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I've been really thinking about this tweet.
This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.
Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.
Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.
The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):
Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.
I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?
As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.
What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.
According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations. (And yes, women do have the whole "expectations to an involved parent" situation, but I'd wager thats more for a person already in the parenthood position - not having the kids itself.)
The primary point of what bothers me here is this: If you want to remove gendered roles and expectations, ok, we can discuss that (not something I'd agree with but still). But it seems to me that many don't want to be rid of the "patriarchy" and gender norms in reality. Switzerland, for example, had an opportunity to remove the draft via ballot measure, it failed. People like gender norms when it benefits them (or when they benefit women), and actively dislike them when they hurt them (or women). It basically ends in a situation where mens rights are up for grabs, while womens are off limits, because reasons.
Its "justifiable" if you look at it from a fairness standpoint. Either everyone has gendered roles and expectations or no one does.
And for the record here, I'm not in agreement with any crazy islamic style patriarchy, if thats your primary concern.
Funny enough, that's just the concept of "toxic masculinity". It's a stupid name but it's literally just about masculine gender roles and how they lock men into having to always play the hero and hide their human vulnerability and complaints.
Of course, in practice the concept of "toxic masculinity" is usually limited to just those expressions of masculine gender roles that the analyst finds toxic rather than those the men they are addressing do. Which conveniently allows them to lock men into "always playing the hero and hiding their human vulnerability and complaints" while claiming not to. EDIT: The goal of those who talk about "toxic masculinity" is never to liberate men, but to coerce them into behavior more beneficial to the speaker.
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If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.
If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.
If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.
Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.
This entirely theoretical though as all the major Western powers don't have a draft and America which has the most powerful military in the world is also all volunteer, so is China btw.
Because there's no war currently happening that the major Western nations are a part of. But the international situation is looking darker every year. The threat still looms.
State-mandated pregnancies would not be required if the fertility rate was naturally >2.1, so there's symmetry in that the government only uses these options when necessary.
Necessary for whom?
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Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.
But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.
Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.
Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.
Yes, Kipling said the female is more dangerous than the male- because cows have calves with them, and bulls don't. I 100% believe that a mama would kill a bear in family defense at equal efficacy to a dad, given the aid of modern technology- but that isn't the problem militaries are trying to solve.
Of course, psychic powers aren't real so women aren't beating men with them.
Instead, in real life, a woman can kill you from thousands of miles away using technology.
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the way a woman commits violence is by convincing a man to do it on her behalf. Therefore, as someone who does not know (or need to care) about what that actually costs, it's more likely she will seek a violent solution and cheer it on.
Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it. This is merely controlling a moral hazard- violence is very literally sex work (as in, "work performed by one's sex") and in a fair system should be treated as such.
You don't need to be sent anywhere. For most countries that aren't America or nestled under it or someone else's nuclear umbrella the consequences of bad foreign policy can find you at home.
Bad German foreign policy, for example, let to the widespread rape of German women when the Soviets came to collect.
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In Western countries no one is being sent to die, it's an all volunteer military. And in the US even during the height of the GWOT it remained so. As well that the feminists back then were arguing for allowing women to serve in combat arms units and the traditionalists were against. The vast majority of politicians also don't know what war costs how many of them were ever lower enlisted? Also the causality rates for the entire GWOT terror were a rounding error lower then a single major battle in WW2 or WW1. Also since no Western country is ever going "ban women from making foreign policy" Even medieval kingdoms didn't do that. It seems like then it makes sense based on your logic to demand more women in combat arms not less since then they would have "skin in the game" but realistically the Western political class is so removed from military service anyway I think this argument just doesn't have legs, unless you want to go full Heinlein which is also not going to happen. If you really view this as an unacceptable moral hazard 50 50 combat arms gender ratios are the only feasible way to solve it.
I don't think it is. I don't think hyper aggressive women unaware of the cost of violence is an issue. I think our political class using the military too easily is an issue. But Bush, Obama and Trump II have done plenty of that despite having penises and I have a hard time seeing how a woman could have been worse then Bush in terms of cavalierly using the military.
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All else aside, by the time a society is at war we've kinda already chosen violence, deciding women aren't gonna get a say in it anymore won't magically fix that. Last I checked the (male)leaders of Russia and Ukraine, or Israel and... multiple other places, haven't hammered out a peace agreement.
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Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book? The thousands of Soviet, Polish, French, Dutch etc women who died fighting the Nazis in WW2, some executed, some tortured to death, some thrown in concentration camps? Women like Valeriya Gnarovskaya who threw herself under a tank with a bag of grenades to save the wounded soldiers she was treating? The 153 American female soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, many from IEDs?
