By Hudson Crozier | The Daily Signal
A coalition of conservative activists and policy experts is urging Congress to reject a bill making women eligible to be drafted into the military.
One group, Concerned Women for America, sent a letter with dozens of individual co-signers in response to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s approving an annual defense package containing the controversial draft provision.
“This monumental policy change would force the U.S. military to erase key biological differences between males and females that will affect readiness in wartime,” reads Concerned Women for America’s letter Thursday, which was shared exclusively with The Daily Signal.
“The Senate should not buy into the lie that women’s equality with men means that the sexes are the same,” the letter says.
Numerous representatives of military policy, religious, and research organizations signed onto the letter from Concerned Women for America, as did several regional CWA chapters.
The letter highlights research showing that “most women cannot meet combat arms standards while most men can,” adding:
‘Gender-neutral’ call-ups of both men and women would jam the induction pipeline and slow mobilization at the worst possible time—when our soldiers are fighting and dying on the battlefield.
Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, described the current draft of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2025 as “social experimentation” in a comment to The Daily Signal.
“An NDAA that drafts our daughters and granddaughters is a nonstarter, and with this letter, we are building a coalition to call on members of courage to oppose its advancement and will rally opposition to it from American women,” Nance said of the message to Congress.
The call to reject the defense bill as drafted came one day after another letter demanding the same of both House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The decision by the Senate Armed Services Committee to draft women “flies in the face of truth and everything that we claim to stand for as conservatives,” Advancing American Freedom writes in its own letter, which dozens of activists, policy experts, and current and former government officials also signed. The letter calls the proposal to draft women a denial of “logic” and “common sense.”
Johnson’s office told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that the House speaker opposes drafting women, but declined to comment further to The Daily Signal. McConnell’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Other Republican lawmakers got vocal on the social media platform X about their intent to stop the defense bill as written.
You can go straight to hell. Over my dead body. @HouseGOP https://t.co/dYBpPdAZEY
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) June 15, 2024
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted a reply to Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, writing: “We Will Not Draft Women. I’m with @ChipRoyTX—this will happen over my dead body.”
Why are the politicians forcing women into the draft? Because Democrats want to eliminate gender completely & turn the military into a social experiment. And some Republicans want to draft everybody they can to fight all these wars.
Here’s my answer to both: NO. pic.twitter.com/lq5X64BxRV— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 18, 2024
It’s not clear when—or whether—Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will allow the defense package to come to a vote by the full Senate, The Hill reported.
First published on The Daily Signal
Coalition Letter (pdf)
Dear Senators,
We write to you in serious concern about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2025 which the Senate Armed Services Committee approved on June 14. The legislation is unacceptable because it would amend the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA) to require young women to register with Selective Service for a possible future draft.
This monumental policy change would force the U.S. military to erase key biological differences between males and females that will affect readiness in wartime. This is a matter of national security – not “women’s rights,” “men’s rights,” or civilian volunteer service. The Senate should not buy into the lie that women’s equality with men means that the sexes are the same. Drafting our daughters should not be a political ploy used to secure critical funds for the military.
Despite reoccurring efforts to amend the MSSA in this way, the case for including women in the never draft has never been made successfully. The first attempt to include women in the draft was famously under President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in Rostker v. Goldberg that Congress “was certainly entitled, in the exercise of its constitutional powers to raise and regulate armies and navies, to focus on the question of military need rather than ‘equity.’”
In 2016, those in favor of the provision authorized a $45 million National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service to provide a defense for drafting women. After three years of research, the Commission’s Final Report recommended that Selective Service obligations be imposed on women simply because: “The time is right.” (Executive Summary, p. 12)
The time is never right to legislate an ill-advised social experiment that would imperil the defense of our nation. Enactment of this language in the NDAA could mean that any future call for Selective Service draftees would have to include women in equal numbers. Theories about gender equality, about the capabilities of women being on par with men, would break down here.
Numerous studies, including this one for the Naval Health Research Center and others mentioned here, have shown that most women cannot meet combat arms standards while most men can. “Gender-neutral” call-ups of both men and women would jam the induction pipeline and slow mobilization at the worst possible time – when our soldiers are fighting and dying on the battlefield.
The National Commission barely mentioned the three-year, $36 million research study that the Marine Corps conducted with scientific evaluations by the University of Pittsburgh and other leading experts. In field tests simulating typical combat tasks, experts compared the performance of all-male and mixed-gender units operating heavy weapons and marching under combat loads.
A four-page summary of voluminous findings reported that servicewomen were two to six times more likely to be injured, and all-male squads and teams out-performed mixed-gender units 69% of the time. Citing this research in 2015, the Marine Corps asked that some infantry units remain all-threatens its own future, and we call on Congress to reject this provision in the FY 2025 NDAA.
Democrats push for a female military draft is ‘woke engineering’: Rep. Chip Roy
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, reacts to a new bill that would require women to sign up for the draft on ‘Varney & Co.’
If the balloon goes up, we will need everybody. Females included. IF women shall be exempt from compulsory wartime service in the military then men should also be exempt. Selective service registration is in preparation for conscription, AKA ‘the draft’. As we are not formally at war, and, as the nature of warfare has now changed to supersonic high-tech, the honest need for infantry and similar MOS’s has diminished greatly. It may never go away completely, the military will probably always have need for people unafraid to kill people and break stuff, barehanded if need be, and a lot of people today would be failures in the infantry, casualties-in-waiting. Unfit, weak, conflict-averse, unable/unwilling to follow orders, etc. Large scale battles involving hundreds of thousands of men are a waste of resources and human life. Mainly men’s lives, in years past at least.
Enter the modern military with drones fighter jets and satellite imagery, logistics challenges and long–distance communications and data analysis, and you have a much different operating environment where the size of your biceps is less important than your capacity to read maps and communicate effectively. Trained qualified women in those roles are a formidable force to be reckoned with.
Automation is the word of the day, and as remote units become more lethal and effective, you will probably see a much smaller military manned staffed and commanded by some very tech-savvy people. God help the enemy because they will need all the help they can get against the 21st century military. Keep it as an all-volunteer force. No strong-arm stuff, no call for it.