As I was looking through the latest issue of the Wolfpacket, I came across an article called  “Women Should Enlist in Military Draft”. I read it, wondering what the reasoning behind including women in the military draft would be. It turned out that women should be in the military draft because, well, girl power and equality. While these reasons may be enough to justify the inclusion of women in the military draft in today’s equalist climate, they are certainly not enough to justify why such a huge social experiment should be undertaken in the military, which will be the force that protects our country, and ultimately us, during a war.

The author states twice that “women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers”. However, the author does not provide any evidence that this is the case. In fact, it is not the case at all. According to an article in USA Today called “Five Women Fail Army’s Ranger Course”, written in November last year, five women signed up as part of a new batch of Army Rangers. While nearly half of the men moved on to the next phase of training, all five women failed the first phase. Earlier in 2015, 19 women attempted to become Army Rangers. Of the original 19, two graduated while 94 of the original 381 men graduated. This means that a little less than 11% of the women made it while 24.6% of the men made it. In other words, the men’s success rate was more than twice as high as the women’s. Clearly, while women certainly can do some jobs in the military, they should not be enlisted in the draft and expected to fight on the front lines.

If only 11% or so of women can actually become soldiers, training and providing for the 89% who fail would be monumentally expensive if millions of people were being drafted. And we would be trying to pay for a giant war at the same time (we would probably only implement the draft in a very big war). Another issue that is completely ignored by the article is what might happen if men and women are placed in the same units and are on the ground together at the same time. Some will obviously be attracted to each other, and this would make it much harder for our troops to fight since they would lose their focus. Then, they will become much easier targets for our enemies, who won’t care one bit about gender equality.

Equalism no matter the cost is all the rage right now, and trying to perform social experiments in girl power and equality in environments away from the front lines might be just fine. However, the military is the last place we should perform social experiments such as putting women in combat, especially alongside men. If a small company fails for whatever reason, it would be unfortunate but in the end inconsequential for our country. If the military fails, we might be speaking Russian soon.