makes some members wonder whether we should match them.

Another member put it to me like this:

“You know why we should do this? So we can look at China and say, ‘Not that we would, but we could.’”

Again - it doesn’t look like this will actually happen this year. It might not even pass the full Senate, having only made it through one committee so far.

But I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become law before the end of the decade. 

Not that it would, but it could.

An experiment - scream vs. substance

Every once in a while, I get to share a nugget from my Attorney General race that speaks volumes. 

That happened recently when someone sent me an email written by my opponent. I read it and thought, “I need to put this in my next email.”

So here you go. Check this out:

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The next Attorney General for North Carolina will be me… or this gentleman.

That is absolutely his style: hyper-partisan, fear-based, pretty screamy.

Now look - there are political consultants who tell me that his style of communication works better than mine. They tell me I should move in that direction, especially for our emails. 

They say we’d raise more money.

Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s conduct an experiment.

We’ve created two different donation pages.

CHOICE A: If you’d like me to switch things up and start writing hyper-partisan, screamy emails, contribute any amount here (ActBlue) or here (non-ActBlue).

CHOICE B: If you’d like me to continue to treat you like a sensible, rational, adult human, then contribute here (ActBlue) or here (non-ActBlue).

I’ll reveal the results in the next email - which, depending on the outcome, might have a very different style!

(As added motivation, this is our last email before the big fundraising deadline at the end of this month and it would be very helpful to show our level of grassroots support for folks to give this week. Just a bonus reason!)

One more thing

Just out of curiosity, I copied and pasted my opponent’s email into an A.I. image generator and asked it to give me a picture - and WOW:

Wild stuff, and spot on.

But please, don’t let that affect the experiment. Pretend like you never saw it.

Best,

Jeff