Men have had to register for the draft since President Carter reinstated it in 1980. Carter wanted the law to include women in the registration because “there is no distinction possible, on the basis of ability or performance that would allow me to exclude women from an obligation to register,” but congress rejected his suggestion and started male only draft registration. (Solomon). The United States government should require women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six to register for the draft, and, if they can pass the same physical requirements as men, should allow them to serve in combat.

There is no good reason not to require women to register for the draft. In the United States when a male turns eighteen, he is required to register with the Selective Service System in case the draft gets reinstated. Females get to choose whether or not they register. Many people think this is a form of discrimination. Nicole Foley, her stepbrother and some friends filed a suit, on January 9, 2003, saying the Selective Service System is violating the guarantees of equal protection of the fifth and fourteenth amendments (Ryan). This was also the grounds for a case taken to the Supreme Court in 1981, Rostker v. Goldberg, where it was argued that only registering men “made men but not women liable for involuntary service in the military” (“Should Women Be Drafted? Rostker v. Goldberg, 1981” 295).

Others, including Nicole Foley, believe not requiring women to register is discriminatory against women not men. Foley told reporters, “If people want women’s rights, they should want it wholeheartedly, including for women to have to fight in wars. We should take the good with the bad” because “with equal rights comes equal responsibility” (Ryan).

Many scholars have suggested various reforms for the draft process. The most widely accepted is that of Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University. This is a three-tier system in which everybody would register. The first tier is for combat jobs, the second for homeland duty, such as airport security, and the third would be civil service such as Americorps or Teach for America. Men would be eligible for all three tiers, while women would only be eligible for tiers two and three (Ryan). This would make both sexes equal in that they would both be required to register, and would both therefore be eligible for being drafted into service for their country, but women still would not be drafted into combat whereas men would be.

Women should be allowed to serve the country in combat. The main reason women are excluded from registering for the draft is that the draft is intended to get combat troops, and women are excluded from combat by federal law. The primary argument for excluding women from combat is that women are not as physically or mentally capable as men, because they are not required to pass the same fitness tests as men. So it would be unfair to put men in the hands of women who are not as physically capable (Ivey).

"What the military needs in a full-scale war is strong, resilient bodies for combat, and that means young men. No matter how much we might wish both genders were physically equal, they are not. They are not built for the heavy-lifting demands of a ground war" (Ryan).

In order to see whether women are really weaker, the U.S. Army and the British Ministry of Defence have each performed studies which conclude when properly trained, a women can be as tough as any man of the same size and build. "Through a regimen of regular jogging, weight training, and other rigorous exercise, more than seventy-five percent of the forty-one women studied were able to prepare themselves to successfully perform duties traditionally performed by males in the military. Before training, less than twenty-five percent of the women were capable of performing the tasks" (Wilson). These studies effectively disproved the old arguments of women being weaker than men. If women were required to meet the same physical standards as men, then maybe the people who still think women are weaker would realize that both the sexes are equal.

As for Capt. Ivey’s argument about women being weaker than men because they aren’t required to meet the same physical requirements, the reason the military does not see men and women as equals is because they have lowered the physical requirements for women. The reason they do this is because of the age-old view that women are weaker than men.

With respect to women not being mentally capable of fighting in combat, it is not a matter of gender. There are men who would not "protect the back of their own mother" in combat, and there are women who would put everything on the line for total strangers, and vice versa (Wilson). "But when it comes to the trenches, foxholes, covert operations, guerilla warfare, and the like, it takes a particular personality type to even want to become a trained killer. This can have appeal for both men and women, but hopefully very few of either sex" (Wilson). Men and women are equally capable of handling the mental aspect of combat; some are just better at handling it than others.

Men and women have the capabilities and skills needed to fight and for this reason should not be restricted from combat based on physical and emotional differences. The only thing that should keep a woman from being allowed in combat is if she is unqualified to do the job, which is one of the few reasons why a man would be restricted from combat by current military standards.

Since women already have jobs in the military which take them to the front lines they should be allowed to fight in combat, because they are just as likely to be killed whether they are fighting or not.

Women comprise fifteen percent of the military, some in air and sea combat positions, many in near-combat support units (Solomon). They serve on missile crews and guard embassies abroad. But the military does not consider these to be combat jobs (Dusky 64).

A commercial shown on TV in the early 1990s showed a woman in charge of operating communications for a combat unit from a tent, in the desert. Representative Patricia Schroeder commented on this commercial saying "Assuming that our enemy is intelligent, that woman would be the first hit in a strike. It's always smart to destroy your enemy's lines of communication first. Army policy allows women to be shot first, but they can not be the first to shoot” (Dusky 64).

The same is true of the women who refuel tanks. Most enemies would rather attack the truck that fuels the tanks rather than the tanks themselves, and women are allowed to operate the truck (Ivey).

One of the reasons women are barred from combat is so they won't get taken prisoner, and as prisoners of war women are often raped by the enemy. During desert storm, Specialist 4 Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, a truck driver was captured on the Saudi-Kuwait border. She was the first woman POW since world war two (Holm 68). She had an assault rifle in the truck next to her, but had no backup so she just surrendered when stopped. “Like in Desert Storm when the woman helicopter pilot crashed and broke both of her arms, and was raped by five Iraqi soldiers before they took her away from the crash site” (Schmaus). But in these support positions the enemy still has the chance to capture them, and it is usually easier to capture them because they are not always armed, whereas a combat soldier usually is.

In the conflict in Panama a year before Desert Storm, women did fight in combat. These women had been defending U.S. military bases when the bases were attacked. "When the shooting was over, it was clear that women had been in combat--hundreds of them, in fact, had operated in the combat zone." They performed just as well as the men, according to Colonel Mike Sullivan (Dusky 64).

Women flew Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters fifty miles into Iraq in the largest helicopter assault in military history. These helicopters were loaded with supplies and combat troops (Holm 68). But flying helicopters full of combat troops into enemy territory is not considered to be a “combat” job even though they are getting shot at on the way to the destination and on the way back to the base.

Women are already doing jobs that are combat jobs (although the military say they are not), which have the same odds of the woman being captured or killed by the enemy as the “combat” jobs. So the jobs that the military considers to be combat jobs, which are only open to men currently, should be opened up to women.

It has been proven that women are capable to serve in combat and can therefore meet the needs of the government if the draft is reinstated. If women were required to register it would strengthen the available force for when we go to war with Iraq in the coming months, and would help relieve some of the burden of war from the men.