How many men died? Just an order of magnitude estimate will do.
Not that this is even necessary; men are more than willing to vote themselves into going to war even without universal sufferage re: WW1, or revoke their own ability to resist being conscripted like they did in Russia (not that it would helped; WW2 was existential for them).
In aggregate (which, let's be clear, is what we're talking about here) they do not. It's not even limited to protecting against foreign enemies; women more than men support things like decarceration, because the consequences (that being more violent crime) are disproportionately unlikely to affect them. That's what "moral hazard" means- no skin in the game means the freedom to make stupid choices.
I’m against treating people based on the aggregate of their various identities, as much as possible, as a moral principle. Otherwise this leads to identity politics, collective guilt, and ideology that’s toxic whether it’s from the left or right. You have to answer for the sins of your fellow white males/kulaks/women/[ethnic group], regardless of whether you, an individual, are guilty or innocent.
If you went all Starship Troopers and said military service guarantees citizenships, and women happened to be 0.1% of soldiers, I could respect that, even if I disagreed with it. But your point is to deny people rights based on what their identity group tends to do, regardless of how they themselves act.
You’d block an individual woman who volunteered in the military and risked her life to save others from voting, but allow a man who bribed a doctor to get a draft exemption, or got a cushy desk position out of danger thanks to his family connections, the ability to vote?
You blame women, yet wealthy, powerful men, from politicians to billionaires, are the ones actually deciding foreign policy while poor men get sent out to die. What personal risk did Donald Trump have when he decided to invade Iran? He evaded the draft, and he’ll carry on living in luxury without giving a damn about gas prices or electricity or skyrocketing cost of living. Meanwhile three American female soldiers died in the war in Iran, two in a plane crash, one in an air strike. They had far more skin in the game than Donald Trump and his cabinet.
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The military is physically grueling beyond simply swinging a sword. There's a reason the Nazis and Soviets didn't bother drafting a large amount of their women into frontline combat despite both sides believing they were in an existential conflict and that the loser could very well be on the receiving end of genocide. From a trite view a women should be about as good as a man when it comes to shooting a gun or piloting a tank. Marching long distances under load, digging trenches, enduring cold and wetness, dragging wounded men -- all of these are things frontline soldiers had to and have to be able to deal with. And that's not even getting into the reflexes advantage men have as evidenced by esports competitions that others have cited below.
Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.
While not as many, a lot of women (hundreds of thousands) were still conscripted by the soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_Soviet_Union
Likewise the Nazis while against conscripting women for their idealogical beliefs, also turned to drafting a lot of women at the end
And both sides still had women doing other military related jobs https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich
So yeah, when push came to shove even the Nazis were like "fuck it, teenage girls take these guns and fight"
Yep, but that day is getting closer and closer. Might even be within a decade from now if AGI predictions pan out and we have another tech explosion from them.
Sure, women were a small percentage of the armed forces of some of the countries that fought in WW2. But they were overwhelmingly not on the frontline, and most were entirely noncombat. As I said in my first comment you responded to, I don't see noncombat roles as being anywhere close to as awful as frontline combat duty where the risk of being killed is far higher. If people wanted to subject women to the draft out of a sense of equality, but then the women ended up mostly just getting noncombat roles, I would call that performative equality.
But that's the thing, noncombat roles have become increasingly more important and likely at some point soon will be the only thing important when attempts to use armies of humans just swarmed by autonomous drones. Human soldier morale is going to plummet even harder and they'll fight back conscription more too when using them becomes even more guaranteed death compared to just making another bot.
We're not there yet though.
But assuming we get there in our lifetimes then that would eliminate the fairness argument for state-mandated pregnancy in terms of the gender balance. However, there would still be the state-interest argument for state-mandated pregnancies that conscription originally relied on.
Hopefully eventually that would also go away with the advent of artificial wombs.
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I don't know if you're intentionally spreading propaganda or just clueless about the war. Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible. They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do. Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).
Ukranian tech is so good that the US is going to them for it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/ukraine-sees-us-looking-for-technology-transfers-in-drone-deal
Over a million Russian casualties for basically no gain, yeah sure dude they totally care.
Yeah, they've been so great at innovation that they're currently losing ground (after drawing it out for years without much advancement) in a war that was expected to be an easy operation that would only take a few days. The underdog is becoming the winner, Moscow is even facing major strikes now something considered pretty unimaginable back in 2022.
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Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots, and logistics games are probably one of the most male-skewed hobbies on the planet.
What is the gap here in comparison to e.g. the grip strength gap?
I've seen lots of hemming and hawing as to why there's a difference, but not many attempts to quantify it. I suppose someone could go over various pool, darts, or e-sports tournaments and compare scores between leagues, but that's a bit too much work for me.
