I'm amazed at how naive a lot of the comments in this thread are. You can hop over to other corners of HN or Reddit and you have people convinced that WWIII is around the corner, or the rise of China is going to lead to a hot conflict in the Pacific again, or that migration and refugee crises will continue to dominate political discourse and cause other security problems. I don't think it's controversial to state that we've returned to the regular flow of history and Great Power conflict.

But a lot of what I'm seeing here amounts to discounting the importance of this because the "likelihood" of a draft is low, or the usual (wrongheaded) arguments about how because the percentage of people in the military who actually fight is low, so adding women to selective service requirements isn't a big deal. Serious countries don't think like this - especially a country that, allegedly, is supposed to shoulder most of the global security responsibility. You don't get to make hand waivey dismissals and still expect peak performance from these huge complex organizations, nor do we get to put off thinking about it because we think an event like WWIII is "unlikely for a while". On what time horizon does it have to be "likely" for us to have to actually engage with it? 50 years? 20? 10?

I don't think we've thought deeply enough about this at all, and frankly I don't view the prospect of my daughter or sister being drafted into a war as "progress".