Congress is again mulling a proposal that would force women to sign up for the military draft for the first time.
But the proposed policy — introduced as part of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that last week cleared a key Senate committee — has raised some hackles among members of the far-right, even though the action has a slim chance of becoming law.
For instance, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, derided the measure to put women on equal footing as another “woke” decision being made on behalf of the nation’s military.
“We need to get reality back in check here,” Hawley told Fox News. “There shouldn’t be women in the draft. They shouldn’t be forced to serve if they don’t want to.”
But Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, along with more moderate Republicans — such as Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have backed the bill, with Collins noting that the change “seems logical,” according to the New York Times.
Currently, the law says that nearly all men ages 18 to 25 must register with Selective Service, the agency that maintains the draft databases.
Most states automatically register those eligible when they get their driver’s license or apply to college – a move that has buoyed the program’s compliance rate and put more than 15 million men on the rosters.
Of those, just under 85% are actually eligible to serve.
Refusing to register for the draft comes with significant consequences — including a felony charge that could lead to a hefty fine and a five-year prison sentence, according to the Selective Service System website.
“Unless a man provides proof that he is exempt from the registration requirement, his failure to register will result in referral to the Department of Justice for possible investigation and prosecution,” the site said.
Despite the number of registered men, the rate at which they actually volunteer for the military has fallen ever further, according to the Defense Department, as less than 1% of America adults serve in active duty combat roles.
Women have been allowed to serve in every part of the military — including combat roles — since 2016.
That change essentially made moot a 1981 Supreme Court decision that found that banning women from forced service was OK, as the draft was meant to help the military fill combat roles – something women would not be able to do for another 35 years.
Since the introduction of women in combat roles, there has been a steady debate in Congress on the issue. Military experts testifying before Congress have repeatedly said that registering women for the draft would be “in the national security interest of the United States.”
But the idea has been pushed continually in Congress for years, lawmakers have abandoned such plans each and every time.
Some Conservatives who have also consistently fought the measure and any like it are already trying to pull that wording from the annual defense authorization bill it’s tacked onto.
Hawley — who led the efforts to strip the provision from the same bill in 2021 and 2022 — attacked Democrats for allegedly trying to experiment with the military, telling on Fox News on Thursday that “normal people are like, ‘Leave our daughters alone.’”
This echoes his 2021 comments, in which he said Missourians felt “strongly that compelling women to fight our wars is wrong, and so do I.”
“It’s one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it’s quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives,” he said.
Congress dropped the language from the bill that December — even though high-profile conservatives like McConnell and Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican and military veteran, supported it.
Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, said he’ll also try to pull the section this time around, noting he was “opposed to that.”
“I don’t think this is the time to get into a debate on the floor of either house about that,” he said. “We’re not anywhere near implementing a draft, and to me, it’s a distraction when we need to be talking about real issues that are immediate.”
But some Democrats — like Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee — said the GOP’s reluctance to green-light the proposal “doesn’t make any sense.”
“Women are doing a remarkable job in our forces today, and if we were in a situation requiring a draft, I think we would need all able-bodied citizens 18 and above,” he said, according to the Hill.
“If we go to a draft, that means we’re in a serious, serious situation,” he said. “It’s not like World War II where we need a lot of infantry. We need cyber experts, we need intelligence analysts, linguists, etc. Wait a second, there are a lot of women out there that can do this better than men.”
But given the dwindling number of days on the legislative calendar, it’s not clear Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York will even push the bill to the floor.
The last time the nation conscripted its youth to serve in the military was at the very end of the Vietnam War, in 1973.