The Defense Department’s decision late last year to allow women to serve in all combat roles has sparked intense debate on whether women should also be required to register for the Selective Services’ draft. This week on Cornerstone, we ask: is the inclusion of women in the draft simply an issue of equal access and opportunity, or does it have wider implications for religious groups and society at large?

By: Marc LiVecche

At the ABC News Republican debate on February 6, Martha Raddatz raised a question regarding the integration of women into direct ground combat occupational roles such as the infantry, armor, and the special operations teams. The question focused specifically on compelling women to register for selective service, and then-candidates Rubio, Bush, and Christie all endorsed the notion because of their support for integration.

They should not have.

Rubio walked his comments back a few days later, and Cruz insisted in the following debate that his colleagues were wrong for supporting women in the draft. Nevertheless, issues regarding the draft are set within a larger context of women in direct ground combat itself and the debate suggests that conservatives are still in search of a way of thinking about the issue, and the Christian tradition has much to commend. The following is one way that candidates ought to respond to the issue:

The question of whether to integrate women into direct combat ground units is difficult; not because I lack confidence in the principles that ground my answer but because any answer is perilous. Obviously, there’s the political peril, for the question of whether women should be assigned to direct combat is asked as a facet of larger questions concerning the equality of men and women and perceptions of basic fairness. In today’s hyper-sensitive, politically correct culture, to suggest that men and women are not, in fact, interchangeable or that men and women, by nature and by the design of nature’s God, are different and that this difference sometimes manifests in different abilities and, consequently, different opportunities, is to risk accusations of backwardness, patriarchal chauvinism, or even outright misogyny.

But there’s another far greater peril, and that is to be understood as not appreciating the service and sacrifice that our military women have already made in the defense of our nation. Even without their being in direct ground combat roles, irregular warfare has so degraded the distinction between the front line and rear support that women have been dragged repeatedly into the fight. We must never forget that in the army alone over 9,000 female troops have earned the Combat Action Badge, hundreds of others have earned valor awards, including several Silver Stars, the nation’s third-highest award for courage under fire. And we must always remember the more than 1,000 women who have been killed or wounded in combat activities. I do not downplay nor ignore the courage, passion, and commitment of our military women.

But nor do I ignore or downplay the testimony of those military professionals who testify that women being drawn into the fight is very different from intentionally integrating them into direct ground combat positions. Just consider the issue of injury. We’ve been focusing on the question of whether women can meet the same qualifying standards as men. Of course they can; American women are heroic and some will qualify—indeed, some already have; including Captain Kristen Griest and Lieutenant Shaye Haver, our nation’s first female army rangers—who accomplished what 58 percent of men regularly fail to do.

So women can qualify: But what then? Army and Marine combat research reports indicate that in basic combat training women suffered injury at more than twice the rate of men. Particularly, injury risks were most prevalent in occupational specialties requiring regularly moving on foot for extended distances under heavy loads. This is the coin of the realm for infantry and special operations. Physiology matters: On average females possess significantly less lean body mass, a slighter build that affects stride and stride frequency as loads increase, smaller aerobic and anaerobic capacity, and less absolute VO2 max production than males. Beyond rendering women far more susceptible to musculoskeletal injuries, the physical differences manifest in lower performance in negotiating obstacles, evacuating causalities, and registering hits on targets while firing weapons while fatigued.

From a biological standpoint, it stands to reason that function follows form—it is no assault to dignity to suggest that certain bodies were made for certain tasks. Again, at the risk of seeming disrespectful to our heroic women, the question is this: If you’re offered a piece of equipment that, at its best, will perform equal to the equipment you’re already using but will break twice as often, why would you use it? When it comes to making peace through killing the enemy and blowing things up, if female combatants do not advance combat effectiveness then why ought we to integrate them into the direct combat force?

But we needn’t—we ought not—limit the discussion to physical concerns. Infantrymen find it famously difficult to describe the mysterious chemistry that forms in and thatforms an infantry unit. One, retired Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold,phrased it this way: 
 

Members of such units deliberately reduce the individual and collective level of humanity and avoid all distractions so that its actions are fundamental, instinctive, and coldly efficient. Polite company, private hygiene, and weakness all step aside…In this direct ground combat environment, you do not fight for an ideal, a just cause, America, or Mom and apple pie. You endure the inhumanity and sacrifices of direct ground combat because, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ This selflessness is derived from bonding, and bonding from shared events and the unquestioning subordination of self for the good of the team. But what destroys this alchemy – and, therefore, combat effectiveness – are pettiness, rumor-mongering, suspicion, and jealousy. And when fighting spirit is lessoned, death is the outcome.

There is a reason, General Newbold reminds us, that we tend to send young men to war. Eighteen-year-olds, overloaded with testosterone, are quite convinced regarding their invincibility. This sometimes leads to mischief in civilian America but it is ideally suited for the combat zone. “Why then,” the general rhetorically wonders, “do we suppose that sexual dynamics—or mere perceptions thereof—among the most libido-laden age cohort in humans, in the basest of environs, will not degrade the nearly spiritual glue that enables the infantry to achieve the illogical and endure the unendurable?”

But it’s not just that sexual dynamics will disrupt unit cohesion because all the men might behave like moose in a rut. Men, even testosterone-addled teenagers, have—or ought to have—a natural predisposition toward gallantry. We expect men on a sinking ship to give up their seats on the lifeboat to women or those in a workplace assault to shield their female co-workers from the danger with their own bodies, as happened in San Bernardino when Shannon Johnson threw his body between Denise Peraza and the terrorist’s bullets. But in combat, while it’s true that the leaders of fighting units must never waste the lives of their men, they must be willing to spend them.

If women are in their ranks, then new choices must be made: either gallantry is allowed to jeopardize combat effectiveness as commanders exercise it and shield their women from danger, or commanders override gallantry and treat their women indiscriminately, thereby—to my mind—< /em>jeopardizing an important facet of human nature.