6 ms·

Perhaps it's unconstitutional, but there are biological reasons why across all cultures throughout history (as far as I'm aware) men are the ones who are sent t

• baroffoos 8y ago
  I worry about a society that sends anyone to war. Its completely unethical no matter who it is you send.
  • globlist 8y ago
    Not into defending yourself or your country? You sound idealistic at best.
    • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      I think we're talking about sending people to war against their will, i.e. the draft.
  • aynsof 8y ago
    What would you would do if you were attacked by another country? What if your peaceful trade partner was being attacked? What if there were a genocide occurring in another country?
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      I'm willing to have a draft if everyone on the draft roll gets veto power over whether or not the war happens. I think your questions boil down to, "what if you were drafted to fight a war that you would have volunteered to fight anyway?"
    • baroffoos 8y ago
      What are the reasons to attack? Mainly for resources and religion. Resources was solved by better global trade, religion is mainly in decline. >What if there were a genocide occurring in another country? How does a military solve this? Create an even bigger genocide?
      • lamarpye 8y ago
        I would think a military solves a genocide by preventing it. Reading the news or history would provide many examples of genocide being stopped by military action.
      • landryraccoon 8y ago
        Is it safe to assume you would have opposed the US entering the war in Europe in World War 2, because there was a genocide happening but the US couldn't do anything but cause a bigger one?
  • lamarpye 8y ago
    A society that wouldn't send/draft people to war is one that doesn't care about it's existence.
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      What about a society that cares so much about its own existence that people volunteer?
      • ndnxhs 8y ago
        At least that way the people affected get to decide what happens rather than being tools in some pointless political dick waving contest. I'm very much against war but if there was impending danger locally I would sign up to sit near the beach and shoot down any danger coming my way.
  • berbec 8y ago
    Pacifists can exist because someone has fought for their right to be a pacifist.
• jothezero 8y ago
  Exactly, I would personally fight against anyone willing to forcefully my girlfriend. Only a coward would do.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    Sorry, I can't interpret this; are you missing a verb?
• claudiawerner 8y ago
  I think it's less being old fashioned and more the idea of what we think gender roles should be or indeed are. While there is doubtlessly an advantage in terms of efficiency in men fighting wars, due solely to physical strength (as far as I understand it), we get gender roles being an issue as soon as we start saying that women need to be protected and shielded - see for instance the degree to which we speak of "women and children" - to many, although they might not want to admit it consciously, they fit very snugly into a category together as something vulnerable. The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children or doing housework - to me this reads simply as another manifestation of what feminists since the 60s at the latest have been arguing against - the separation of women into the private sphere of life. There isn't much reason I can see why that should be further carried over to the matter of war. In the end, I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I must admit they are almost entirely ideological ones, based on new rationalizations of ancient ideas of 'the fair sex' and influenced by modern attitudes towards masculinity and femininity. There are two good papers on the topic of women and conscription and their actual experiences in places where it's practiced (e.g Israel): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538 https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1132&context=king https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refer... (see section V, "Analysis" on whether women are "different" enough to be exempt from conscription).
  • curun1r 8y ago
    > The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children From a survival standpoint, it's not about raising the children but creating the children. Men went to war and the ones that came back fathered all the children of the next generation. Even heavy losses in battles wouldn't really affect the ability to grow the tribe's population that much. And the fathers of that new generation would be the strongest and most able to survive combat. A good example of this is Paraguay, which lost about 70% of its male population back in the 19th century in a war with its neighbors. But the population recovered in the course of 1-2 generations because the women mostly survived. But in militaries that aren't going to experience the kind of staggering losses that Paraguay's forces did and in societies that have no shortage of population like ours does, the policy of sending only men to war makes less sense.
• gnicholas 8y ago
  It will be interesting to see whether draft exemptions will be granted for new mothers or pregnant women, and how people react to any such rules. In the past, there were exemptions for pursuing higher education, and (not surprisingly) many people went that route. I would guess that people would do the same to avail themselves of a motherhood exemption.
  • remarkEon 8y ago
    Speaking from experience, you could tell which Brigade on post was deploying soon because a lot of the females all of a sudden became pregnant. We ignore these things at our own peril.
    • gnicholas 8y ago
      What country was this in, and when?
      • remarkEon 8y ago
        US, 2012.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  In the forces there are: a) Plenty of roles for women to do that don't involve the kind of 'direct combat' type scenarios we may have concerns over. and b) That they are effectively just as good as men. Only a small portion of fighting forces actually 'fight'. The argument remains 'should women be in front line combat' - but my point is that in reality, it's kind of moot. We don't even need that kind of debate in order to have women broadly in the forces.
  • x220 8y ago
    So if women get drafted, they will mostly fill non-combat roles and push more men into combat roles? Jesus, no thanks.
    • pseudalopex 8y ago
      Why would the total number of draftees increase?
  • chongli 8y ago
    That's how things are now. Presumably, if there were a general draft, then the situation may be different. I don't know if it would ever be as awful as the Normandy invasion but I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility.
