In the News

To hear U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman tell it, Congress essentially has two options when it comes to the future of mandatory draft registration—either start requiring women to register or end the practice altogether—and Coffman stands on the side of the latter.

“It no longer really meets the constitutional test,” he said.

The problem, according to the Aurora Republican, can be found in the case law that has upheld male-only registration because women were not eligible for combat anyway. That changed with the new Pentagon decision that now allows women to take on any military role as long as the physical and training standards are not compromised.

That raises serious questions about the policy’s future, Coffman says.

Last week, he introduced a bipartisan bill with Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, and other congressional supporters to abolish the Selective Service System, the federal agency that has coordinated draft registration since President Carter reinstituted it in 1980.

“Register: It’s what a man’s got to do” says the website for the Selective Service, whose database of men ages 18-25 has not been used for an actual draft since the Vietnam War—and there are good reasons for that, according to Coffman, who has more than two decades of experience in the Army and Marine Corps.

“Even during the height of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military was severely stressed, they never even had a discussion in the Pentagon about should we start calling people up,” the congressman said. “We have today the most elite military we’ve ever had in the history of this country, and warfare is different today. You don’t have the kind of time to mobilize that we’ve had in previous conflicts.”

Coffman says a new draft would effectively mean lowering military standards, a proposition that was a deal breaker in discussions that led to women in combat. He points to estimates that say as many as 75 percent of men would not even meet the minimum requirements of today’s military.

Vietnam is a case study in the flaws of military conscription, Coffman says.

“A lot of the draftees performed extraordinarily well, but quite frankly, there were some that didn’t want to bother and were there as an alternative to being incarcerated,” he said. “The sons of families of influence didn’t have to serve and the sons of working-class families disproportionally served and disproportionally paid an extraordinary price.”

Coffman is not concerned by a recent poll from Harvard University that found that fewer than 20 percent of men 18 to 29 years old would be inclined to serve in a war with ISIS.

“That would be more than we’d need anyway,” he said. “I think [the millennials] are very patriotic and they’re showing up now in greater numbers than is required. Let me tell you that having people there on your right and your left who want to be there, there’s a very big difference in combat effectiveness.”

Men who do not register for the draft can face such penalties as denial of student loans.

Selective Service costs taxpayers an estimated $22 million annually.