In December, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that all combat positions without exception – including those in elite special forces units - would be open to women, and ordered all service chiefs to submit plans to implement the new policy by January 1. Last week, top military brass told the Senate Armed Services Committee that all young women should also be required to register with Selective Service. “I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
But when CNSNews.com asked conservative leaders: “Do you support requiring all young American women to register for the draft?” the response was overwhelmingly negative. "No. I do not want to see my 15-year-old daughter drafted into the military and every mother and father I've talked to in Utah feels the same," Sen. Lee told CNSNews.com. ”I do not support putting women into direct combat and I think including young women in draft registration is a terrible idea,” agreed Gary Bauer, president of American Values. "Requiring women to register for Selective Service is unequal and unfair to women and certainly harmful to the military," Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness (CMR), told CNSNews.com. "Selective Service is a low-cost insurance policy to provide 'combat replacements' in the event of a national emergency. It is exactly the opposite of choice. "Ordering women into the same combat environment on the same basis as men is not giving them an equal opportunity to survive," Donnelly pointed out. "The most recent research backs up that fact."
According to a special interim report released in December by CMR, a Marine Corps study found that “the assessment across all occupational specialties revealed that gender-integrated teams, squads, or crews demonstrated, with very few exceptions, degraded performance… directly related to the physiological differences between males and females.” The Pentagon’s “plan to order women into direct ground combat units by January 2016 would needlessly harm military women, men in the combat arms, and the All-Volunteer Force on which national security depends,” the CMR report concluded.
Major Michael Berry, a former active duty Marine officer and JAG attorney who is currently director of military affairs at the Liberty Institute, told CNSNews.com that drafting women is a “dangerous” idea that “disregards the natural differences between men and women.” “It also raises a lot of questions: Will women be allowed to be conscientious objectors because of their sincere religious belief that women should not be conscripted to fight wars?” Berry asked. “Will they conscript women who are pregnant or have young children? “This is just another step towards removing constitutional protections that have existed since the time of our nation’s founders in the name of political correctness,” he added. “We are quite firmly against women being required to register for selective service,” David Theroux, founder and president of the Independent Institute, told CNSNews.com. “This is just more inane, ‘progressive’ (i.e. authoritarian) involuntary servitude, all in the name of feminism.” “We do not support women in combat, and therefore also do not support registration for the draft,” Charles Orndoff, administrative vice president of Americans for Constitutional Liberty, formerly known as the Conservative Caucus, told CNSNews.com.
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