At least according to the Google AI slop response (can't be bothered to dig into the sources to verify) the typical female world championship darts game has a score of 72 to 92, while the typical male world championship game is 95 to 105.
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It would seem that women and men have very similar performance in Olympic shooting, which has got to be pretty coordination loaded. I'm not convinced that there's much of a gap after all. Esports gaps are easily attributed to the well known gender autism gap.
I absolutely despise modern journalism and it's inability to present information, but hey, turns out you're actually right. On the other hand - darts. I tried to find results for pool / snooker, but that only yielded a lot of mewling from journos. So it's not a clear "no differences in hand-eye coordination" thing, but it turns out Samuel Colt did, in fact, make us equal.
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Yeah, the winning combo for Total War is to have the women in manufacturing and food production so men can fight. If we want this to be "drafted' as well out of a sense of fairness then that's fine, there can be separate female draft where if your number gets pulled you move to a potato processing facility in Idaho (if you don't have a kid under 2).
And that is exactly what happened in WWII. Famously even queen Elizabeth II(RIP) spent time in conscripted service as an auxiliary. Soviet women hitched themselves to plows because the army was using 100% of the fuel and machinery.
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Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.
Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.
Well those are the same thing. Man or woman, they both will die to a drone coming for them. Just like how it makes no difference if the ant you squash under your foot is the strongest ant alive. It's dead anyway, and you didn't even notice.
Hardly. It clearly means if you're organizing opposition against Skynet, you still should put men in charge of the military affairs. We may ultimately lose, but "we'll all die anyway, so it doesn't matter" is a very defeatist attitude.
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AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.
And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.
Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?
They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.
We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.
Warfare is more going to iterate to machine-assisted humans versus machine-assisted humans. On the ground, things like reaction time and muscle mass will still matter for the foreseeable future.
Self driving cars are actually a decent example of the direction warfare is headed, because they are not fully autonomous. Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work.
Arguably Waymo is behind the military; the US fielded long-range fire-and-forget computer-controlled missiles in the 1970s and the Phalanx CIWS in the 1980s, and both systems can operate fully autonomously once human guidance is released, something it seems self-driving cars still struggle with.
Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles are similar, inasmuch as they are not supposed to replace troops wholesale, but rather allow them to operate more safely. Most UGVs in Ukraine are assigned to logistics tasks, not combat.
Firstly, Ukrainian war marketing propaganda, even if accurate, has little evidentiary value without context which even the Ukrainians likely lack - "a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines" could simply be a case of "the Russians decided to abandon their position because it had become an untenable logistically" or "the Russians wanted to bait Ukraine into moving troops into it so they could plaster them with glide bombs."
Secondly, while the position might have been taken by "machines," it was not taken by "AI," it was taken by humans using remote control. This is World War Two-era technology that is probably well suited for Ukraine's needs because of the specifics of its military situation, but may be less (or differently) relevant in other, more battlespaces. Remote-controlled cars that cannot do things like "scale a fence" or "open a door" are not on the cusp of replacing grunts.
(The article you linked to references the TerMIT, Zmiy, and Protector; none of these appear to be autonomous vehicles.)
I'm not saying or suggesting that "robots won't come to the military." To an under-appreciated degree, the (US) military has had substantially autonomous systems for longer than I am alive, and we will continue to see systems with various degrees of autonomy proliferate. In the US military, likely to a degree greatly exceeding the military of Ukraine, AI already is allowed to execute on human decisions with autonomy (any self-guiding weapon) and assist human judgment (most aircraft, submarines, etc. have AI-assisted sensor filters). These technologies have not filtered down to dismounts to the degree that they have to high-end weapons systems, and that is likely to happen before infantry are replaced by machines, if only because the combination of intelligence, endurance, and mobility in a human-sized package is extremely expensive at best, even if infantry-bot does not need to carry out the many secondary peacetime operations that are required of troops.
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As someone peripherally close to this field, I think there is a categorical distinction between a self-driving car tuned to drive against random road occurrences and an adversarial model that is actively looking for weaknesses and forcing the worst decisionmaking situations. As a concrete example, self driving cars of today probably don't worry about murals of tunnels adjacent to roadways (Roadrunner style): it's not a common occurrence. But in war you'd absolutely want your self-driving tank to not drive into such traps, and you'd expect your enemy to mass deploy paint to make it happen all at once.
A bunch of traffic cones on hoods seems able to stop Waymos, for example.
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Yeah, it's pretty much a meme that if you see a female name on an e-sports leaderboard, the person attached still has a Y chromosome.
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