By Jonathan Miller

Because women are now going to be able to apply for any job in the military that men are allowed or forced to do, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller are calling for mandatory draft registration for women. By gaining one freedom, women are now losing another freedom they have almost always had, but which men historically have not. Slavery is now extended in principle to both sexes, even if it never has been applied in recent years except for stop-loss. As then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan said in a letter to the late Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield on May 5, 1980, “draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending.”

Sure, I know about the argument that a draft or stop-loss is necessary for national defense. But is that any reason why it should now include women, just because they have gained a new right in another area? Has some new danger to the security of the country suddenly emerged that we hadn’t been aware of?

We muffed our one big opportunity to perhaps abolish the draft forever within the United States in 1949 when we failed to prevent the Soviet Union, and eventually other nations, from acquiring nuclear weapons. We easily could’ve done so then without using either nuclear weapons or a draft.

As misguided as these operations were, do you really think that we had to draft or force people to man the bombers that flew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that we couldn’t have found sufficient volunteers, including women, to conduct non-nuclear air strikes or commando raids against the Soviet Union’s fledgling nuclear facilities a couple of years later?

I realize there are people who believe that even with a nuclear monopoly, the United States would have needed a draft. (The draft was restored again after World War II in 1948, even before America lost its nuclear monopoly.) But if so, why weren’t they at that time at least willing to give military preparedness without a draft a chance, to see if it would work with just a nuclear monopoly? As it was, they allowed that option to be foreclosed forever in 1949 by failing to take out the Soviet’s nuclear facilities, and now we will never know whether it would’ve worked, though certain bombastic types are allowed to dominate the airwaves and media proclaiming it never would’ve worked!

One person who thought it would work was Stuart Symington, Air Force Secretary at the time and later a senator from Missouri and serious contender for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He didn’t want to see the draft restored if it meant any diminution in the number of air wings that the Air Force had and that this country could sustain economically.

But other officials prevailed who wanted to see the draft reinstated and who were morally opposed to initiating any attack on the Soviet’s nuclear facilities, such as former Defense Secretary James Forrestal and former Harvard President and Interim Committee member James Conant. The Interim Committee was the group that had advised President Truman to drop the atom bombs on Japan, a decision Conant favored.

Conant wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in January 1949 that Forrestal heartily endorsed and distributed to other policymakers that argued against initiating an attack on the Soviet nuclear facilities. This article employed much of the same argument that Reagan had used against the draft in 1980: that it would run counter to the values that this nation stands for.

Which was the greater threat then to those values: draft registration, which some now want to extend to the other half of our population and which since 1948 (along with stop-loss) has probably cost more than 100,000 American lives in questionable wars, or the initiation of a limited attack on another nation solely to prevent it from building a weapon for which it had already stolen plans from us? I’ll let the reader decide.

Jonathan Miller is a graduate student studying geography. He can be reached at jsmiller@umd.edu.