    • sonnyblarney 8y ago
      I'm not actually taking a stand on 'women in combat' one way or another at all. I'm saying that for 90% of roles 'gender doesn't matter' really. So it's 90% a 'moot point'. Without taking a stand on the issue ... I believe that in reality if there were a relatively major conflict today, women would be getting close to the lines but not on front line units for the most part. Pretty much every other role they would do.
• snek 8y ago
  As a geniune curiosity, what is the distinction between your son and your daughter that makes you prefer sending one over the other? (assuming you have both a son and a daughter) I'm not a parent but if I had kids I can imagine not wanting any of them to go to war.
  • m0zg 8y ago
    I can think of two things: 1. Women are on average physically weaker (I hope this is not controversial) and therefore are much more likely to die in hand-to-hand combat or just plain not be able to carry the gear soldiers have to carry today, let alone another soldier. 2. After a war of attrition women are crucial to population replacement, due to biological limits on procreation frequency, whereas men have much greater "fanout", and you don't need that many of them, even if you're concerned about inbreeding. That said, I do think women should be draft-able, for two reasons: 1. Women too can be "strong enough" for combat 2. There are lots of non-combat roles And to anyone who says there can't be another WW2-style war, I bet people said the same in the aftermath of WW1. And yet, here we are.
    • eesmith 8y ago
      1. Set the criteria based on abilities, not gender. 2. WTF? When has that ever been important? What sort of situation will we get into where scores of millions of women will die, where they wouldn't die if there wasn't conscription or volunteering, and where we don't have nuclear Armageddon? WWII wasn't simply a do-over of WWI.
      • remarkEon 8y ago
        >WTF? When has that ever been important? People who don't understand why this is important have a view of history that doesn't go back beyond the 20th century.
        • eesmith 8y ago
          Rather than accuse me of ignorance - falsely, I might add - wouldn't it have been easier to just list one example?
• AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  Forcing anyone to go to war or to some sort of slavery (such as mandatory civil service) itself is unethical, plus I can not see any reason why the idea of being okay with sending my father, or son onto the battle field is in any way better (or worse) than doing so with my mother, or daughter.
• rayiner 8y ago
  > Perhaps it's unconstitutional, but there are biological reasons why across all cultures throughout history (as far as I'm aware) men are the ones who are sent to war. Those conventions predate modern technology. There are obvious reasons why the Roman Legion was entirely male. (In terms of upper body strength, the bell curve for men and women is almost completely disjoint, with the top 10% of women overlapping with the bottom 10% of men.) Those rationales apply less and less as military technology evolves. There is no obvious reason why fighter pilots should only be men, or Navy gunners, or army helicopter pilots. > If women want to apply, then fine, but I do worry about a society whos men are willing to send their women to war. Israel seems fine.
  • Pristina 8y ago
    >Those rationales apply less and less as military technology evolves. There is no obvious reason why fighter pilots should only be men, or Navy gunners, or army helicopter pilots. so a war broke out and half of your fighter pilots got pregnant and can't fight anymore.
    • slavak 8y ago
      That is only a slightly less stupid argument for why women can't fight than the "women get irrational for several days every month" argument. If you're worried about them getting pregnant, provide access to contraceptives. This is only a problem in the minds of people grasping at every possible straw to prove women can't do something they've successfully been doing at scale for decades.
• lsiebert 8y ago
  Female warriors in a variety of cultures fought alongside with men, or lead people in battle. Some have disguised themselves as men (such as during the US civil war), whereas others have served openly. There were certainly some bad ass women during WWII ( http://mentalfloss.com/article/30254/8-female-fighters-world-war-ii http://mentalfloss.com/article/30254/8-female-fighters-world... has a few examples, plus there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko the russian sniper credited with 309 kills, which makes her the 16th deadliest sniper ever). And women serve in combat in multiple countries, and have for decades in some. The US is rather late to the party, many countries have allowed women in combat roles for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military_by_count... But even in societies where women didn't themselves fight, women often provided logistical support, as well as working in factories, shipyards, an other places to produce materials for war.
  • remarkEon 8y ago
    I see this argument all the time and it's so flatly wrong. You are describing maybe 10% of the tail in terms of physical performance being on par with their male counterparts. And you're also describing _total wars of exhaustion_, where literally everyone had to fight because otherwise it's extinction. These are not arguments in favor of women in combat roles as policy - they're merely observations that Total War forces everyone to fight. Should we also draft kids because soldiers as young as 12 were fighting at Stalingrad?
    • landryraccoon 8y ago
      When would a general draft be justified except when we are facing an existential threat? In the event of an existential threat to the US I don't think we'd stop at just women. Anyone who is able bodied and can carry a weapon might have to fight.
      • afiori 8y ago
        There are degrees of existential treats. Compare "China and Russia try to nuke the US" with "Mexico tries to get California back" or "the UK is invaded and the US helps".
• mnm1 8y ago
  I think the main reason men get sent to war traditionally is because all wars are started by men. Only men are stupid and angry enough to start and continue wars.